Monrovia is currently hosting yet another masterclass in the art of the 'Old Guard Switcheroo,' a political maneuver as ancient and dusty as the ledgers of the Liberian Treasury. President Joseph Nyuma Boakai, the man who rode into office on the high horse of the 'Rescue Mission'—a branding exercise so saccharine it should come with an insulin shot—is already proving that 'rescue' is just another word for 'redecorating the swamp.' The latest incident involves an appointment at the Independent National Commission on Human Rights (INCHR), an institution whose title is roughly four adjectives too long for its actual function. According to the Center for Transparency and Accountability in Liberia (CENTAL), Boakai has decided that the law is more of a suggestion than a mandate, prompting Executive Director Anderson D. Miamen to issue a stern, yet ultimately futile, call for the withdrawal of a recent appointment. It is the kind of bureaucratic theater we have come to expect: the government breaks a toy, and the NGO sector issues a press release about the broken toy, while the public watches from the sidelines, wondering when the lights will come back on.

Let us dissect the anatomy of this particular failure. The INCHR is, on paper, supposed to be independent. In the reality of West African governance, 'independence' is a term of art used to describe a body that hasn't yet been fully absorbed by the ruling party’s digestive tract. By allegedly violating the very Act that established the commission, Boakai isn't just making a staffing error; he is signaling that the 'Rescue Mission' was never about salvaging the rule of law, but about ensuring the right hands are on the steering wheel as the ship continues to sink. Miamen’s outrage, while technically correct and professionally polished, smells of the same desperation that defines the entire civil society sector. They are the designated screamers in a room full of the deaf. They point to the law, citing its provisions like holy scripture to an audience of atheists. The law states the commission must be free from executive interference, yet the executive cannot help but interfere because, in the mind of a career politician, an unmanaged commission is a wasted opportunity for patronage.

There is a profound, almost poetic exhaustion in watching this play out. Boakai, a man whose age was supposed to bring the 'wisdom of the elders' but instead seems to have brought the 'entitlement of the ancient,' is operating from the standard playbook. You win an election by promising to be the antithesis of the previous disaster, and then you spend your first years in office proving that you are merely a different flavor of the same systemic rot. The INCHR appointment is a micro-cosm of the macro-collapse. If you cannot even follow the procedural requirements for a human rights body—a group whose primary job is usually to sit in air-conditioned offices and write reports that no one reads—what hope is there for the actual human rights of the Liberian people? Rights, in this context, are a luxury item, like imported luxury SUVs for ministers, reserved only for those who can afford the legal fees to defend them.

CENTAL’s warning that this appointment threatens the institution’s independence is, frankly, adorable. It assumes there was independence to lose. The INCHR has always been a political ornament, a bit of tinsel hung on the skeletal remains of the state to make it look festive for international donors. When Boakai bypasses the law to stick his people in these roles, he isn't breaking the system; he is finally being honest about it. He is saying, 'I am the state, and the state needs its loyalists in every chair.' This is the inherent tragedy of the 'Rescue Mission.' The rescuers are always the ones you eventually need to be rescued from. We see it in the Americas, we see it in the EU, and here in the 'Africa' category of human stupidity, it is simply more nakedly obvious. There is no pretense of sophisticated policy here, just the raw, grinding gears of nepotism.

So, what happens now? Miamen will continue to call for withdrawals. The President’s office will likely ignore him or issue a rambling justification that uses the word 'reform' five times per sentence to mask the smell of corruption. The international community will 'monitor the situation' with the glazed eyes of a bored teenager. And the INCHR will become just another hollowed-out shell, an 'independent' body that nods in synchronized harmony with the Executive Mansion. It is a cycle of bureaucratic necrophilia, where the corpses of old laws are dragged out to justify new power grabs. Liberia doesn’t need a rescue mission; it needs an exorcism of the idea that any of these people, whether they wear the sash of the President or the lanyard of an NGO, have the slightest intention of putting the law above their own relevance. In the end, the only thing 'transparent' about CENTAL’s report is the fact that nothing ever changes.