Published: July 1, 2026
Mr. President,
I have held this letter for a while. What follows is not an attack but an appeal, offered with respect.
Only a few Liberians alive have seen the inside of this government the way you have. You rose through the Liberia Produce Marketing Corporation to become its first Liberian managing director, ran the Ministry of Agriculture under Samuel Doe, and led the Liberia Petroleum Refining Company. For 12 years you served as Vice President and President of the Senate under Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, and then you watched George Weah govern for six more. You did not arrive at the Executive Mansion to learn the office. You arrived having studied it from every chair for half a century.
That is why the present moment troubles me.
You can diagnose this country’s problems with a precision few leaders possess. You know how a clean project is financed, what a lawful procurement file looks like, how a credible investigation is run, and how a state earns trust by showing its work. The worry is not the diagnosis. It is whether that same standard is being enforced inside your own house.
Begin with Foya, because two stories now come out of your hometown at once, and they point in opposite directions.
The first is the compound. Construction on a multimillion-dollar facility began in September 2024, and for nearly a year the government gave no steady answer about it. It was a presidential project, then a Mano River Union initiative, then a government-owned peace center. The Mano River Union itself denied putting a dollar into it. The Public Procurement and Concessions Commission has not confirmed it vetted anything. No legislative appropriation has been produced, the money is said to have come partly from state enterprises like NASSCORP and the National Port Authority, and the Anti-Corruption Commission has opened a review. Mr. President, this is the administration that ordered audits across government and suspended more than 450 officials for failing to declare their assets. You set that standard. The country only asks you to meet it in Foya. Tell us who approved the project, who paid for it and under what law.
The second story is harder, because it is the mirror image of the first. A short distance from that guarded compound sits the land elders donated for the Foya Polytechnic. There is no school there, only bare ground and tall grass, and there never was a foundation. Yet for seven fiscal years the national budget set aside about US$264,000 for it, through line code 251102 under the Ministry of Education, to an account residents say matches no institution on the ground. The Liberian Investigator newspaper traced the idea to a bill proposed by the late Representative Eugene Fallah Kparkar, who died in 2016 before it ever became law. After his death a board was stood up for an institution the Legislature never created, and the allocations kept coming, vanishing from the budget in 2021 and 2022 when scrutiny rose, then reappearing once it faded. The officials best placed to explain where the money went, the Education Minister and Internal Affairs Minister Francis Nyumalin, did not answer our questions.
Hold those two facts together, because the country already has. In your own district, money appears in abundance for a project no one will explain, and disappears entirely from a school your people were promised. Young people from Foya still cross into Voinjama and Sierra Leone to study, paying for an education that was funded at home and never delivered. A leader with your memory of how a budget is built should find that intolerable, and should want the General Auditing Commission inside that line code more than your critics do.
Then there is Roberts International Airport. On June 8, agents intercepted 198 plates of cocaine worth an estimated US$19.2 million, roughly 237 kilograms, cleared and packed for a Brussels Airlines flight to Europe. It was a genuine win, and the officers deserve credit. But nearly a month on, the country still does not know who owns that cocaine. Several people are said to be in custody, yet no names of the real owners have been released. The man accused of trucking the consignment to the cargo warehouse is reportedly still at large. And no one has explained how a quarter-ton of cocaine cleared airport screening before it was stopped at the cargo stage. Liberians remember that when a local artist was arrested over a smaller matter, his name was public within days. They are entitled to ask why the principals in a US$19 million shipment are being shielded by silence.
You know better than anyone where this road leads. Our courts have a long history of large seizures that never become convictions, cases that collapse on weak evidence and broken chains of custody. Silence at the start is how that ending gets written.
And silence does more than weaken a case in court. I will be candid about something uncomfortable. In some quarters, people now whisper that the Foya money, the presidential palace or MRU security building, traces to individuals tied to this very cocaine saga. I have seen no evidence of it, and I do not write this as fact. But that such a rumor travels at all is the warning. Silence never stays empty. It fills with the worst thing people can imagine, and right now that is what they imagine of you. Only disclosure can starve a rumor like that. Denial cannot, and indignation cannot.
Mr. President, you hold something most leaders never accumulate, and it is not money. It is credibility. You won this office because Liberians believed you were the honest man in a dishonest system, the one who would restore integrity to public service, not merely promise it. That credibility is not meant to be banked. It is meant to be spent on hard things, on disclosures that embarrass allies and investigations that name powerful people.
So this is my appeal. Open the file on the Foya compound and tell us who paid. Send the auditors into the polytechnic money and account for every dollar of that line code. Put the cocaine investigation in daylight and let the names follow the evidence. Hold your own government to the standard you imposed on everyone else. Do it now, while the goodwill is still yours to spend, because next year the political season will swallow every difficult conversation whole.
You have the experience. The country is waiting to see you use it.
Respectfully,
Lennart Dodoo
Managing Editor and Publisher,
The Liberian Investigator
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