Monrovia – Grand Kru County has not had a working cattle herd in a generation. Its old county ranch is mostly memory now — cleared pasture reclaiming itself, pens that haven’t held an animal in years. So, when the Ministry of Agriculture said 200 Muturu cows were coming, and that this southeastern county would be first in line, it read to many there as more than a delivery of livestock. It read as a promise that the ranch, and the income it once supported, might come back to life.
Rodney D. Sieh, [email protected]@frontpageafricaonline.com
That promise is now tangled in a dispute over money — one playing out not between the ministry and its critics on the ground, but between the Ministry of Agriculture and the national government’s own budget book.
The ministry’s explanation
Reached for comment, the Ministry of Agriculture pushed back, point by point, against the budget figures FrontPageAfrica had put to it.
In a written response, the ministry said the $3 million line item widely cited from Annex 7 of the National Budget’s ArcelorMittal Liberia Signature Bonus Allocation does not appear anywhere in its approved books.
According to the ministry, its full FY2026 appropriation totals $10,495,326 — $3,477,083 in basic salaries, $1,812,159 in goods and services, and $5,150,500 in government-funded Public Sector Investment Program (PSIP) spending. That PSIP allocation splits into two sub-projects: $3.2 million for Food and Cash Crop Production Value Chain, and $1.95 million for Livestock and Poultry Value Chain Production.
The ministry said the supplemental appropriation it actually received from the $200 million ArcelorMittal signature bonus, after the FY2026 budget recast, was just $358,078 — far short of the $4.5 million ($3 million for livestock, $1.5 million for general agriculture value chain) recorded against its name in Annex 7. “There was never $3 million allocated for ‘Support for livestock and Poultry value chain Production’ in the supplemental budget for MOA from the ArcelorMittal Liberia Signature Bonus,” the ministry wrote. The $200,000 spent on the 200 Muturu cattle, it said, came out of the ministry’s approved core PSIP budget — not the signature bonus at all.
The road to Grand Kru
Twenty-four of the thirty-five cows that set out for Grand Kru never made it. They went down along the way — worn out, the ministry says, by a long haul without enough food, the kind of overland journey that is hard on cattle even in the best conditions.
The supplier has admitted fault and promised replacements at no cost to the government. But no cost to the government is not the same as no cost at all: those were animals meant to found herds, calve, and carry families through lean seasons, and more than two out of every three in the first batch never got the chance.
That toll is far starker than the public was first told. The ministry’s own July 29 announcement, and a Facebook post cheering the program along, both mentioned the deaths only in passing — “some of the cows,” with no count attached. Behind that soft phrase were twenty-four animals a Grand Kru farmer will never see arrive.
What was announced
On July 29, 2026, the Ministry of Agriculture announced the arrival of the first 200 Muturu cattle, a purchase it said was budgeted at $200,000 — $1,000 per cow. Agriculture Minister Dr. J. Alexander Nuetah said the cattle would be distributed to farmers in Grand Kru County, alongside a government-funded rehabilitation of the county ranch under the Public Sector Investment Program (PSIP).
A Facebook page, Jallah TV, later ran a post defending the purchase against unnamed critics — “trashing the lies,” as its headline put it — confirming that of the first 47 cows to land, 12 went to the Central Agricultural Research Institute, and 35 were trucked toward Grand Kru, with some dying en route.
The post framed the losses as routine, noting the transporters had agreed to replace the dead animals, and closed by thanking the minister.
Two documents, two totals
The FY2026 National Budget itself is unambiguous on paper. Annex 7, titled “ArcelorMittal Liberia Signature Bonus Allocation,” lists under “Support to Agriculture Sector”: $1.5 million to the Ministry of Agriculture for “additional support to enhance Agriculture value chain,” and $3 million for “Support for Livestock and Poultry Value Chain Production” — a sector sub-total of $4.7 million once the Liberia Agricultural Commodity Regulatory Authority’s $200,000 line is added.
The ministry says that document does not match what it actually received: $358,078 in supplemental funding from the signature bonus, and nothing more. Neither the newspaper’s review of the published budget nor the ministry’s written response explains why a page of the national budget and the ministry charged with spending it describe two different sums for the same purpose. That discrepancy — not the price of a cow — is now the central open question.
The wider context
Independent reporting on the FY2026 budget adds useful background. The $200 million ArcelorMittal signature bonus — tied to the renewal of the company’s mineral development agreement — accounts for nearly 17 percent of total budget revenue and was described as fully allocated to development projects.
Economists quoted in that coverage warned that a significant share of the budget increase rests on this one-time payment, raising sustainability concerns, with one warning that Liberia will only move forward once it stops the money that is silently flowing backward. Separate analysis of the same budget found the Legislature’s allocation running nearly four times the national agriculture budget, even as hospitals report medicine shortages and schools remain dilapidated.
What still needs answering
The ministry has offered to share the FY2026 PSIP project document, procurement updates, cash plans, and related implementation records, an offer FrontPageAfrica intends to take up. Two questions remain unresolved: why the printed National Budget records $4.5 million in agriculture supplemental funding that the ministry says never existed, and what portion of the $1.95 million core PSIP livestock line — along with the $3.2 million food and cash-crop line — has actually been disbursed as of September 2026, a question the ministry’s response did not directly address.
Why it matters
A government ministry publicly contradicting its own national budget document is, on its own, a story worth Liberians’ attention — whichever account turns out to be accurate, one official record is wrong. Add to that a cattle-import program whose first shipment lost nearly seven in ten animals before reaching the farmers it was meant to help, and the story stops being only about arithmetic. It becomes a question of whether a flagship livestock program was adequately planned, funded, and executed — regardless of which line item paid for it.
The ministry’s response, in full
The Ministry of Agriculture responded in writing to every question FrontPageAfrica put to it, and its full letter — including its rejection of the Annex 7 figures and its account of the cattle deaths — is also being published today.
The ministry says the FY2026 PSIP Livestock Production Project remains under implementation and that no completed audit yet covers it, but it has offered supporting project documentation to this newspaper ahead of further reporting.
For now, the arithmetic sits unresolved in Monrovia, argued over in letters between a newsroom and a ministry. In Grand Kru, the question is simpler and more immediate: how many of the promised 200 cows will actually arrive, healthy, and put to work on pastures that have waited years for them.
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