Published: April 15, 2026
MONROVIA — Liberian police arrested several University of Liberia students Tuesday, as hundreds of their peers marched through Monrovia demanding that President Joseph Nyuma Boakai slash top government salaries by half, guarantee every worker $500 a month and nationalize the country’s mines, forests and banks, and warning that if he does not, worse is coming.
By Blamo N. Toe & Masefane Konneh
Police spokesperson Sam Collins confirmed the arrests but declined to provide details, saying authorities were preparing a formal statement. The Student Unification Party did not back down.
“If our demands are ignored, we can guarantee that we will come out more forcefully,” the group stated in a 10-point petition delivered Tuesday to Boakai, Vice President Jeremiah Kpan Koung, House Speaker Richard Nagbe Koon, Senate Pro-Tempore Nyonblee Karnga-Lawrence and Chief Justice Yamie Quiqui Gbeisay.
The arrests and the threat of escalation together define the sharpest edges of a demonstration that SUP Chairman Odecious Mulbah insisted was not theater.
“This petition should not be mistaken for rhetoric or a ceremonial appeal to authority,” Mulbah told the crowd. “The issues raised herein are not speculative or exaggerated. They are concrete manifestations of structural conditions that continue to undermine the dignity, stability, and future of our society.”
The march, which stretched from the Capitol Building to the U.S. Embassy corridor, drew hundreds of students behind a banner that posed the question the petition puts directly to the government: “How can a society endowed with vast amounts of natural resources remain wretched and destitute after 179 years?”
Arrests Amid a Peaceful March
The confirmation of arrests during a march the students described as peaceful sharpens the confrontation between the Boakai administration and the student movement. SUP’s petition explicitly demanded that the Liberia National Police “refrain from all acts of brutalization against peaceful university students and the Liberian people,” a demand that now carries immediate relevance given what unfolded Tuesday.
Collins said police would release a full account of the circumstances surrounding the detentions but gave no timeline.
Cut Their Pay, Raise Ours
At the economic core of the petition is a demand that strikes directly at the political class: reduce the salaries of the president, vice president, all lawmakers, ministers, the chief justice and heads of state-owned enterprises by 50 percent immediately, and redirect those savings to raise the pay of civil servants, teachers, nurses, doctors and soldiers by the same proportion.
The students also demanded a guaranteed minimum monthly wage of at least $500 for all employed Liberians, paired with loan access for entrepreneurs and a government-published, time-bound jobs strategy.
The petition locates the unemployment crisis in a structural failure, describing an economy whose “commanding heights are owned and controlled by foreign companies and roguish individuals who steal our wealth, degrade our environment and eviscerate the future of unborn Liberians.” It further accused the World Bank and International Monetary Fund of dictating Liberia’s economic policy while local officials serve as “political and economic puppets.”
Nationalize the Economy
SUP went further than any wage demand, calling for the immediate nationalization of mining, logging, agriculture, fisheries and banking, arguing that only state control of those sectors can generate the jobs and infrastructure Liberia needs.
The government was also urged to comply with the Maputo Declaration by dedicating at least 10 percent of the national budget to agriculture and to enforce the Liberianization policy to shield local farmers and rubber exporters from what the petition described as the “foreign interest of Jetty and his criminal accomplices in the government.”
Kolubah, Named Rape Suspects and a University in Decay
SUP demanded an immediate halt to the politically motivated push to expel Montserrado County District 10 Representative Yekeh Y. Kolubah, warning of mass citizen action if the effort proceeds.
On sexual violence, the students named Bryant McGill and Peter Bon Jallah directly, demanding their arrest and prosecution, and called for survivors to receive protection, medical care, and psychosocial support in a justice process free from political interference.
The final demand was closer to home: modernize and expand the University of Liberia, the institution from whose steps the march began.
The Numbers Behind the Anger
The petition grounded its grievances in figures the government has not disputed: 35.5 percent of Liberians are undernourished, and 26.9 percent of children under five suffer from stunted growth, in a country sitting atop some of West Africa’s most coveted mineral and forest resources.
“A nation cannot sustainably progress where economic exclusion is normalized and justice is inconsistently applied,” the petition states. “The responsibility now rests squarely with the Government of Liberia to demonstrate through concrete measures that governance is not merely the exercise of power, but the fulfillment of obligation to the people.”
The government had not responded to the petition by the time of publication.
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