Name Them, Inspector General, or Withdraw It

Published: July 30, 2026

Inspector General Gregory Coleman told the nation on Thursday that he has verified and established that drug money has been pushed into the Liberian media to change the narrative, distract his investigators and sow discord. He named no one. He produced nothing. He gave no outlet, no reporter, no amount, no date, no bank record, no transfer, no witness. Within minutes, the Ministry of Information had to walk into his sentence and narrow it for him, explaining that he had not meant the Liberian press as a whole, and he accepted the correction, saying that had been his intent all along.

Let us be plain about what that sequence was. It was an accusation of a serious crime, made by the most senior police officer in the country, against people he declined to identify, and then quietly reduced by a government spokesman before the room had emptied.

An inspector general does not get to do that.

If he has verified it, he has evidence of a felony. Then he has a duty, not an option, to charge somebody. Every day he sits on it is a day he is shielding people he says are working for a cartel. If he has not verified it, then he stood at a government podium and put every honest reporter in this country under a cloud he cannot lift. There is no third possibility. He should name them and charge them, or he should withdraw it.

And since he has raised the question of who has been bought, let us go through the record of the last few weeks, because it is his record, not ours.

It was not a journalist who drove escort for the cocaine. By his own account on Thursday, the narcotics were moved from the shoreline to the stash house with police vehicles running ahead of the load and behind it. Those were his officers. His highway patrol chief, Waddell Kwabo. His chief of major crimes, Anthony Blade. Both charged and sent to court the same day he was warning the press about its integrity.

It was not a journalist who took US$10,000. That was Johnny Bolar Dean, who headed Crime Services, the unit the force calls 106, and who admitted taking the money to provide comfort to two men already sitting in cells at Police Headquarters in a cocaine case. Dean had been dismissed from this same police force in 2015, after an internal investigation into the LBDI robbery in which officers were accused of supplying weapons and police uniforms to armed robbers. He came back. He rose. He was returned to active service and elevated to the head of Crime Services under the leadership of the very man who now lectures the press about moral bankruptcy. When Dean fell, it was reported that his removal shocked the inspector general himself, because Dean was in his circle.

That is the point, and it is not a small one. The men who compromised this case were not strangers who slipped past a screening process. They were colleagues. Some were friends. They held their offices because senior people vouched for them, and the most senior person in that building is Gregory Coleman.

Nor has he been spared. The Student Unification Party has demanded his removal. Senator Samuel Kogar told a Senate hearing that the president should suspend him, and said to his face that he was shielding people, and the inspector general’s answer was to call the senator a loose talker rather than to answer the charge. There is a campaign running on social media asking him to recuse himself from cases involving officers he worked beside for years. This newspaper takes no position on whether any of that is fair. We note only that a man carrying that much unresolved suspicion should be more careful, not less, about accusing other people of being bought without producing a single name.

Then there is the money, and on that the inspector general owes the country an answer to a simple question of chronology.

Security forces raided the Duazon property on July 21. On July 22, Justice Minister Oswald Tweh, who chairs the joint task force Coleman serves on, went before the nation and told Liberians what had been recovered. He gave the weight, 3,971 kilograms. He gave the value, US$317.68 million. He described the network behind it as organized, sophisticated, complex and well funded, and said it may have operated here for more than six years. The government then named the assets it intended to forfeit, the Duazon property itself and the vehicles used in the operation.

Not one dollar of currency appeared anywhere in that accounting. Not one line.

An inventory precise enough to list the trucks did not find room for the cash.

The money entered the public record only because journalists put it there. No government statement raised it. No task force briefing disclosed it. It surfaced in the press, and it was only on Thursday, more than a week later, and only because a reporter in that hall asked him to his face, that Inspector General Coleman gave the country a figure at all: seven thousand United States dollars, found inside the suitcases with the drugs, with the sheriff’s returns on file at court.

So we ask him plainly, and we would like an answer in public.

Why was the seized cash not reported from the onset? Why was it not named among the items recovered when the minister who heads his own task force addressed the nation two days after the first detentions and itemized everything from the tonnage to the transport? Why was that information kept out of the public domain entirely until speculation in the media forced it into the open? And who decided it should be left out?

This newspaper reported, on the account of sources with knowledge of the operation, that roughly one hundred and fifty thousand dollars was found in the room of a principal suspect, that the figure accounted for afterward on the police side was seventeen thousand, and that the inspector general himself was in the room when the money was discovered. We said then, and we repeat now, that we have not seen an inventory, a receipt or a custody log, and cannot confirm any figure. That is exactly why the question belongs to him. He has the documents. We do not.

Notice what finally pried that figure loose. Not an inventory. Not a task force release. A reporter’s question, asked to his face, nine days late. Seven thousand dollars is a small sum. The silence around it was not.

Which brings us to the accusation that we distracted this investigation.

For weeks after the seizure at Roberts International Airport, this country was told almost nothing. The joint security said little. The Ministry of Justice told lawmakers there had been no formal arrests, only persons of interest. In that silence, Liberians were left to guess, and rumor filled the space that officials had vacated. It was reporters, working without security details and without state salaries, who established that a police intelligence chief, a highway patrol commander, a major crimes chief and a National Security Agency operative had been picked up and questioned. It was reporters who put the names of officers into the public record before the police were ready to confirm them. It was reporters who kept asking about the cash. The details the inspector general now dispenses at podiums are, in significant part, details he was forced to confirm because journalists had already found them.

That is not distraction. That is the job. And it is worth remembering what the job costs here. Liberian reporters do this on stipends, on borrowed data bundles, on transport fare they sometimes do not have, in a country where a man who investigates the wrong shipment can be found in a ditch. To stand in a government hall and tell that press corps, without naming a soul, that it has been bought by a cartel is to spend their safety for the price of a soundbite.

Let no one twist this into a claim that the Liberian press is clean. It is not. Some in this trade sell coverage, take handouts and run platforms that answer to nobody. This newspaper has said so before and will say so again, and if the inspector general has proof that any of them took cartel money, we will be the first to publish it and the first to demand they be prosecuted. We have no interest in protecting them. They are a stain on everyone who does this work honestly.

But that is precisely why the accusation must be specific. A named, charged, convicted journalist strengthens the press. An unnamed, uncharged, unproven accusation against all of us strengthens only the person making it, because it gives every corrupt official in Monrovia a ready answer to the next inconvenient story.

Inspector General, we are asking you three things.

Name the individuals and the platforms you say you have verified, and forward the file to the Ministry of Justice this week.

Publish the sheriff’s returns and the full evidence inventory for the Duazon seizure, and explain why no currency was declared to the nation on July 22 when the vehicles were, so the country can stop guessing between seven thousand, seventeen thousand and one hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

And tell Liberians plainly how a man dismissed for allegedly arming robbers was returned to this force and placed over Crime Services in the middle of the largest narcotics case in our history, and who approved it.

Do those three things and the country will see a police chief who deals in evidence. Fail to do them and Liberians will draw the obvious conclusion, which is that it is easier to accuse the press than to explain the police.

We are not going anywhere. We will keep asking.