Liberia’s Top Cop Drops Bombshell, then Turns on the Press

That one sentence is the most consequential thing any Liberian official has said publicly about this case since it broke in early June. Coleman didn’t say which state actors. He didn’t say how senior “very, very senior” actually means, or whether he was talking about the current administration, the last one, or both. No timeline, no evidence, no indication of whether his own police force, the NSA, or the Ministry of Justice is even pursuing whoever he has in mind. As the country’s top police official, Coleman’s word carries a kind of institutional weight that a rumor or an anonymous source simply doesn’t have — which is exactly why the lack of specifics stands out so much. A claim this serious, made this publicly, by someone in this position, can’t just sit there unexplained. Either Coleman knows who he means and plans to say so eventually, or he’s just told the country its government is compromised at the highest levels without committing to naming a single person who might actually be held accountable for it.

In the same appearance, Coleman turned to the media, accusing unnamed journalists and outlets of taking payment from the cartel to derail the investigation. “We’ve been able to verify and establish – that there are infused monies into the media to change the narrative – and distract the key players in the investigation and just sow a serious seed of discord – and that is just not hurting the investigation, it is hurting this nation,” he said. “If you claim the patriotism that you built your platform upon and you stand up and say you are doing this to redeem this nation, for once, put that moral bankruptcy aside – and do something for the future of this country.”

He kept going, framing scrutiny of the investigation itself as a symptom of the very corruption he was describing. “This disinformation just to throw off this investigation. So, what do you want? You crying that the government not doing enough to deal with the drug investigation – at the same time, you have an ulterior motive,” he said. “My conscience is clear. Some of us were raised right. Moreso, we have families to answer to – and we have taken a commitment to the Liberian people. Taking 10,000 to do what? For what? People who are pushing this narrative are those who are susceptible to the same. For the record, I’m a human being, I can make my own mistakes, but this is not one of the mistakes I will make. I will never betray the trust and confidence of the Liberian people.”

That’s a serious accusation to level at an entire profession, with no outlet named and no evidence presented publicly. FrontPageAfrica hasn’t independently verified any claim that news organizations have received payments connected to this case, and no journalist or publication has been formally accused, charged, or named by Coleman or anyone else in government. A free press asking hard questions about a security apparatus that investigators themselves say has been compromised for six years isn’t, on its face, evidence that the press is compromised too. Coleman made two claims Thursday — that the scandal reaches senior government actors, and that journalists covering it have been bought — and neither can just be waved away, but neither can be taken on faith either. Both need exactly what Coleman says he wants for the drug case itself: evidence, brought forward, and tested.

Where Coleman pointed vaguely upward, Information Minister Jerolinmek Piah pointed backward. Addressing the same briefing, Piah laid the blame for Liberia’s drug crisis on previous governments. “In the last few years before this administration, Liberia was made a breeding ground for drug trafficking,” he said. “What you seeing now, are efforts to uproot the trafficking network and destroy the cartel behind the traffickers. That is the reason why you see all these discoveries.”

Piah’s argument, boiled down, is that the sheer scale of recent seizures is itself proof of the administration’s good faith. “The government that wants to get involved in drug business will not be arresting drugs, they will rather be creating corridors for the drugs to move through,” he said. “So, anyone who thinks otherwise will be quite unfortunate.”

It’s a real argument, not a baseless one — governments that protect trafficking networks generally don’t stage record-breaking public seizures of their own product. But it sits awkwardly next to his own police chief’s statement, delivered at the same podium on the same day, that the operation was “sanctioned by state actors at the very, very senior level” of this government, not a past one. Piah’s defense and Coleman’s accusation can’t both be the government’s final word on where responsibility lies, and Thursday’s briefing did nothing to sort that out.

The briefing came a day after former President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf offered her own verdict on the moment, without having to name a single suspect. Speaking Wednesday at the opening of the National Conference on Women’s Financial Inclusion at the Ministerial Complex in Monrovia, Sirleaf urged the Boakai administration to build the kind of integrity, discipline, and public confidence that attracts credible investors instead of illicit ones.

“If you want more banks to open and if you want investment to come, they have to have confidence in our government,” Sirleaf said. “We need a government that investors can respect, rely on, and trust. Otherwise, we become a place for bad businesses and drug dealers instead of legitimate investors.”

Sirleaf wasn’t responding to Coleman’s remarks — they hadn’t happened yet — but her warning reads differently in hindsight. A government trying to project the kind of discipline she described spent the very next day publicly split between its police chief alleging complicity at the senior-most levels of the state and its information minister insisting that same government is the one cleaning house.

Thursday’s briefing is the latest chapter in a crisis that’s consumed Liberia’s national security conversation for nearly two months. It started June 8, when authorities intercepted 237.6 kilograms of cocaine at Roberts International Airport, worth more than US$19.2 million, in a shipment police say came from Sierra Leone and was headed for Britain. Nearly every principal suspect in that case left the country before warrants caught up with them, and Coleman has linked the shipment to Dutch fugitive Jos Leijdekkers, one of Europe’s most-wanted traffickers, believed to be sheltering in Sierra Leone.

Then, on July 21, a joint security operation raided a stash house in the VOA Community, Paynesville, and seized 3,971 kilograms of cocaine — worth roughly US$318 million, the largest drug bust in Liberia’s history. Two foreign nationals were arrested at the scene, and a formal charge sheet later filed at the Paynesville City Magisterial Court named twelve defendants in total. Investigators have said the trafficking network behind the case may have been operating inside Liberia, and inside its own security institutions, for more than six years.

The fallout inside the country’s own institutions has been steady and keeps growing. A police intelligence chief was fired after admitting to taking a $10,000 bribe from suspects in custody — the same figure Coleman brought up Thursday when he asked, of his media critics, “Taking 10,000 to do what?” An NSA operative was separately named over an alleged $300,000 payment, and several more police and NSA personnel have been pulled in for interrogation. Days before Thursday’s briefing, a viral video showed armed men threatening President Boakai’s son, Joseph Boakai Jr., over the case; Boakai Jr. broke a three-year public silence this week to deny any involvement and to say he’d reported the threat to both the LNP and the NSA before any video even existed.

Drugs Burned, Authorities Say

On Thursday, the Joint Security destroyed both consignments at the center of this case — the 3,971 kilograms seized in the VOA Community, valued at approximately US$317.68 million, and the 237.6 kilograms intercepted at Roberts International Airport, worth more than US$19 million — a combined street value exceeding US$336 million, in what authorities describe as a major step in the country’s fight against transnational drug trafficking. The burning followed weeks of back-and-forth over timing: Executive Protection Service head Sam Gaye had publicly dared the network behind the VOA Community shipment to collect their “merchandise” at the burn site, while members of the joint investigative team had told FrontPageAfrica the destruction couldn’t proceed without court approval, given that both cases remain before the courts. The government didn’t say, in announcing the burning, whether it had actually obtained a court order authorizing the destruction.

That omission matters, because Liberian law doesn’t leave this to the discretion of police or prosecutors alone. Under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act and standard Liberia Drug Enforcement Agency protocol, seized narcotics have to be publicly destroyed — usually by open burning — but only after representative samples are set aside for use as evidence at trial, and only once the destruction has been formally authorized by a court with jurisdiction over the case. That authorization exists specifically to protect the chain of custody in an active prosecution: destroy the evidence without it, and defense lawyers in either case could later argue the state failed to preserve material the accused were entitled to have tested or examined. Neither Coleman nor any other official has said publicly whether a judge signed off on this particular destruction, or whether enough samples were kept beforehand for the twelve defendants now headed to trial.

Two months into Liberia’s largest drug scandal, the country’s own police chief has now said, on the record, that it goes to the top. That’s either the most important admission of the entire investigation or the most reckless thing anyone in government has said about it — and right now, nothing tells us which. Coleman built his credibility Thursday on the claim that his conscience is clear and that he answers to his family and to the Liberian people. Fair enough. But conscience isn’t evidence, and neither is confidence. If state actors at “the very, very senior level” of this government sanctioned a $318 million cocaine pipeline, the Liberian people are owed names, not adjectives. If members of the press have taken cartel money to sabotage the investigation, they’re owed the same. Until either claim is backed up, Thursday’s briefing accomplished something more corrosive than clarity: it gave every Liberian permission to suspect everyone — the traffickers, the government investigating them, and now, by the Inspector General’s own words, the journalists trying to tell them apart.