Last Wednesday, the Liberian political establishment was upended following the arrest of Senator Varney Sherman, the Chair of the ruling Unity Party, and the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Alex Tyler. Also arrested were ECB Jones, a former Deputy Minister of Lands, Mines, and Energy and Chris Onunaga, a business associate of Sherman’s. The quartet is charged with five criminal counts resulting from activities first disclosed in a report by the international non-governmental organisation, Global Witness (GW).
The GW Report, The Deceivers, alleges that Sherman’s law firm, Sherman & Sherman, distributed nearly $1 million in bribes in an ultimately unsuccessful effort to secure a lucrative iron ore concession for the British firm, Sable Mining. Sherman has rejected the report, accusing GW of fabrication and speculation while noting that his firm fulfilled its duties for Sable Mining “diligently and honestly.” In addition to Alex Tyler, the report says that the heads of several government commissions and a presidential aide who now serves in the Senate, received bribes.
President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf responded promptly to the May 11 release of the GW report by constituting a task force to examine the allegations. The head of the body is Liberia’s newly appointed Minister of State Without Portfolio, J. Fonati Koffa. His detractors have seized on his checkered history in the US where he was disbarred by the North Carolina State Bar in 2005 and subsequently pled guilty to charges of embezzlement.
Speaker Tyler initially refused to cooperate with the committee, urging that its members be drawn from civil society. This platform was shared by several opposition parties, who expressed scepticism that representatives of the government were capable of conducting an impartial investigation. Until earlier this month, Koffa chaired one of the larger opposition parties.
Senator Sherman has also refused to embrace the task force; a number of his supporters gathered outside of his home two days prior to his arrest in order to prevent the authorities from searching for material relevant to the investigation.
Liberia, Africa’s oldest republic, has a history of impunity in the public sector. A century of one party rule was broken by a coup in 1980 that resulted in more than two decades of conflict under the rule of strongmen routinely accused of looting state resources.
Under the leadership of President Sirleaf, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, several integrity institutions have been launched. However, her administration can point to few concrete achievements to reverse the culture of impunity.
Cases against several former government officials, including the Managing Director of the National Port Authority and a Minister of Commerce and Industry have been initiated, but they have generated scant public interest in comparison to the Sable Mining saga.
However, John Morlu, Liberia’s auditor general during Sirleaf’s first term, now a fierce critic of her administration, is sceptical that the recent events represent a fundamental shift. Pointing to a number of previous investigations, he observes via e-mail that the Sable affair will likely be more of the same. “You will see some arrests and indictments, but practically no serious prosecutions and convictions…It’s all international PR.”
Both Sherman and Tyler have previously been associated with corruption scandals. Sherman, a Harvard-trained corporate lawyer served as the national orator for Liberia’s 2013 independence day celebrations, where he called on President Sirleaf “to take a political risk to tackle corruption.”
Ironically, The Ambassador, a satirical documentary film released the previous year by the Danish journalist Mads Brugger, captured Sherman asking for a $30,000 campaign contribution for the Unity Party in return for the delivery of a diplomatic passport. In written comments outlining his reaction to Sherman’s arrest, Brugger characterised Sherman as “an extremely shady character, the very embodiment of everything which is wrong with the practice of law in Liberia.”
At the beginning of the year, Speaker Tyler opened Jandy’s Little Paradise, a hotel and conference facility estimated to have been built at the cost of $1 million US. Tyler expressed disappointment with the President’s refusal to attend the grand opening, a gesture widely interpreted as an expression of displeasure with the manner in which those funds may have been obtained. Tyler was also implicated in a probe by the Liberia Anti-Corruption Commission over wrongdoing at the National Oil Company of Liberia.
GW, the organisation that has launched the current fervour, is optimistic that their report, which follows over a decade of activism in Liberia, may signify a turning point. In response to an e-mail inquiry, a GW spokesperson noted, “The Liberian government has a mixed track-record investigating corruption and natural resources illegality, but in recent years has begun to prosecute those who have done the wrong thing – most notably convicting former forest officials in 2015. We take the President at her word that the task force will get its job done.”
