When the Ministry of Justice (MOJ), announced the charges against former Vice President, Jewel Howard-Taylor this week, it wrapped them in a solemn public vow: there would be, it declared, no selective justice, no political protection, no sacred cows.
This newspaper takes the government by its word — and holds it to that word without flinching. For a vow of equal justice is not a mere phrase to be spent at a press conference and quickly forgotten minutes later.
It is a constitutional obligation. And The Independent newspaper, on behalf of the reading public, now requests that the State honor it in full.
Let the principle be stated plainly, because it is the ground on which everything else stands. Under our Constitution, every Liberian is equal before the law, and every Liberian — the former Vice President and the serving police commanders alike — are entitled to the same presumption of innocence and subject to the same accountability.
The state may not apply that law by rank, by party, or by convenience. If the government holds real and admissible evidence that Madam Taylor broke the law, it is right to charge her, and the courts, not the crowd, must decide her guilt. We do not ask that any citizen be shielded. We request only that the law should fall the same way on every head.
Observe, then, the direction of the State’s hand. It charged a former opposition Vice President. It summoned an opposition senator, Amara Konneh, in the same week.
It dispatched five vehicles filled with riot police to intercept a grandmother bound for a women’s forum abroad. Whatever the merits of the case against her, the speed and the spectacle were unmistakable.
Pointing the machinery of the State at one’s opponents has never been the hard part of governance. It is the easiest thing a government ever does, and it proves nothing about equal justice.
Now, observe where the same hand hangs still. By the government’s own account, from the mouth of its own Inspector General of Police, serving LNP commanders used official security vehicles to escort the largest cocaine shipment in our nation’s history — one cruiser before it, one behind.
A deputy police commissioner has reportedly confessed to accepting a bribe of US$10,000 to compromise the case. Cash allegedly counted after a raid, in the presence of the Inspector General himself, is reported to have shrunk from one hundred fifty thousand United States dollars (150,000) to seventeen thousand ($17,000) on the official record. And the officer presiding over the investigation commands the very institution those escorting officers serve.
This evidence was not smuggled out of a foreign syndicate. It was announced on national television by the State itself — and still, in that direction, nothing moves.
This is the heart of the matter, and it is not a partisan complaint; it is a constitutional one. A government that moves at the speed of riot police against its opponents and at the speed of a snail against its own has not ended selective justice — it has merely chosen its direction.
The rule of law is not a weapon to be aimed; it is a standard to be met, uniformly, or it is not the rule of law at all. Until the same hand that signed the charge against Jewel Howard-Taylor moves against every commander who its own Inspector General has implicated, the vow of “no sacred cows” remains unredeemed, and the equal-protection guarantee of our Constitution remains, in practice, a dead letter.
And here The Independent speaks not as a critic of any government, but as a steward of the national interest. A people will endure hardship, and even error, from those who govern them. What a people will not long endure is the sense that justice itself is rigged — that the law is a net woven fine for the weak and the opposed, and full of holes for the so-called powerful and the well connected.
That belief, once it settles into a nation, is corrosive of the public trust on which sustainable peace, impeccable integrity, and credibility rest.
We have paid too dearly, in our own history, for the collapse of that trust to watch it squandered again over a scandal the government itself brought to light. Equal justice is not merely a legal nicety. In a country such as ours, it is a pillar of the enduring peace and concord.
The Independent therefore makes its requests very clear and simple, and in the name of the nation’s constitution, the rule of law, peace, security, stability and progress of the Republic.
Now Madam Taylor has been formally charged by the state, let the necessary evidence for the charges be provided in court as requires by law.
We also hope that the state will fully guarantee her constitutional and other basic rights as any accused person, under Liberian law, is presumed innocent until proven otherwise in a court of competent jurisdiction.
With the same speed and seriousness, the state applied that led to her swift arrest for prosecution, we hope that it will be equally applied in bringing to justice others to whom investigative evidence leads.
Those who cannot credibly investigate themselves should be encouraged by the authorities to recuse themselves from the ongoing illicit drugs investigation or have them suspended or removed to further strengthen the integrity and credibility of the probe.
Follow the money that vanished in official custody. Prosecute without regard to rank or party, or abandon the pretense of equal justice altogether.
The government said there would be no sacred cows. We now require it to prove that indeed — for the nation is watching, the Constitution is clear, and the peace we all depend upon is not a thing to be gambled for the shielding of a favored few.
Towards Economic Empowerment And Reconciliation
