“YOU CAN FIGHT fire, but not water.” With those words, President Boakai has correctly identified a profound truth about our changing climate. Yet his prescription—urging citizens to simply leave flooded communities—treats a systemic crisis as a personal logistics problem. This is not leadership; it is abdication dressed as concern.
LET US BE blunt. When the President tells Liberians to relocate, he never answers the two most critical questions: Where are they going? And how? Many of these residents are not squatters; they are families who have established homes, businesses, and schools over decades. They live in Neezoe, in West Point, in communities that existed long before the rains grew merciless. To suggest they pack up without a national resettlement plan—with land, infrastructure, and livelihoods—is to offer despair, not salvation.
THE TRAGEDY IN Ghana, which killed 13 and displaced 70,000, is not a distant warning. It is a preview. With 323 flood-prone communities and over 100,000 Liberians at risk this season, climate change is no longer an abstract forecast. It is real, it is here, and it is displaying itself with terrifying precision. The President is right: we cannot fight water. But we can manage it—through sea defenses, dredging, enforced wetland protections, and urban planning that stops encroachment before the rains come.
INSTEAD, THE GOVERNMENT offers cleaning tools and Red Cross buckets. While commendable, these are bandages on a hemorrhage. The National Disaster Management Agency itself admits that urban flooding is worsened by deforestation and wetland destruction—problems caused by policy failures, not by the poor. Where is the executive order halting construction in floodplains? Where is the investment in drainage infrastructure that matches the 15 inches of rain forecast for August and September?
WE ARE NOT calling for empty rhetoric. We are demanding structural actions. These include a funded, time-bound national resettlement scheme with clear land titles and services, an emergency infrastructure fund to reinforce coastal barriers and clear major waterways before the peak rains, and a ban on further wetland encroachment, enforced with penalties, not pleas.
CITIZENS ARE NOT refugees in their own country. They are taxpayers, parents, and voters who deserve a government that fights for their survival—not one that merely waves them away.
PRESIDENT KOAKAI URGED fiscal discipline on foreign travel. We urge the same discipline on disaster preparedness: stop spending on delegations and start spending on drainage. The water is rising. It does not care about Cabinet meetings. It cares about action.
THE TIME FOR warnings is over. The time for walls—physical and political—is now.
