Postwar Liberia still struggles with corruption and impunity

On 23 April, Liberia’s supreme court affirmed the legitimacy of the Speaker of the House of Representatives Jonathan Fonati Koffa. This followed months of legislative impasse and political crisis triggered by rival legislators’ vote to remove Koffa over alleged budget manipulations, overruns and a conflict of interest involving his law firm and government agencies. 

The legislators, forming the “Majority Bloc”, had voted to elect Richard Koon to replace Koffa. They alleged that Koffa’s office overspent its allocation of about $1.5-million by more than $4-million in 2022 and about $3-million in 2023. These amounts, they said, could not be accounted for. 

The situation disrupted legislative business, provoking protests and apparently causing fires to be set in the Capitol Building. Importantly, it highlights the country’s struggle to break from one of the direct causes of its 1989-2003 civil war – corruption and impunity – and the need for renewed and sustained anti-corruption efforts. 

Among the key objectives of the 2003 Comprehensive Peace Agreement, which ended the conflict, was combating corruption and institutionalising good governance. These were reinforced by recommendations of the truth and reconciliation commission, and successive postwar governments have – at least officially – made them key components of their governance agenda.

Key among the several steps taken to achieve these objectives were establishing the Governance Commission in 2007, the Liberia Anti-Corruption Commission in 2008 and the General Auditing Commission in 2014. 

In 2022, the Liberia Anti-Corruption Commission Act was amended to grant direct prosecutorial powers to the commission, in addition to passing a Whistleblower Act and the Witness Protection Act to facilitate public reporting of corrupt acts. 

In April 2024, the legislature voted to approve President Joseph Boakai’s proposal to set up a War and Economic Crimes Court to prosecute perpetrators of serious abuses committed during the civil war. 

Notwithstanding these efforts, Liberia remains haunted by entrenched corruption, consistently ranking close to the bottom of Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index. Its score has been less than 40 and has declined since 2013. 

Institute for Security Studies interviews with several stakeholders point to a culture of political patronage and lack of political will to ensure criminal accountability for corruption. Institutional weakness – and often dysfunctionality – is also among the causal factors that have transcended various governments. 

These deep-seated challenges were acknowledged in 2016 by Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Liberia’s first postwar president, but have since persisted. She noted that her government had “not fully met the anti-corruption pledge… because of the intractability of dependency and dishonesty cultivated from years of deprivation and poor governance”. A succession of corruption scandals rocked her government, including those emanating from General Auditing Commission investigations, but for which there were no prosecutions.  

George Weah, who succeeded Sirleaf, faced immense public unease following several scandals involving his appointees. Like in the Sirleaf era, public appointments based on political connections and personal relations under Weah meant appointees were not prosecuted for corruption. Yet some stakeholders still argued that corruption under Weah became insidious and accounted for his electoral defeat in November 2023. 

In August 2022, for instance, the US Department of the Treasury sanctioned Liberian government officials Nathaniel McGill, Sayma Syrenius Cephus and Bill Twehway for graft. Former finance minister Samuel Tweah was also sanctioned in December 2023 alongside two senators and Monrovia’s mayor, Jefferson Koijee, for involvement in corruption and, in Koijee’s case, human rights abuses. 

None of these cases resulted in prosecutions, a situation that has drawn criticism of the Liberia Anti-Corruption Commission for failing to exercise its prosecutorial powers. However, it reflects the resource and capacity constraints and lack of political and fiscal independence faced by the commission and other anti-corruption institutions, particularly the General Auditing Commission. 

Much like his predecessors, Boakai has sought to strike the right tone by promising to fight corruption. In February he suspended more than 450 government officials, including the health and education ministers and high-ranking state institution officials. They were accused of undermining “national efforts to combat corruption and ensure accountability” by failing to declare assets as required by law. 

Yet, the president has been criticised for being selective and politically motivated by suspending certain officials for corrupt acts while leaving others with the same allegations untouched. 

Boakai’s anti-corruption agenda also faces other challenges. His appointment of Jonathan Massaquoi to head the Office of the War and Economic Crimes Court – the body mandated to prepare the legal grounds for the court’s establishment – sparked controversy over Massaquoi’s previous legal representation of Agnes Taylor, wife of convicted former president Charles Taylor.

Rooting out corruption and institutionalising good governance remains a vital postwar imperative. Doing so requires far more than setting up anti-corruption frameworks. Stakeholders must tackle the culture of patronage, promote criminal accountability for corrupt acts and remove political and resource impediments to institutional effectiveness. 

The current political crisis, rooted in allegations of corruption, also offers a unique opportunity for Liberia to take stock of its good governance and anti-corruption progress and renew its efforts. DM

Sampson Kwarkye, project manager for Littoral West African States, Institute for Security Studies (ISS) Regional Office for West Africa and the Sahel.

Research for this article was funded by the Bosch Foundation and the government of Denmark. 

First published by ISS Today.