Monrovia – Liberia’s Minister of State for Presidential Affairs, Nathaniel McGill has assured media institutions that the Government will settle its debt with them under the domestic debt payment arrangement in the COVID-19 stimulus package.
McGill said that this is the perfect opportunity for government to settle its obligations and managements should be assured that they will be covered.
“The focus now will be on domestic debt and we know it’s not easy. But we are hopeful that after this, the media will start to pay their employees and other people in the private sector can get money in their pocket.”
On April 6, 2020, the Publishers Association of Liberia (PAL) expressed disappointment over the government’s reluctance to meet up with its indebtedness with the struggling Liberian media, two years after the ruling CDC government came to power.
At an emergency meeting in Monrovia on Friday, the Publishers noted that despite the government’s repeated promises to meet up with its financial obligations to the media, it appears to have deliberately refused to live up to its promises.
As a result, media institutions are going through serious financial crisis, as their advertising base remains at a low.
Compounded by the government’s failure to pay its debt, is the fact that the Executive Mansion website has over the past years taken away vacancy notices and other adverts from the local media.
The prevailing situation is forcing the media into collapse amid the daily high cost of printing, generator fuel and other logistics that the media need to pay for on a daily basis in the wake of the Coronavirus pandemic.
At their meeting, the media practitioners warned that government’s continuous failure to pay its debt to media institutions would eventually lead them to taking several actions, including media blackout and possible withdrawer from the newsstands.