Published: February 16, 2026
Liberia has walked this road before and paid dearly for every step taken toward parallel authority. That is why the emergence of a group styling itself the “National Fula Security of Liberia” must not be treated as a routine community dispute or dismissed as mere social media noise. It is a governance question. It is a constitutional question. And above all, it is a national stability question.
Videos circulating online show men drilling in formation under an ethnically defined banner, raising legitimate public concern about whether Liberia is witnessing the birth of a security structure outside state command. The Ministry of Justice has promised a response. That response cannot be delayed, diluted, or diplomatic to the point of meaninglessness. The state’s silence is already creating a vacuum, and history teaches that vacuums around security matters quickly fill with fear.
Liberia’s security architecture is not accidental. It was rebuilt after the conflict precisely to ensure one principle: the monopoly of force belongs to the Republic alone. Community watch groups may exist. Private security companies may operate. But none may organize along ethnic identity or resemble a national authority in structure, appearance, or command.
This is not about the Fula people. It must never become about the Fula people.
Liberia’s Fula community is woven deeply into commerce, trade networks, and local economies. Turning a legal question into an ethnic confrontation would be reckless and dangerous. Yet the opposite error, pretending ethnicity is irrelevant when it is explicitly used in the name of a security formation, would be equally irresponsible. The issue is neither ethnicity nor community safety. The issue is legitimacy.
A security body branded around tribe, regardless of intention, alters public perception immediately. It signals allegiance before citizenship. It suggests protection may be selective. And it risks encouraging imitation: today one group, tomorrow another, until the country quietly drifts toward fragmented authority.
Former Senate security committee chair Steven Zargo is correct to raise alarm. Private security entities exist to complement state security, never to mirror it, and certainly never to rival it.
Once uniforms, drills, and command structures enter the picture, the line between neighborhood vigilance and paramilitary identity becomes dangerously thin.
The defenders of the group argue it is merely community safety organization. If so, clarification should be easy. Who authorized it? Under what law is it registered? What oversight exists? Who controls training standards? Who disciplines members? Who answers when a citizen is harmed?
A lawful entity answers these questions before it appears in formation — not after public panic.
Government now faces a delicate but unavoidable duty: act quickly, act transparently, and act evenly. Failure to act invites rumor. Rumor invites polarization. Polarization invites mobilization. Liberia understands this progression better than most nations, and that knowledge alone should guide urgency.
The state must immediately establish the legal status of the organization, determine whether any uniforms or drills violate national security regulations, and communicate clearly to the public to prevent ethnic suspicion.
Delay will not calm tensions; it will ethnicize them.
Liberia’s peace has endured because the country chose institutions over identities after war. Any development that blurs that choice must be addressed early, firmly, and fairly, before fear becomes organization and organization becomes confrontation.
Security, in a republic, belongs to the flag.
Never to a tribe.
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