By AFP
Liberia’s House of Representatives speaker said he had stepped down Monday, following months of standoffs within the chamber stoking a serious political crisis.
Last October saw 47 representatives — a majority in the 73-strong lower chamber — vote for Jonathan Fonati Koffa to be impeached over accusations of poor governance, corruption and conflicts of interest.
But he held on as the constitution required two thirds of the House — 49 members — to vote him out, leading to a crisis of leadership as their bid fell just short.
“Our choice was to either go tomorrow to the Capitol to have a repeat of some sort of violence or to avoid that,” said Koffa.
The 47-strong dissident coalition dubbed the “Majority Bloc” went as far as to elect their own president of the House and to vote on the 2025 budget.
In the power standoff the Supreme Court of Liberia ruled in Koffa’s favour in April, invalidating his impeachment and dubbing the coalition of defectors as having acted unconstitutionally and illegally.
Koffa’s move to step down came a day before the House was to sit for the first time since the court ruling.
“We understood what the Supreme Court said — that Fonati Koffa is the speaker, any other thing that happened was null and void,” Koffa told reporters.
“Then the rule of the game shifted when the president said he will go back to the original posture, which was to deal with the ‘Majority Bloc’.”
He added he had to take into account the fact that some 60 of his employees had not been paid for six months and the impasse therefore had to end.
December saw pro-Koffa demonstrations in the capital Monrovia and a fire break out in parliament, which a team of independent US investigators said was set deliberately. Nobody has yet been held accountable.
Liberia, a west African country with a population of five million including the world’s poorest, is still seeking stability after years of civil wars and an Ebola epidemic in 2014.
An October 2023 election saw Joseph Boakai elected president by a very narrow majority against outgoing president and former football star George Weah.
No party won an absolute majority in the House of Representatives, and Koffa, from Weah’s Coalition for Democratic Change (CDC) was elected as speaker in January last year.
