A school in plain sight

THE CHILDREN OF Chief Compound Public School in Gbarnga are not asking for much. They want chairs.

THIS WEEK, FRONTPAGEAFRICA reported that more than 1,500 pupils at the school compete each morning for a handful of usable seats. Those who lose the race sit on bare concrete for hours, balancing exercise books on their knees. Others share broken benches or carry chairs from home. In the staff room, a teacher hunted for somewhere to put down her lesson notes before marking pupils’ books in the doorway, because that was where the light was.

THIS IS NOT a school lost in the bush, beyond a river that floods every rainy season. It sits in the capital of Bong County, a short walk from government offices. If children can be left on the floor here, in plain sight, we should be deeply worried about what is happening in schools that no reporter visits.

Why Monrovia must act

THE COUNTY EDUCATION Officer, David Boakai, told this newspaper he had not been aware of the conditions. We credit him for saying so plainly. But his answer is itself the indictment. A school of more than a thousand children in the county seat should not be invisible to the officer responsible for it. When it is, the failure is not one man’s. It belongs to a system that does not count, does not inspect and does not report.

THAT IS WHY this is a matter for the national government, not for Bong County alone. The Ministry of Education sets policy, controls the budget and decides what reaches the counties. Liberian law promises free and compulsory primary education. A promise of free schooling means little when a child must bring her own chair, or stay home because her parents cannot afford one. Pupils at Chief Compound told our reporter that some of their friends have stopped coming for exactly that reason.

A CHAIR IS not a luxury. It is the most basic tool of learning, after the teacher. A child who sits on the floor for six hours cannot write properly, cannot concentrate and learns, quietly, that the state did not expect her to arrive.

What the government must do

WE CALL ON the Ministry of Education and the national government to act on five fronts.

1. Furnish Chief Compound now. Deliver enough chairs and desks for every pupil and teacher before the end of this term. This is an emergency purchase, not a budget debate.

2. Count every seat in the country. Order a national audit of furniture in public schools: pupils enrolled, usable seats, and what must be repaired or replaced. Publish the results county by county.

3. Put furniture in the budget. Create a dedicated line for school furniture in the next national budget, tied to the audit’s figures, so that a chair does not depend on a donor’s goodwill or a parent’s pocket.

4. Stop charging children for chairs. Make clear that no public school may require pupils to bring their own seats as a condition of attending class.

5. Make officials see. Require county and district education officers to inspect and report on school conditions every term, and hold them answerable when a school like Chief Compound goes unreported.

6. ⁠

The measure of a government

GOVERNMENTS SPEAK OFTEN about education as the foundation of Liberia’s future. The children of Chief Compound are testing whether those words mean anything. They have done their part. They turned up, sat on the floor and still opened their exercise books.

“WE ARE CHILDREN, and all we are asking for is a chair,” one of them told our reporter. “We want to believe that somebody will hear us.”

THIS NEWSPAPER HAS heard them. The question now is whether the Ministry of Education and the national government will. We will return to Gbarnga to find out, and we will report what we see.

NO LIBERIAN CHILD should be forced to learn on the floor. Not in Gbarnga, and not anywhere else in this country.

Summary: Forty-seven days after her arrest, former Vice President Jewel Howard-Taylor remains under house arrest without a Grand Jury indictment. The government says it has strong evidence, yet the case appears to hinge on one witness, an alleged co-conspirator. It has also ignored a legal path to a special Grand Jury, and Liberia’s wider drug traffic remains unexplained. The state must either present its case or release her from restrictions.

FORTY-SEVEN DAYS AFTER former Vice President Jewel Howard-Taylor was stopped at Roberts International Airport and charged in what the government called one of the biggest narcotics cases in the nation’s history, Liberians are entitled to ask a simple question: where is the case?

THERE IS NO Grand Jury indictment. There is no trial date. What there is, instead, is a former vice president confined to her home under court-ordered restrictions, and a government that told the country it had “overwhelming evidence” but has yet to put that evidence before the body the Constitution says must review it first.

LET US BE clear about what this newspaper is not saying. We are not saying Madam Howard-Taylor is innocent. We are not saying she is guilty. The allegations against her are grave: drug trafficking, money laundering, conspiracy, and payments said to run into hundreds of thousands of dollars from people tied to an international cocaine network. Liberia’s drug crisis is real. Our young people are dying from it. The government has every right, indeed every duty, to pursue anyone it believes is feeding it.

BUT HAVING THE right to prosecute is not the same as having the right to wait indefinitely.

The Constitution is not optional

ARTICLE 21 OF our Constitution says no person shall be held to answer for a capital or infamous crime except on indictment by a Grand Jury. That provision exists for a reason. It is the people’s check on the state, a requirement that ordinary citizens, not just prosecutors, agree there is a case worth answering before a person’s liberty is taken.

THE GOVERNMENT’S EXPLANATION is that the Grand Jury is not sitting. But the Criminal Procedure Law anticipated exactly this situation. Section 15.5 allows a Circuit Court judge, on the prosecution’s application, to summon a special Grand Jury whenever the public interest requires it. If this case, which the government itself has described as a matter of national security, does not meet the public interest test, it is hard to imagine one that would.

SO WHY HASN’T the Ministry of Justice used it?

What is the government waiting for?

CRIMINAL COURT “C” denied Madam Howard-Taylor’s bail on September 24, ruling that the government’s writ alleged conduct continuing into August 2026. The court was careful to say its ruling did not settle the substance of the charges. That is the point. Every ruling so far has been about whether she should be held, not whether the state can prove what it says.

MEANWHILE, THE CASE appears to rest heavily on one man: Sheikh Bashiru Kante, the businessman who allegedly introduced her to the network, allegedly carried money to her foundation, and whose phone allegedly holds the recordings at the center of the prosecution. Kante is himself an alleged co-conspirator. He was arrested in the United States in 2022 on fraud and money laundering charges. And this week, sources close to the defense claimed he is demanding US$500,000, banked abroad, before he takes the stand. The Ministry of Justice has denied offering him money.

WE CANNOT SAY whether that claim is true. But the government’s silence on the larger question is telling. If the state has travel records, financial trails and independent evidence, as it said in August, why does the case appear to stand still whenever the conversation turns to one witness? A prosecution built on the word and phone of an alleged co-conspirator with his own legal history is fragile. The longer the government delays, the more it invites the suspicion that it knows this.

One woman cannot be the whole story

THERE IS ANOTHER question this case forces on us. In the past year, Liberia has seen cocaine seizures worth hundreds of millions of dollars: four tonnes in July alone, and hundreds of kilograms at the airport in June. Drugs on that scale do not move through a country on the influence of one retired politician. They move through ports, airports, customs posts, security checkpoints, warehouses and bank accounts.

WHO SIGNED OFF at the port? Who cleared the cargo? Who looked the other way at the airport? The foreign nationals named in the case have been charged in absentia, beyond the reach of our courts. If Madam Howard-Taylor ends up as the only prominent Liberian ever to face trial for this traffic, Liberians will be right to ask whether this was a war on drugs or a war on one person.

Fairness is not a favor

THE DEFENSE HAS its own questions to answer. It has argued that the 2023 drug law cannot apply to conduct before it was passed, and the court has so far sided with the state on that point. Those are legitimate legal fights, and they belong in a courtroom, not on radio talk shows or in political rallies.

BUT THE BURDEN right now is on the government. It chose to arrest a former vice president at the airport. It chose to announce its evidence to the public. It chose the timeline. It must now live by the rules it is asking the rest of us to respect.

DUE PROCESS IS not a favor granted to the powerful. It is the protection every Liberian relies on, including the market woman, the motorcyclist, and the student who will never have a team of lawyers or a newspaper willing to tell their story. If the state can hold a former vice president for seven weeks without an indictment, it can hold anyone.

THE MINISTRY OF JUSTICE has two honorable options. Convene a special Grand Jury and present its evidence, or admit that the evidence is not yet ready and release her from restrictions while the investigation continues.

WHAT IT CANNOT do is leave her and the nation waiting.

AT THE WEEKEND, President Joseph Nyuma Boakai stood before Liberians in the United States, turned a question about a second term back to the crowd, and smiled: “I am still entitled to one term.” On the same Sunday in Monrovia, five opposition parties signed a pact to hold his government accountable and work together toward 2029. In the ruling camp, the Vice President and others are weighing their own futures. Across the country, party structures are waking up, alliances are shifting, and loyalties are being tested.

NONE OF THIS is unusual. Ambition is part of democracy. Wanting to lead your country is no sin. What matters is how that ambition is pursued, and what it is pursued for.

SO, THIS NEWSPAPER has one appeal to every man and woman who plans to ask Liberians for their vote in 2029: put Liberia first.

WE SAY THIS because we have seen what happens when politicians put themselves first.

LIBERIA DID NOT fall into chaos by accident. The slide began long before the first gunshot. It began with politics built on grievance instead of vision, on “my people” against “your people,” on the belief that power was a prize to be seized and kept, not a trust to be earned and returned. Spite became strategy. Hatred became a mobilizing tool. Greed turned public office into private property. The 1980 coup, the war that followed in 1989, and the second war that dragged into 2003 were paid for by ordinary Liberians: an estimated quarter of a million dead, a generation of children handed guns instead of books, and families scattered across refugee camps and foreign cities, many of them in the very diaspora the President addressed on Sunday.

PEACE DID NOT come from the men who made war. Much of it came from ordinary people who refused to accept it. The market women and church and mosque women who sat in the sun at the fish market, dressed in white, demanding peace. The mothers who said enough. They reminded us that the country belongs to its people, not to those who would burn it to rule the ashes.

SINCE THEN, LIBERIA has built something precious. In 2017, power passed from one elected president to another for the first time in generations. In 2023, a sitting president lost by one of the narrowest margins in our history and conceded peacefully. Those were not small things. They were proof that Liberians can disagree fiercely and still remain one nation.

BUT PEACE IS not a permanent gift. It has to be protected, election after election. And the warning signs are always the same: the rumor spread on WhatsApp to inflame one county against another, the rally speech that attacks a rival’s tribe or religion instead of his record, the young people paid a few dollars to fight at a campaign ground, the promise of jobs and contracts that sounds more like loot-sharing than governance. In 2023, campaign clashes turned deadly in places. We cannot afford to treat that as normal.

WHAT LIBERIANS NEED in 2029 is a contest of ideas.

TELL US HOW you will bring down the price of rice and fuel. Tell us how you will put electricity in homes beyond Monrovia, pave the roads that cut off whole counties in the rainy season, pay teachers and nurses on time, and keep young people off the streets and away from drugs. Tell us how you will fight corruption, including when the accused is your own ally. Tell us how you will create jobs for a young population that is tired of waiting. Show us your plan, your numbers, and your record, and let the voters judge.

TO THOSE IN power: incumbency is not a license. State resources, security forces and public media belong to all Liberians, not to one party’s campaign. A government confident in its record should welcome scrutiny, not fear it.

TO THOSE IN opposition: accountability is not the same as agitation. Criticize hard, expose failures, offer alternatives. But do not tear down the house simply because you are not the one living in it.

TO EVERY CANDIDATE and party leader: control your supporters. Words spoken on a microphone travel far, and in Liberia they have a history of ending in blood. Condemn violence and hate speech loudly, including when it comes from your own side.

AND TO THE voters: demand more. Ask candidates what they will do, not only whom they hate. Refuse to be bought. Refuse to be divided. Your vote is the most powerful thing you own. Do not sell it for a bag of rice or a T-shirt.

LIBERIA HAS ALREADY paid too high a price for politics driven by spite, hatred and greed. We have walked that road. We know where it leads.

IN 2029, WHOEVER wins, let Liberia win first.

THE SIGNATURES on Sunday’s joint communiqué were barely dry before the question every Liberian was already asking landed on the table: haven’t we seen this before?

WE HAVE. In 2005, a crowded opposition split the vote and handed the runoff to Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. In 2011, the main challenger walked away from the runoff altogether. The Collaborating Political Parties won a Senate seat in 2020, then collapsed in a quarrel over a framework document and a flag-bearer long before the 2023 elections. By the time voters went to the polls, the men and women who had promised to stand together were campaigning against one another. The Unity Party, which had itself been part of that collapse, walked into the Executive Mansion by barely 20,000 votes.

SO, WHEN George Weah, Alexander Cummings, Dee-Maxwell Saah Kemayah, Simeon Freeman and Jonathan Mason put their names to eight pages accusing the Boakai-Koung government of selective justice, lost territory and a creeping police state, the grievances were not the news. Liberians know what the opposition is against. The news is whether it has finally learned how to stay together.

TO BE FAIR, the document suggests some lessons have been absorbed. The parties have not merged. They have not crowned a leader. They have not touched the 2029 ticket. They have created a joint technical committee, two members from each party, and given it the dull but necessary job of turning complaints into policy. They say, in their own words, that they will not try to manufacture unity by declaration. That sentence reads like a confession about the CPP, and it is the most honest line in the communiqué.

THE HOSTING arrangement also matters. The first roundtable was at Weah’s Jamaica Resort. The second was at Freeman’s Sinkor Palace. That may sound like protocol, but it answers a charge Musa Bility made loudly before the first meeting: that this was a CDC project with its leadership decided in advance.

AND YET Bility is gone. His Citizens Movement for Change walked out three days before the signing, saying the draft did not commit to real national reform. The opposition can call that a small loss. It should instead treat it as a warning. The CPP did not die in one dramatic night; it died one grievance at a time, each one dismissed as minor until there was nothing left.

HAVE THEY LEARNED from their mistakes? Partly. They have learned what not to say. They have not yet shown they know what to do. If this effort is to be different, we believe it must do at least five things.

FIRST, publish the rule before the name. The CPP did not collapse because it had too many candidates; it collapsed because it never settled, in public and in advance, how one of them would be chosen. A primary, a polling formula, a negotiated power-sharing deal: any of these is better than silence. The name can come in 2028. The rule should come in 2026.

SECOND, own the past. A coalition anchored by the CDC cannot lecture the government about selective justice while pretending 2018 to 2024 did not happen. Liberians remember the missing billions controversy and the officials sanctioned abroad. An opposition that wants to be trusted on corruption should say plainly which of its own it would hold to account.

THIRD, bring the doubters back in. The CMC’s objection was not about seating arrangements. It was about reform: the structure of government, the institutions, the laws. That argument deserves an answer, not a shrug. So do the absences of the Liberty Party and a divided NPP. A tent that is wide only on paper will not hold.

FOURTH, produce something. The technical committee should publish positions, with deadlines, on the issues the communiqué raises: resettlement for families evicted from their homes, pay for teachers and health workers, the border in Foya, an independent drug inquiry. Liberians have heard enough roundtable statements. They have rarely been handed an opposition plan they could hold in their hands and judge.

FIFTH, leave Monrovia. Elections in Liberia are not decided at resort roundtables or palace signings. They are won in Lofa, Nimba, Grand Gedeh and Bong. The communiqué promises outreach in all fifteen counties. That promise should be the first one kept.

NONE OF THIS lets the government off the hook. The questions the opposition has raised about the Foya project, the SIB transfer and the handling of the drug busts are serious, and the Boakai administration would be wise to answer them with documents rather than with dismissals. An opposition with a good argument is a problem. An opposition with a good argument and a working structure is a threat.

THE PEOPLE who signed Sunday’s communiqué have been here before, some of them more than once. They know the script. The only question left is whether they are prepared to write a different ending. Liberians will judge them not by what they signed, but by who is still standing beside whom when the ballots are printed.

PRESIDENT JOSEPH NYUMA BOAKAI went to the United Nations on Thursday night and spoke powerfully about dignity. He demanded that Africa, a continent of 1.5 billion people, stop being discussed without a permanent voice on the Security Council. He said a global system “governed by so few” cannot keep deciding the fate of billions. He pledged that Liberia stands ready to “guarantee human dignity, and leave no one behind.”

FINE WORDS. BUT Liberians are entitled to ask how they square with what happened at Roberts International Airport just five weeks ago.

THE DEAL THE SPEECH LEFT OUT

IN AUGUST, LIBERIA agreed to accept up to 1,200 third-country deportees from the United States over the coming year, one of the largest such arrangements under the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. The first 20 arrived at Roberts International Airport outside Monrovia. They are not Liberians. They include Africans as well as nationals from North America, South America and the Caribbean.

THE GOVERNMENT CALLS this humanitarian. Perhaps. But the facts warrant pause. According to Reuters, these deportees have in most cases won legal protection against repatriation after U.S. immigration judges found they risked torture or other abuses. In other words, Washington cannot legally send them home, so it sends them here.

IMMIGRATION LAWYERS SAY such deportations work as a loophole to push asylum seekers back to their home countries indirectly, and that many end up with little choice but to return to the very places they fled.

Is that what “leave no one behind” means?

NOT LIBERIA ALONE

LIBERIA IS NOT the only African country in this business. At least eight African governments now have confirmed agreements or arrivals, including Eswatini, South Sudan, Ghana, Rwanda, Uganda, Equatorial Guinea, Cameroon and the Central African Republic. The record elsewhere is troubling.

IN ESWATINI, DEPORTEES have been held at a maximum-security prison pending repatriation. Human Rights Watch has warned that transfers to Eswatini, Ghana, Rwanda and South Sudan exposed several hundred people to the risk of arbitrary detention, ill-treatment and refoulement. One regional outlet reports Ghana has repeatedly sent protected deportees home anyway, and that these deals have paid African governments more than $32 million.

SO HERE IS the contradiction. Africa goes to New York demanding to be treated as an equal partner in global decision-making. Yet at the same time, African governments, Liberia among them, are quietly agreeing to serve as holding grounds for people a powerful nation does not want and cannot lawfully return. That is not the posture of a continent seeking a permanent seat. It is the posture of a continent still taking instructions.

WHAT DID WE GET, AND WHAT DID WE GIVE?

LIBERIANS HAVE NOT seen the terms of this deal. The information minister said Liberia will receive U.S. support to manage the program and strengthen its migration system. What support? How much? Who decides who comes? Where will these people live, and who will protect them? What happens if one of them is later sent back to face torture after passing through Liberia’s hands?

A government that told the UN that trust is broken because principles are applied “inconsistently and selectively” cannot keep its own agreements hidden from its own people.

A SEAT MUST MEAN A SPINE

WE SUPPORT AFRICA’S demand for permanent seats on the Security Council. But visibility is not the same as influence, and a seat is worth little if it comes without the courage to say no. If Liberia wants a louder voice on the world stage, it must show that voice is its own and not borrowed from whoever holds the purse.

LIBERIA ALREADY SITS on the Security Council. It could use that seat to demand transparency and legal protections for every African nation being asked to host deportees. It could lead on the rights of migrants rather than quietly serve the policy that tramples them. That would be leadership worthy of a permanent seat.

THE PRESIDENT TOLD the world that Liberia is “living proof that dialogue can overcome division.” Let that dialogue begin at home. Publish the deal. Explain the benefits. And show Liberians that the dignity promised in New York applies at Roberts International Airport too.

Jos Leijdekkers’ fingerprints are turning up in port after port, patrol after patrol, from Freetown to Tema to a beach in Liberia — not because one fugitive is unusually clever, but because West Africa keeps fighting him one border at a time. Ghana has charged its own customs officers. Liberia’s police chief has named his own officers. Each response has been national, quiet, and separate. None has yet matched the scale of a network that treats the whole coastline as a single market. This editorial argues that unless ECOWAS states build real, shared instruments — intelligence-sharing with teeth, vetted port personnel, extradition that actually works, a joint task force built around networks rather than individual shipments — the region will keep discovering Leijdekkers-style operations one country at a time, always a step behind. The stakes go beyond narcotics: a coastline that cannot secure its ports against traffickers will struggle to secure them against anything else.

ONE MAN’S SHADOW now falls across an entire coastline. From Freetown, where Jos Leijdekkers is reported to be sheltering, to Tema, where his associates allegedly bought their way past a customs scanner, to a Liberian beach where police officers allegedly stood watch over a cocaine landing for $5,000 apiece — the footprints of a single fugitive trafficker keep turning up wherever West Africa’s ports and patrols prove for sale. That is not a coincidence. It is a diagnosis.

WHAT THE DUNKIRK CASE EXPOSED in Ghana, and what Inspector General Gregory Coleman has alleged in Liberia, are not isolated failures of two governments. They are the same failure, wearing two flags. A network built around one man has been able to move tonnes of cocaine through this region not because West African security services lack the will to stop him, but because he has found, again and again, the one official in the one office willing to look away for a price. Every country that has now stumbled onto a piece of his operation — Ghana, Liberia, Sierra Leone — has treated it as a national embarrassment to be managed quietly, prosecuted separately, and closed. None has yet treated it as what it actually is: evidence of a single, regional criminal architecture that respects no border, because the men running it long ago stopped respecting ours.

THAT HAS TO CHANGE, and it has to change now.

A Threat That Does Not Recognize Borders

LEIJDEKKERS’ NETWORK did not need a visa to move between Sierra Leone, Ghana, and Liberia. It needed a bent scanner operator in one port and a police escort in another. Eastern European operatives tied to his associates have reportedly been slipping into Liberia on Ghanaian passports since at least 2021; one suspect now in Liberian custody was arrested in Accra at Liberia’s own request — and then simply vanished. That single episode is the whole regional problem in miniature: a request for cooperation was honored on paper and defeated in practice, because no mechanism exists to make an arrest in one West African capital actually stick by the time it matters in another.

MEANWHILE THE SEIZURE numbers, taken country by country, look like separate stories: Ghana’s cocaine hidden in gari sacks and container irregularities, Liberia’s $317 million bust in Duazon and its $19 million interception at Roberts International, Sierra Leone’s cocaine-stuffed suitcases out of Freetown, Nigeria’s opioids in bread and speakers, Cabo Verde’s swallowed capsules. Read individually, each is a national success story — an arrest made, a shipment stopped. Read together, across a single June-to-September stretch, they describe a trafficking corridor running the length of the West African coast, probing every port and every patrol for the weakest link. Traffickers already treat this region as one market. It is well past time our governments did too.

What Cooperation Actually Requires

GHANA’S PRESIDENCY has ordered inter-agency investigations and restored its narcotics agency’s mandatory role in screening port cargo. Liberia’s Inspector General has named officers he says took bribes to escort a shipment. These are necessary steps, and each government deserves credit for taking them. But a scanner fixed in Tema and an internal police probe in Monrovia will not stop a network that simply moves its business to the next weak port down the coast. What this moment calls for is not two governments cleaning house separately. It is ECOWAS states finally building the shared instruments they have spent years discussing and never finishing:

A REGIONAL INTELLIGENCE-SHARING arrangement with teeth — not another memorandum of understanding, but a standing mechanism through which a customs flag in Tema, a police tip in Monrovia, and an airport seizure in Praia are treated as one file, not three.

VETTING AND ROTATION of port and customs personnel with regional oversight, so that a scanner operator’s login cannot become, as prosecutors allege happened in Ghana, a key that a trafficking network simply buys.

EXTRADITION AND MUTUAL legal assistance agreements that actually function under pressure — so that an arrest made at a neighbor’s request, as Ghana made of a suspect wanted in Liberia, does not end in a suspect who “reportedly vanished” before he can be handed over.

A JOINT TASK FORCE tracking networks, not just shipments — built to follow people like Leijdekkers and his associates across the borders they cross freely, rather than waiting for each country to rediscover the same names independently.

NONE OF THIS IS EXOTIC. Regional bodies elsewhere have built exactly these tools. What West Africa has lacked is not the blueprint but the political will to treat trafficking as a shared emergency rather than each nation’s private scandal.

The Region’s Future Is What Is Actually at Stake

IT WOULD BE A MISTAKE to see this only as a drug story. Every scanner that gets overridden for cash, every police escort sold for $5,000, is a small transaction that adds up to something much larger: a generation of West African institutions being hollowed out from the inside, one bribed official at a time. Money on this scale does not stop at corrupting a customs post. It buys judges, financiers elections, and arms the same criminal networks it enriches. A region that cannot secure its own ports and highways against traffickers will find it just as hard to secure them against anything else.

JOS LEIJDEKKERS WILL eventually be caught, or he will not; that is, in the end, a matter for Dutch, Sierra Leonean and Interpol investigators. But whether West Africa produces the next Leijdekkers-scale network, and whether it takes years or weeks to unravel next time, is entirely within this region’s own hands. Liberia, Ghana, Sierra Leone and their neighbors have now each been handed unmistakable proof that their ports, their patrols and their own officials are being tested for weaknesses by organized crime on an industrial scale. The only responsible answer is to close that gap together, before the next shipment — and the next bribe — finds it first. The choice in front of West Africa’s governments is not complicated. Cooperate now, or explain later why they didn’t.

THE GOVERNMENT of Liberia recently received a $200 million signature bonus from ArcelorMittal in connection with the extension of its Minerals Development Agreement. Under the agreement, the government is expected to receive an additional $100 million in 2027, $100 million in 2028, and another $100 million in 2029, bringing total signature-bonus payments to $500 million.

THIS IS A SIGNIFICANT windfall for a country whose fiscal resources are severely constrained. The initial $200 million received in 2026 alone represents more than one-fifth of the government’s 2025 domestic revenue. It is therefore legitimate for Liberians to ask a fundamental question: What are we going to do with this extraordinary, once-in-a-generation opportunity?

AVAILABLE INFORMATION indicates that the initial payment has been incorporated into the government’s overall fiscal resources and is being used to support ordinary operations. If the entire amount is absorbed into recurrent and annual budgetary expenditures, then by the end of the fiscal year Liberia may have little or no enduring asset to show for this exceptional revenue.

THAT WOULD be a missed opportunity — not because government spending is inherently wrong, but because a one-time resource windfall should not be treated the same way as recurring government revenue. A signature bonus is finite. Once spent, it is gone.

THE QUESTION therefore, is not simply how much government can spend today. The more important question is how Liberia can transform a temporary windfall from its natural resources into permanent national wealth.

THE CASE FOR A LIBERIAN SOVEREIGN WEALTH FUND

ONE POSSIBLE answer is the establishment and capitalization of a Liberian Sovereign Wealth Fund, or a broader National Investment Fund — a state-owned investment vehicle capitalized from sources such as fiscal surpluses, resource revenues, foreign-exchange reserves, privatization proceeds and other extraordinary receipts. Its purpose can include saving for future generations, stabilizing public finances, and investing in assets that generate long-term returns.

LIBERIA WOULD not be venturing into uncharted territory. Across Africa, countries including Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal, Guinea, Cape Verde, Libya and Botswana have established sovereign or state investment vehicles combining savings, stabilization, infrastructure and intergenerational objectives.

THE IMPORTANT point is that Liberia’s natural resources should create more than temporary government revenue. They should create national capital.

SEVENTY-FIVE YEARS OF IRON ORE: WHAT DO WE HAVE TO SHOW FOR IT?

LIBERIA HAS been commercially exporting iron ore for approximately 75 years. In 1951, the Liberia Mining Company began commercial exports from the Bomi Hills mines, with an initial shipment of roughly 10,000 tons of ore to the United States. Iron ore subsequently became one of the pillars of Liberia’s economy, generating substantial export earnings and government revenue over several decades.

YET CONSIDER Bomi today. Tubmanburg, the capital of Bomi County, bears little resemblance to what one would expect of a community that once stood at the center of a major international mining industry. Its infrastructure remains inadequate, economic opportunities are limited, and the communities surrounding the former mining areas continue to face significant development challenges.

BOMI IS NOT simply a story about one mining town. It forces us to confront a larger national question: After roughly 75 years of exporting iron ore, how much of the wealth generated from our mineral resources has been transformed into enduring national assets?

THE SAME QUESTION applies to our other natural resources. We have mined iron ore, exported rubber, harvested timber, extracted gold, and granted concessions for other minerals. Yet Liberia remains heavily dependent on external financing, development assistance and borrowing to meet many of its basic infrastructure and development needs. We must therefore begin thinking differently.

WHAT COULD $200 MILLION BECOME?

IMAGINE IF a meaningful portion of the $200 million had been placed into a professionally managed sovereign investment vehicle rather than being entirely absorbed by the annual budget. The objective would not necessarily be to lock the money away indefinitely, but to convert a finite resource payment into a portfolio of assets capable of generating value for Liberians for decades.

A NATIONAL INVESTMENT fund could, for example, allocate capital among several carefully governed windows:

A FUTURE GENERATIONAL Fund. A portion could be invested internationally in diversified, professionally managed assets, with the principal preserved while investment returns accumulate. Instead of saying Liberia received $200 million and spent it, future generations could say our generation inherited a national investment portfolio that began with the proceeds of our natural resources.

A LIBERIAN Value-Addition Fund. Liberia produces gold, yet much of the value chain occurs outside the country. A portion of the fund could support the development of gold refining and other value-added infrastructure, subject to feasibility studies, commercial viability, regulatory safeguards and environmental standards — capturing more value domestically and strengthening the country’s financial reserves.

A NATIONAL CREDIT Enhancement Facility. Rather than simply lending government money, the facility could provide partial guarantees enabling credible Liberian businesses to obtain financing from commercial banks and other institutions. A relatively modest amount of sovereign capital could mobilize substantially more private capital.

A LIBERIAN SME/MSME Investment Fund. Liberian-owned businesses routinely face one of their greatest constraints: access to affordable, appropriately structured capital. A dedicated window could finance viable enterprises in agriculture and agro-processing, manufacturing, logistics, tourism, information technology, construction materials, fisheries, renewable energy and import-substitution industries — investing commercially and transparently in businesses capable of creating jobs, paying taxes and generating returns.

A NATIONAL EDUCATION and Human Capital Fund. An education endowment whose investment returns support scholarships and technical training in engineering, medicine, science and agriculture. There is a profound difference between spending on government operations today and investing in the next generation: one buys consumption, the other builds capacity.

INFRASTRUCTURE INVESTMENT: A portion of the fund could co-invest with private investors and development-finance institutions in commercially viable energy, telecommunications, logistics, transportation, water and industrial infrastructure — making government capital catalytic, using limited public resources to attract far larger amounts of private and institutional capital.

THIS IS NOT AN ARGUMENT AGAINST GOVERNMENT SPENDING

LIBERIA HAS enormous development needs. Roads must be built. Hospitals require resources. Schools need support. Civil servants must be paid. The argument is not that government should refuse to spend — it is that extraordinary, non-recurring resource revenues deserve a different fiscal philosophy from ordinary recurring revenues.

IF WE USE a temporary windfall entirely to finance permanent recurrent obligations, those obligations remain after the windfall disappears. If, however, we convert part of it into productive assets, those assets can continue generating returns long after the original payment has been spent. That is the fundamental distinction between consumption and capital formation.

WE HAVE ANOTHER $300 MILLION COMING

PERHAPS THE most important point is that the opportunity has not entirely passed. An additional $300 million is expected over the next three years under the payment schedule. That gives Liberia another chance to make a different choice.

What should Liberia look like in 2040, since we received this money in 2027, 2028 and 2029?

WE SHOULD NOT be satisfied merely because a government has balanced an annual budget. We should ask whether today’s decisions have increased the wealth, productive capacity and economic independence of the Liberian people.

FROM NATURAL RESOURCES TO NATIONAL WEALTH

FOR TOO LONG Liberia’s development conversation has focused on the resources beneath our soil without sufficient attention to the assets we should build above it. Iron ore is finite. Gold is finite. Timber is finite. Even concession revenues are finite. Human capital, productive enterprises, infrastructure, financial assets and institutions can endure.

THAT IS WHY the real measure of natural-resource management should not simply be how much revenue government collects. It should be how much permanent national wealth we create from the resources nature has entrusted to us. Liberia is blessed with considerable natural resources, but natural resources alone do not make a country prosperous — institutions, human capital, investment, sound fiscal management and prudent stewardship do.

THE RESPONSIBILITY OF LEADERSHIP

THE RESPONSIBILITY for this decision does not rest with the President or the Minister of Finance alone. It also rests squarely with the Legislature, which has the constitutional responsibility to scrutinize and approve the national budget and to determine, through legislation and appropriation, how public resources are used. That is more than a legal obligation — it is a responsibility to the Liberian people.

WHEN LEGISLATORS decide whether an extraordinary national resource should finance consumption today or create assets for tomorrow, they are making a decision that can affect generations of Liberians. Will we buy more government vehicles, or help educate the next Liberian doctor, engineer, scientist or entrepreneur? Will our children inherit another story of resources extracted and revenues spent, or institutions, businesses, infrastructure and financial assets built from those resources?

A CALL FOR A NEW ECONOMIC MINDSET

LIBERIA’S MINDSET must mean more than political sovereignty. True independence also requires economic capacity — the ability to increasingly finance our own development, build our own institutions, invest in our own people and reduce our dependence on the generosity of others.

WE CANNOT CONTINUE to appeal to the international community for assistance while allowing exceptional domestic resource revenues to disappear into ordinary consumption without building a corresponding stock of national assets. Our natural resources are a gift from God and a trust from one generation to another. We have a moral and economic obligation to manage them wisely.

THE $200 MILLION should be a wake-up call. More importantly, the remaining $300 million should be an opportunity to change course. Let us establish the mechanisms, governance structures and investment disciplines necessary to ensure that a portion of future extraordinary resource revenues is transformed into permanent national wealth.

LET US CREATE a fund that is professionally managed, independently governed, transparently audited and protected from political interference. Let us invest for Liberia — not merely for today, but for tomorrow.

BECAUSE THE REAL question is not whether Liberia has resources. The real question is whether we have the wisdom to turn those resources into wealth that will outlive us. That is the test of leadership — and the responsibility we owe to the generations of Liberians yet unborn.

LIBERIA HAS DONE something it has never done before. For the first time in 179 years, the government has raised more than a billion dollars at home in a single year — not borrowed, not donated, but collected from our own people and businesses. That is worth marking. It is proof that when institutions are reformed, digitized, and held to a target, Liberians will pay what they owe and the state can actually collect it.

BUT A NUMBER on a ledger in Monrovia does not, by itself, put medicine on a hospital shelf in Zwedru or keep a teacher in a classroom in Voinjama. Whether this milestone matters will be decided not by how loudly it is announced, but by how visibly it changes daily life for the Liberian at the bottom of the ladder — the market woman, the okada rider, the subsistence farmer, the unemployed graduate. That is the only test that counts.

Why this should matter

LIBERIA HAS spent two decades being told, correctly, that its government could not afford to do very much. Every unpaved road, every unstaffed clinic, every unpaid teacher could be explained, at least in part, by a thin revenue base. That excuse is now smaller than it was. A government collecting over a billion dollars a year has real choices it did not have five years ago — choices about wages, about roads, about whether a farmer can get a loan without traveling to Monrovia and back. For ordinary Liberians, this milestone should matter because it removes an excuse, not because it delivers an outcome on its own. The outcome still has to be built.

Why it might not matter, if nothing changes

AS OUR REPORTING this week has shown, a meaningful share of this year’s total came from a one-time mining signature bonus that shrinks next year, and from a gold price boom that is enriching mining concessions faster than it is enriching the treasury, under royalty terms Liberia has not updated in years. If the government spends this year’s windfall as though it were a permanent baseline — locking in payroll additions and recurring commitments funded partly by non-recurring income — it risks a repeat of a familiar Liberian story: a good year followed by a mid-year scramble to borrow against a shortfall nobody budgeted for. The people who pay for that scramble are always the same people: public workers whose salaries go unpaid, patients whose clinics run out of drugs, students whose school year gets disrupted. The bottom of the ladder feels a revenue shortfall long before the top does.

What government can do to make it matter

Publish the breakdown, not just the total

LIBERIANS SHOULD be able to see, in one public document, how much of the billion dollars came from ordinary tax and customs collection versus one-time concession payments and signature bonuses. A number that cannot be broken down cannot be trusted, and a number that cannot be trusted cannot build the public confidence the President says this milestone represents. The Senate has already asked the Revenue Authority for an importer-by-importer accounting; that kind of disclosure should become routine, not something extracted committee by committee.

Renegotiate royalties while gold prices are high, not after they fall

A FLAT THREE percent royalty on gold made sense when prices were a fraction of today’s. It does not make sense at record highs, when neighboring countries are capturing two to three times the share Liberia collects. Every month this goes unaddressed is revenue that leaves the country for good. This is not a call to punish investment — sliding-scale royalties that rise with price and fall with it are standard practice regionally, and mining companies operating under them elsewhere have not fled.

FUND RECURRING commitments with recurring revenue, and one-time gains with one-time investments

SALARY REVERSALS and new payroll placements are welcome, but they are also permanent obligations. Money from a shrinking mining bonus should go toward the roads, clinics, and equipment the President has already flagged — capital investments made once — while recurring costs like salaries should be sized to what the ordinary, repeatable tax base can sustain in a normal year, not a record one.

Close the leakage before celebrating the collection

INDEPENDENT RESEARCH this year estimated the country may be losing upward of US$90 million annually to underreported mineral exports and unpaid turnover taxes. That is money already owed under existing law — no new tax, no new negotiation, just enforcement. Every dollar recovered there is a dollar that does not need to be squeezed from a market woman’s daily takings or a small trader’s import duty.

Let the Special Purpose Vehicle reach the people it is named for

THE GOVERNMENT’S proposal to set aside a portion of new revenue for affordable financing to Liberian-owned businesses is one of the more promising ideas in the President’s address — provided it is designed to reach the market women and small traders it is meant to serve, rather than concentrating in a handful of well-connected firms, as similar vehicles elsewhere on the continent have sometimes done. Transparent criteria and independent oversight from the start would make the difference.

A BILLION DOLLARS is a milestone worth noting. It is not yet a milestone worth celebrating on behalf of the ordinary Liberian — that will depend entirely on what the government does with it, and how honestly it tells the country where the money actually came from. The measure of this achievement will not be the number the government announced this year. It will be whether the teacher gets paid, the clinic gets its drugs, and the market woman notices the difference — not just this year, but in 2027, when the mining bonus is smaller and the real test of Liberia’s revenue reform finally arrives.

THERE IS A special kind of carelessness in believing that good intentions excuse bad judgment. This week, several Liberian officials — including Mo Ali, Managing Director of the Liberia Water and Sewer Corporation — offered a case study in exactly that. In an effort to show that government assistance to vulnerable children is real, they published the names, ages, schools, home addresses, and caregivers’ details of children enrolled in social protection programs. Publicly. On Facebook.

WE UNDERSTAND the impulse. Liberians have every right to be skeptical of government claims of assistance, especially when so much public commentary — fair or not — accuses officials of enriching themselves while aid fails to reach the people at the bottom. Officials feel pressure to prove they are doing something. But proving you are helping vulnerable children is not an excuse to expose them. It is, in fact, the opposite of helping them.

THIS IS NOT a gray area

Liberia’s Children’s Law of 2011 guarantees every child the right to privacy. The guidelines under that law are explicit about the disclosure of a child’s personal information to outside parties. There is no reading of that law under which publishing a vulnerable child’s name, school, and home address to a public Facebook page is acceptable — regardless of how well-meaning the intent, and regardless of who initiated it.

ATTORNEY MORIAH YEKULAH said it plainly, and she is right to say it plainly: this data has been treated as “a chess piece in the cesspool of political buffoonery.” When the identity of a child who has been removed from a dangerous situation, or flagged as street-connected, or enrolled in a reunification program, becomes a talking point in a political argument, the child has been failed twice — once by whatever circumstance put them in the program, and again by the very system meant to protect them.

THE STAKES ARE not abstract

This is Liberia. We do not have the luxury of treating this as a paperwork issue. Many of the children on these lists carry the weight of a history this country knows intimately — family separation, displacement, exploitation, the long tail of conflict that does not end when the guns go quiet. A published address is not just an administrative slip for a child who was removed from a trafficking situation or an abusive home. It is a map back to harm.

AND UNICEF’s fingerprints are on this program. That should raise the bar, not lower it. International child protection standards — developed with UNICEF’s own participation — require informed consent before this kind of information is shared, and confidentiality protocols that were plainly not followed here. Liberia’s donor partners will be watching how — and whether — this is addressed.

WHAT SHOULD happen now

The Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection should open a formal investigation, as Attorney Yekula has demanded, and it should not be a quiet one. Officials who posted this information should account publicly for why they believed it was appropriate. And UNICEF, as the project’s funder, owes the country transparency about what data-handling protocols were supposed to be in place — and why they failed.

BUT BEYOND the accountability owed for this specific incident, there is a broader habit Liberian officials need to break: the instinct to treat vulnerable people as props in a public relations campaign. Assistance to vulnerable children does not need names and addresses attached to be credible. It needs oversight, consistency, and results — the kind that can be verified by auditors and journalists without ever putting a child’s safety on public display.

LIBERIA’S CHILDREN who have already lived through more than any child should have to are not evidence to be filed into a Facebook post. They are citizens this government is obligated to protect — including from the government itself.

IN JUNE, THE country watched a vessel — the IB Atlantic IV — sit off Grand Cape Mount County for the better part of a week while officials debated what to do about it, before it slipped away and had to be chased down and seized in Ivorian waters. No drugs were ever officially confirmed aboard. What was confirmed, over and over, was that Liberia’s maritime security moved too slowly to matter.

NOW THERE IS a second mystery vessel — this one not off some distant coastline, but docked directly behind Monrovia Central Prison, the facility currently holding foreign nationals tied to the country’s largest-ever drug case. Authorities have offered no explanation for how it got there, or why.

WE DO NOT know yet what this boat is carrying, or who it belongs to. But we know this: five weeks ago, the prison’s own deputy superintendent for operations, Jackson K. Kolako, stood up publicly and warned that someone was laying the groundwork for a breakout to free exactly these detainees. He was suspended days later, under circumstances that remain disputed. His warning was never confirmed — but it was never disproven, either. It was simply left hanging, the way too much in this case has been left hanging.

TWO VESSELS, TWO separate months, two moments of confusion about who is watching Liberia’s waters and its walls. If this were happening to any other country’s highest-value prisoners in the middle of a half-billion-dollar drug scandal, the response would not be a quiet search at 2 a.m. It would be a visible, immediate hardening of security around the facility holding them.

WE ARE CALLING on the Government of Liberia — specifically the Ministry of Justice, the Armed Forces of Liberia, and the Liberia National Police — to do the following, without delay:

• DEPLOY A DEDICATED, round-the-clock security detail at Monrovia Central Prison for the duration of the drug case proceedings, separate from routine prison staffing.

• ORDER AN INDEPENDENT review of Kolako’s allegations, rather than allowing them to sit unanswered while new incidents pile up around the same facility.

• EXTEND COASTAL AND riverine patrols around Monrovia’s port-adjacent areas, given that two vessels have now surfaced in proximity to major elements of this case within a matter of weeks.

• PUBLICLY CLARIFY THE status and security arrangements of every foreign national currently detained in connection with the case, so that public confidence does not continue to erode by default.

LIBERIA HAS ALREADY lost credibility once this year over how slowly it responded to a ship it could see. It cannot afford to lose it twice over one it apparently didn’t see coming until it was already at the back door of the prison itself.

THE GOVERNMENT DOES not need to have all the answers about this boat by tomorrow. But it needs to show, starting today, that it takes the question seriously.