27/11/2025
Former Education Minister George K Werner Writes..
"Liberia’s Governance Model Is Failing to Deliver — And the Evidence Is Everywhere
Liberia is not short of talent, ideas, passion, or plans. We produce brilliant graduates. We write ambitious national strategies. We host international conferences. We craft vision documents that promise transformation. Yet our outcomes remain painfully familiar: weak institutions, low learning, stalled reforms, and an economy that cannot absorb even a tiny fraction of the young people entering the labor market each year. It is tempting to blame resources. But countries that began poorer than Liberia — Vietnam, Rwanda, Botswana, Mauritius, Singapore — transformed themselves within a generation. Their advantage was not wealth. Their advantage was governance models built for development, designed to coordinate, deliver, and sustain results.
To understand why Liberia struggles, we must go back to the founding of the Republic. From the beginning, Liberia was not meant to be ordinary. The purpose of the pioneers — Black men and women returning from bo***ge and exclusion — was nothing less than the creation of a republic that challenged global prejudice. Our founders believed that Africans could govern themselves with dignity, intelligence, and order. In the writings of J.J. Roberts, Hilary Teage, Edward Blyden, and the early political leadership, one theme is unmistakable: Liberia was meant to be a model African democracy built on constitutionalism, civic virtue, learning, accountability, and collective uplift. This was not simply state-building — it was a mission to prove a point to the world.
But that founding narrative is incomplete without acknowledging those the settlers met on the ground — the Gola, Kru, Kpelle, Vai, Bassa, Lorma, Grebo, Mano, Gio, Mandingo, and other peoples who had lived here for centuries. These were not empty lands. They were vibrant societies with sophisticated governance systems: councils of elders, Poro and Sande regulatory institutions, justice based on consensus, and social norms that ensured accountability long before written constitutions arrived. What emerged in Liberia was not the birth of a nation from scratch, but a collision of two political traditions — the constitutional order brought by settler leaders, and the community-based Indigenous orders that predated the Republic.
The tragedy is that instead of blending the strengths of both systems into a unified national governance architecture, Liberia built a state that excluded the majority and centralized authority in Monrovia. Citizenship was unequal. Participation was limited. Trust fractured early. The resulting distance between the state and its people has shaped our political culture ever since. Modern governance failures in Liberia cannot be understood without recognizing this original fault line.
Yet Liberia did rise to continental leadership — and that makes today’s stagnation even more painful. We were central to Africa’s political imagination. Liberia championed the continent’s independence movement. We helped shape the Organization of African Unity (now the African Union). We were foundational to the creation of ECOWAS. We supported the establishment of the African Development Bank. We stood proudly as a founding member of the United Nations. Our diplomats and statesmen shaped global norms on peacekeeping, human rights, and multilateral cooperation. This history proves something essential: Liberia once possessed institutional creativity, strategic vision, and a sense of continental responsibility. We were not bystanders; we were architects.
Which is why today’s governance paralysis feels like a betrayal of both our founding mission and our historical leadership. The evidence of systemic dysfunction is overwhelming. Successive General Auditing Commission (GAC) reports document legislative overreach, opaque budget lines, self-approved benefits, and unexplained constituency spending. Public Expenditure and Financial Accountability (PEFA) reviews consistently rate Legislative budget oversight as weak or ineffective, with limited follow-through on audit recommendations. Afrobarometer surveys and U.S. State Department reports identify the Judiciary as one of the least trusted institutions, vulnerable to political influence, corruption, and financial dependence that undermines independence. Over this fragile system sits an imperial presidency, empowered by the Constitution to appoint more than 4,000 officials across ministries, agencies, commissions, and state-owned enterprises. The IMF and World Bank have repeatedly flagged that this hyper-centralization fuels patronage networks, coordination failures, and inconsistent policy implementation.
The result is predictable: a governance arrangement where reform depends more on personalities than institutions; where political loyalty outweighs competence; where electoral cycles reset national direction every few years; where the civil service is politicized; where ministries operate in silos; where data comes too late or is used too lightly; and where the state struggles to deliver basic services or long-term transformation.
Contrast this with countries that broke out of similar cycles. Vietnam rebuilt a professional bureaucracy insulated from political turnover, stabilized its curriculum, invested in teachers, and reorganized its economy around productivity and exports. Rwanda rebuilt its institutions from scratch, introduced performance contracts (Imihigo), embedded accountability, and created community health and governance systems that reached every village. These countries are not perfect — no country is — but they deliver results because their governance models demand results.
Liberia’s governance model, by contrast, is still built on the logics of accommodation, patronage, and survival rather than coordination, performance, and national mission. We have electoral promises, not development missions. We have strategies, not delivery systems. We have talent, but no enabling architecture to turn talent into national progress.
So the question confronting Liberia is simple: Can we leapfrog with the governance model we have? All evidence says no. Our system cannot deliver the speed, coherence, discipline, or continuity required to close a 50–100-year development gap. It cannot sustain reforms across administrations. It cannot align ministries. It cannot produce jobs at scale. It cannot integrate learning with economic transformation. It cannot deliver at the pace Liberians deserve.
But the future is not hopeless. Liberia does not need to copy Rwanda or Vietnam. We must redesign a better-functioning Liberian governance model — one that preserves democracy, freedom, and civic participation, while embracing performance culture, institutional coherence, and delivery discipline. A model that establishes a national human-capital mission beyond electoral cycles. A model that professionalizes the civil service, strengthens data and oversight, creates delivery units that break silos, aligns education with economic reform, and rewards outcomes rather than announcements.
Liberia cannot build tomorrow’s prosperity on a governance architecture designed for yesterday’s purposes. If we want the results that high-performing nations have achieved, we must adopt the principles that made those results possible. We must design a governance system worthy of our founding vision, our Indigenous heritage, and our historic continental leadership.
Until then, development will remain a promise we repeat — not a reality our people experience"
— George K. Werner
