17/12/2025
Wantoe Teah. Wantoe Writes...
"On Protest, Power, and the Numbers the State Cannot Silence!!!
Much of the public conversation around the STAND protest has focused on crowd size. How many people came out. How many stayed home. This obsession misses the point. Protest is not a census. It is a signal. It emerges when citizens believe policy promises and lived reality have drifted too far apart.
Ahead of the December 17 protest, STAND framed its demand plainly: Lead or Leave. Whether one agrees with STAND or not is secondary. The harder question is whether the issues raised are grounded in fact. On that front, the government’s own documents offer the clearest evidence.
Liberia is operating under a draft national budget of roughly US$1.2 billion annually. Over three fiscal years, this administration will have managed close to US$3.6 billion in public resources. At the same time, the ARREST Agenda for Inclusive Development commits the country to an ambitious transformation plan costing US$8.38 billion between 2025 and 2029. Human Capital Development alone is projected to cost US$2.37 billion, making it one of the most expensive pillars in the plan.
Yet in the FY2026 budget, education and health combined receive roughly US$225 million, less than one fifth of total spending. Education remains stuck at around 13 to 14 percent of public expenditure, below regional benchmarks and far below the plan’s own targets. Health outcomes remain catastrophic, with maternal mortality at 742 deaths per 100,000 live births, under five mortality at 93 per 1,000, and universal health coverage still out of reach.
The contrast between promise and allocation is stark. While the ARREST Agenda speaks of empowering youth, strengthening civil servants, and restoring dignity to markets and communities, the budget structure tells a different story. The Office of the President, the Vice President, the Speaker, and central administrative institutions continue to absorb significant allocations for operations, security, travel, and centralized authority, while ordinary civil servants remain trapped in stagnant wages, delayed benefits, and poor working conditions. Market women face rising costs without protection. Teachers remain underpaid. Health workers operate in fragile systems with limited supplies.
This contradiction becomes sharper when viewed through the government’s own reform agenda. Strategic Policy 16 on Public Administration explicitly calls for reducing the size of central government, decentralizing power, correcting wage disparities, and strengthening local governance. The plan acknowledges overlapping mandates, bloated ministries, politicized employment, and arbitrary salary structures. Yet two budget cycles in, the structure of spending remains heavily centralized in Monrovia, with limited evidence of meaningful fiscal devolution.
Youth unemployment lies at the heart of the protest and again, the government has already diagnosed the problem. Strategic Policy 23 on Youth Development notes that 42 percent of Liberia’s population is between 15 and 35. Youth not in education, employment, or training stands at over 40 percent. Dropout rates are rising. Motorcycle and tricycle riding has become a survival economy for young people with few alternatives. The plan declares youth unemployment a national emergency. Yet funding for TVET, youth entrepreneurship, and large scale job creation remains thin and fragmented.
Human Capital Development, the most expensive pillar on paper, is where the moral weight of this contradiction sits. Liberia ranks 177 out of 193 on the Human Development Index. Multidimensional poverty stands at 45 percent nationally and exceeds 70 percent in some counties. Rural households are deprived of electricity, clean water, sanitation, and access to health facilities. Schools lack trained teachers, basic infrastructure, and inclusive facilities for children with disabilities. Universities struggle with decay and underinvestment.
Protest emerges in this space not because people misunderstand policy, but because they understand it too well. The anger is not abstract. It is rooted in documents the government itself authored. The ARREST Agenda promises dignity through education, health, decentralization, and youth employment. The budget has not yet caught up with that promise.
This is why counting bodies on the street misses the truth. Protest is not noise. It is feedback. And right now, the numbers that matter most are not protest attendance figures, but budget lines that continue to fall short of the country’s own declared ambitions.
I respect STAND’s decision to speak. When people protest, they do not do so to embarrass the state or to entertain the internet. They do so to force attention onto realities that polite conversation keeps postponing. Protest is society’s way of saying that patience has expired, that accountability cannot wait for the next fiscal year, and that leadership must be measured not by calm streets but by responsive governance.
You can disagree with the protest. But you cannot dismiss the questions it raises."
