LIBERIA · MONROVIA · THE OUTSKIRTS
Tugbeh N. Doe was a short, fat man who ran the best bar on the outskirts of Monrovia. He was also the Deputy Finance Minister. One evening, two men came and sat opposite him and said nothing at all. For hours. They just stared at him. What happened next is something I have never fully explained to myself.
You have to understand Monrovia at that time to understand the bar. The city was still finding its feet after the war. The formal and the informal existed side by side, sometimes in the same person. Tugbeh N. Doe was a case in point. He was the Deputy Finance Minister for Administration — a government official, a man with a title and an office and responsibilities that connected directly to the accountability work I was doing as the World Bank’s Lead Financial Management Specialist. He was also a successful businessman who ran a bar on the outskirts of Monrovia that was decent and big and well-frequented by UN officials who wanted somewhere to sit in the evening and not think about the work.
As a lady of the night once put it, with the particular clarity that comes from watching a place carefully over time: business used to arrive in the evening in UN cars.
Tugbeh was my friend. That needs to be said plainly. In Liberia you work closely with the people on the other side of the table — the ministers, the officials, the counterparts. You share time and trust in a way that is different from a normal professional relationship. The work is too intense, the stakes too high, the country too small for anything to remain purely transactional. Tugbeh was a friend. So was Boima, a good friend and senior staffer in the Ministry of Finance, who was there that evening.
The bar was on the outskirts of Monrovia. Business used to arrive in the evening in UN cars.
Tugbeh invited me one evening for a drink. Boima was there. We sat outside — in Monrovia you sit outside if you can; the air is better and the darkness has a quality that the inside of a room cannot match — and opened a bottle of Black Label. The kind of evening that starts simply and deepens without announcement.
As the evening progressed, people came to meet and greet Tugbeh and Boima – both very popular local souls. The circle around the table grew gradually, in the way that circles grow in places where evenings are long and the bottle is good. And then two men arrived and sat down opposite Tugbeh and did not speak.
That was all. They sat down. They looked at him. They said nothing.
I noticed them because they were different from everyone else. Not in any way I could name precisely — they were not visibly armed, they made no threats, they did not raise their voices. They just sat there, directly opposite the minister, and looked at him. For hours. Thin and still in the way that certain men in post-conflict Monrovia were thin and still — the kind of stillness that is not peace but its opposite. Sinister. They had the specific quality of men who have been sent somewhere with a purpose and are being patient about it.
They sat opposite the minister and spent the evening looking at him directly. Not saying a word. Just staring.
The bottle went down. The conversation continued around them as if they were not there, because in Monrovia you learn to continue as if certain things are not there. But I could see what it was doing to Tugbeh. The laughter became slightly forced. The pauses between sentences grew slightly longer. A man who had been relaxed was becoming, degree by degree, afraid.
Black Label on a warm Monrovian evening, sitting outside with friends makes you feel life is good and problems can be solved. By the end of the bottle I was in the particular state where the normal calculations about what is advisable are still present but have become somewhat theoretical. What was not theoretical was what I could see happening to my friend across the table.
I got up. I went to them.
‘Why are you here? Why have you been sitting here for hours and just staring at the Minister?’ I said. ‘Get out of here. If you want to speak to the minister, you do it in the morning, in his office. Not here. Not like this. Get out.’
They stared at me. They were shocked. This was not what they were expecting. One of them got up, and then hesitated. I do not know what they had expected — certainly not a turbaned Indian man, slightly high, telling them to leave. It had rattled them. This was something that had not been in the plan. They looked at each other. Then they got up and left.
I was a bit high. The normal calculations about what is advisable had become somewhat theoretical. What was not theoretical was what I could see happening to my friend.
I came back to the table. Tugbeh looked at me for a moment. Then he got up from his chair, went down on his knees, and touched my feet.
In India, this gesture means something specific. It is what you do before an elder, before someone you revere, in a moment of the deepest gratitude. It is not a casual thing. Tugbeh had not grown up in India and did not know the full weight of the gesture in its original context, but he knew what he was doing. He was putting his body on the floor in front of me. That is a language that does not require translation.
I did not know what to say. I helped him up. We sat back down. Nobody spoke about what had happened. Boima picked his glass. The evening continued.
I have never known who those two men were. In Monrovia at that time, men like that could have been sent by anyone, for any number of reasons. Tugbeh was a government official in a transitional government that was being scrutinised from multiple directions. He had enemies I knew nothing about. They looked like hit men sent to collect ransom. The pressures on the people like him came from many directions at once, not all of them institutional or legal.
Whether those two men were connected to any of that, I do not know. I have thought about it. I do not know.
What I know is that Tugbeh was scared of them, and that he was my friend, and that I did what seemed right in the moment. That evening outside the bar and the morning in the office were part of the same Liberia, the multiple shades of grey. There is a complicated truth in choosing your friends in a post-conflict country where you recently got to without any idea of who your counterparts really were. The same people you are trying to hold accountable could also be the people who pour the Black Label and sit beside you in the dark.
The friend and the subject of the investigation later on turned out to be the same person. That is the honest account of how it was.
I left Liberia in 2008. Oneof the things I had documented was how money had been siphoned out of the Central Bank through letters issued by the Ministry of Finance. I came back in 2015, and was shocked to learn that of all the mismanagement that happened – and there was a lot of it – Tugbeh had been sent to jail for letter payments. I heard he went to jail. I know what happened to the bottle of Black Label: we finished it. I know what happened when those two men left: Tugbeh touched the ground at my feet, and I helped him up, and we sat back down, and the evening in Monrovia continued, as evenings in Monrovia do, without explanation or resolution, into the dark.In the mist when an Army sentry calls out Friend of Foe – there is no answer in countries like Liberia. You could be friend and foe. On both sides.
— Parminder Brar
Liberia, World Bank Lead Financial Management Specialist, 2003–2008. Tugbeh N. Doe served as Deputy Finance Minister for Administration under the NTGL and was subsequently charged in connection with the letter payment scheme documented in World Bank aide-mémoires. Boima is his real name. He owns a petrol station and wasa key counterpart in the Ministry of Finance.