Published: September 7, 2026
MONROVIA — President Joseph Boakai’s allies expelled Nimba County Senator Samuel G. Kogar to keep the governing coalition disciplined. They instead cut him loose. Sen. Kogar spent Saturday in a room of opposition politicians and Sunday in front of a cheering Nimba crowd, asserting a mandate that isn’t tied to any party and refusing to disclose his allegiance.
By Lennart Dodoo | News Analysis
That puts at risk the single largest bloc of votes behind Boakai’s 2023 victory and tests Vice President Jeremiah Kpan Koung’s claim that he can still deliver the county.
Kogar has yet to prove he can carry Nimba for anyone. But the MDR has turned an internal party dispute into an opposition opening in the county the governing coalition can least afford to lose.
Kogar appeared Saturday at an opposition roundtable convened by Weah, a week after the MDR removed him. It gave Weah what he could not otherwise produce: a sitting Nimba senator among opposition politicians. Kogar twice declined to explain his presence as he left the closed-door session at Jamaica Resort, telling reporters only, “No comment.”
Former Speaker Bhofal Chambers gave the account from inside. “The takeaway from the meeting is that we will work in concert,” Chambers said, adding that there had been “no real disagreement so far.”
Kogar broke his silence a day later in the county.
“The issue about roundtable they say many are called but few are chosen. CDC, UP, ANC, MDR, NPP, CMC voted and all these people, marketers, motorcyclists, religious leaders, and all of the citizenry voted for me so anyone who invites me, I will attend their program,” he said.
He called Saturday’s session an exchange of ideas about uniting the country, and turned on those who objected to his being there.
“So if you look at a woman and say ‘I don’t want this woman’, then the woman went and found a fine man, then you’re complaining saying ‘that man will not buy good lappa for you’; is that your business?” he said.
He denied a personal quarrel with Vice President Koung.
“Some people feel when you’re in position you should not go this way so there is nothing between me and Vice President. Policy difference is not enmity so I want to make that clear,” he said.
That is a politician holding two doors open. It is also what the MDR’s disciplinary process was meant to prevent.
At the party’s Monrovia headquarters Aug. 29, 33 of the 37 National Executive Committee members present voted to remove Kogar after months of public criticism of the government’s record on governance, the rule of law and the cocaine investigation.
MDR Chairman Cooper W. Kruah, who is also labor minister, called the expulsion necessary to protect the party’s place in the alliance.
“This party is in collaboration with the Unity Party. We are part of the government. You cannot be part of the government and sit and play opposition in the same government that you are a part of,” Kruah said.
Kogar was not removed merely for breaking party rules. He was removed because a senator from a governing party had begun behaving like an opposition politician, th party said.
A punishment that created a platform
“I strongly believe that what is happening at the MDR Party headquarters today is a government-backed effort to remove me from the party without due process,” Kogar said as the vote was taken, citing the presence of police officers at the headquarters. He promised a legal challenge, and the Supreme Court had already intervened once, when Justice-in-Chambers Yussif D. Kaba lifted a stay that had halted the party’s inquiry into a 17-count complaint by Kelvin D.J. Mattaldi, the MDR’s vice chairman for press and publicity.
By Sunday the tone had changed.
“I’m not the first person that had been expelled from political party. Plenty people have been expelled and they’re still existing. Maybe my expulsion will be promotion or will make me prominent in society but I accept my expulsion,” he said.
Whether that acceptance disposes of the court fight, he did not say. Either way the case is hard to sell as a purely internal party matter when the MDR chairman sits in Cabinet, the party calls itself part of the government and police were at the headquarters. None of that proves the Boakai administration ordered the removal. It gives Kogar enough material to make the allegation stick politically, and he now has the option of not making it at all.
The 94,193-vote dependency
Boakai and Koung won 144,646 votes in Nimba in the 2023 presidential runoff, or 74.14%, against 50,453 for Weah. Their countywide advantage of 94,193 votes was more than four times the 20,567-vote margin by which Boakai won the presidency, 814,481 to 793,914.
A coalition that wins nationally by about 20,000 votes while banking a 94,000-vote advantage in one county does not need to lose that county to lose an election. A substantial cut in its margin there could be enough.
In 2017, the late Sen. Prince Y. Johnson, PYJ, took 53.50% of the county’s first-round presidential vote, then backed Weah, who carried Nimba in the runoff with 57.14%. Six years later the same county gave Boakai 74.14% with Koung on the ticket. Nimba produced opposite outcomes in consecutive elections because its brokers changed sides, and that machinery is in play again.
A spoiler, not yet a kingmaker
The evidence does not support treating Kogar as the new owner of that vote. In the April 2024 by-election for the Senate seat Koung vacated on becoming vice president, running against the combined weight of Koung, UP and Nya D. Twayen Jr., he lost by 25,942 votes, taking 41,196 to Twayen’s 67,138. A year later, with Koung, Twayen, most of the Nimba legislative caucus and the MDR machinery behind him, he won the seat left vacant by PYJ’s death, taking 62,136 votes to Edith Gongloe-Weh’s 40,506.
Kogar’s total rose by 20,940 votes between the two contests even though countywide turnout rose by only 6,877 ballots. He lost heavily when the county’s dominant blocs opposed him and won comfortably when they lined up behind him. His 62,136 votes are not portable property.
That reading is contested in Nimba.
“In my view, Kogar leaving the ruling side and joining the opposition is a major boost for the opposition and a minus for the government. Because in Nimba, Kogar is naturally respected by the electorate,” Armstrong Gobac Selekpoh, a youth leader and a former senatorial candidate in the county, told The Liberian Investigator.
Kogar himself has not said he is leaving the ruling side. But he does not have to become Nimba’s kingmaker to damage the governing alliance. He needs only to become a credible spoiler, capable of splitting local leaders, depressing enthusiasm for the government or moving enough voters to cut the margin the national coalition depends on.
The real test is Koung’s control
Koung faces the most immediate danger. His principal value to the Unity Party is his ability to deliver Nimba, and his own record shows the limits of that control. He won his Senate seat in 2020 with 37,899 votes, or 36.12%, far short of a majority.
His strength in 2023 came not from personal ownership of Nimba but from a broad alliance that included PYJ, the MDR, county officials and other local figures. Kogar’s rupture tests whether Koung can hold that alliance together without PYJ, whose authority once kept competing ambitions in check. If the county becomes competitive, Koung’s claim to be the coalition’s indispensable Nimba broker weakens with it.
The question hanging over Nimba since PYJ’s death is who inherits his network. Kogar has a credible claim to a place in that contest. He won District 5 three times, in 2011, 2017 and 2023, under three party labels, and he organized and chaired the Majority Bloc that removed J. Fonati Koffa as speaker and installed Richard Nagbe Koon. Amy Johnson, PYJ’s daughter, publicly backed him after the expulsion. Kogar told the crowd that PYJ himself had called him into the MDR to help administer it, setting the founder’s authority against the committee that voted him out.
Selekpoh went further, saying the county’s traditional leadership has already settled on Kogar.
“Kogar, since the death of PYJ, the elders of Nimba have reposed serious confidence in him, especially after the transfer of all traditional rituals to him. Let no one fool you, no elder can easily go against Kogar now,” he said.
A grievance that can travel
What makes Kogar useful to the opposition is not the expulsion. It is the issue he built his break around: the cocaine case. He has demanded that Police Inspector General Gregory O.W. Coleman resign or be dismissed over allegations involving officers. Chambers echoed the demand at Saturday’s meeting, saying Coleman should already have been removed, and challenged him to name the journalists he previously accused of taking cartel money. His claims do not establish misconduct by Coleman. They show the investigation becoming common ground for Kogar and leading CDC figures.
Weah, who returned to Liberia on Wednesday, has begun using similar language.
“We all have been monitoring. I think the rule of law is being tampered with. It is wrong, tampering with justice,” he said at his residence in Rehab.
An opposition room, not yet a coalition
The opposition engaging with him isn’t a unified bloc but a group of politicians whose interests intersect, yet their ambitions differ. Saturday’s meeting assembled various political stakeholders instead of party leaders, who were scheduled for a separate leaders’ session on Sunday. CMC leader Musa H. Bility initially declined the roundtable format before changing his stance a few days later, and the NPP questions whether they were even invited.
Kogar indicated that his history with that room shouldn’t prevent him.
“If Fonati and myself had some impasse and I go for an example I say my brother whatsoever that happened I’m sorry, am I big to say sorry?” he said.
Kogar led the bloc that stripped Koffa of the speakership, and Koffa’s allies sit among the CDC figures whose company he kept on Saturday.
Weah still enters weak in Nimba, where he took 25.86% in the 2023 runoff. For now Kogar’s attendance is worth more to Weah than to Kogar.
On the public record, the senator has not defected. He accepted an invitation from CDC National Chairman Janga A. Kowo on Aug. 28, the day before the expulsion vote, and said he looked forward to “a meaningful and constructive conversation on issues affecting Liberia.” That sequence cuts both ways: Kogar was in contact with the CDC before the vote, which weakens any claim that the vote alone drove him out, and it means the MDR expelled a senator who already had somewhere to go.
What would turn this opening into a threat is whether Kogar builds or joins a party, whether the coalition that elected him in 2025 follows, whether the PYJ network holds behind him, and how the government responds, after efforts by Nimba chiefs and elders to reconcile him with Koung failed. Twayen is the figure to watch, since his 2029 calculations are separate from Koung’s.
Those 62,136 votes came in a by-election in which 122,312 ballots were counted, far below the roughly 195,000 Nimba voters who took part in the 2023 runoff. He does not have to carry all of them. In a two-candidate rematch, with turnout and registration otherwise unchanged, 10,284 Nimba voters switching from Boakai to his principal opponent would produce a 20,568-vote swing, one vote more than the margin by which Boakai won the presidency.
That is the risk the MDR created when it expelled a senator for behaving like an opposition politician. Kogar is not Nimba’s new kingmaker. But in trying to silence him, Boakai’s allies produced the one thing they could not manage: a Nimba senator who owes them nothing and answers to no party.
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