Moye Says Bong’s 2023 Vote Freed Jewel Howard Taylor From ‘Bondage’

Published: August 10, 2026

GBARNGA, Bong County — Bong County voted the Coalition for Democratic Change out in 2023 to rescue one of its own from a vice presidency that had reduced her, Sen. Prince Moye said, casting Jewel Howard Taylor’s four years in the office as a captivity she has never described that way herself.

“We will not have any regrets that we took our sister from vice president bondage and tried to liberate the county,” Moye said at the Bong Athletic and Social Intellectual Center in Gbarnga over the weekend.

Moye, a senior figure in the ruling Unity Party, said his assessment is political rather than personal. “We are in solidarity with her. That’s our mother. We respect. We don’t hate,” he said. “We said the way she has been treated, you didn’t see it in the current political dispensation.”

He predicted Taylor will eventually say so publicly. “Next time our sister will feel very strong and say, ‘Yes, I think I was not treated well.’ She knows that, and it is just a matter of time to say that,” he said.

Taylor has not said it. She has not publicly described her tenure as bondage, and the characterization is Moye’s.

Moye drew a contrast with the present administration. “That’s why the current president is treating his vice president with that comfort, so that Nimba didn’t go the way Bong went the other time,” he said, a reference to the political consequences of the strained relationship between former President George Weah and Taylor and the realignment that followed in Bong.

The remarks land in a debate Liberia has been having about the office itself. In March 2025, Vice President Jeremiah Kpan Koung told a town hall meeting in Pennsylvania that a vice president is constitutionally a “parked car,” with executive authority resting primarily with the president and the vice president operating within powers assigned by the president and the Constitution. Koung said the arrangement is not unique to Liberia and that vice presidents must accept the limits of their authority rather than function as parallel centers of executive power. President Joseph Nyuma Boakai used a similar comparison in describing his own service as vice president under former President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.

Taylor engaged the same metaphor during her tenure, rejecting the idea that she was parked while acknowledging she was not operating at her highest speed.

Moye and Taylor have been on opposing sides of Bong politics for years. Taylor served as vice president from 2018 to 2024 and built a durable base in the county. Moye emerged as a leading opposition voice against the CDC government and defeated CDC-backed Sen. Henry Yallah in the 2020 senatorial election. In 2023, Bong backed Boakai and the Unity Party, contributing to the defeat of the Weah-Taylor ticket.