A political development analysis
By: Jusu Kamara
September 9, 2026
There is an old truth that every worker, every farmer, every market woman in this Republic already knows in her bones: it is not the promise of a distant paradise that feeds a family, it is the steady, visible improvement in the conditions of daily life. The final goal matters little beside the movement toward it. What matters is that the movement is real, that it can be measured, and that ordinary Liberians can feel it in the price of rice and the light in the evening.
This is the standard by which President Joseph Nyuma Boakai’s administration must be judged, and by this standard it is delivering. Not through revolution, not through slogans, but through the patient, evolutionary work of governance: budget by budget, road by road, kilowatt by kilowatt. The World Bank, the IMF and the government now agree that Liberia’s economy expanded by 5.1% in 2025, up from 4.0% in 2024, propelled by a 17% surge in mining output, with iron ore production climbing an estimated 42% (World Bank, 2026; IMF, 2026). Services grew 4.4%, and agriculture grew 2.6%.
On 25 August 2026, Information Minister Jerolinmek Matthew Piah carried these numbers to the public himself, presenting the findings of a National Steering Committee review chaired personally by President Boakai, two years into the ARREST Agenda (The New Dawn Liberia, 2026). That is how a reformist government behaves. It does not wait to be asked for its scorecard. It publishes one.
Let the skeptics call this incrementalism. The working people of Liberia have a better word for it. They call it progress they can hold in their hands.
For it is not enough to seize power and declare the future arrived. Real gains for the common people are won the hard way, through disciplined administration, honest accounting and the slow rebuilding of institutions that were once hollowed out. Under President Boakai’s fiscal stewardship, the overall government deficit narrowed from 7.1% of GDP in 2023 to just 1.1% in 2025, as domestic revenue climbed from 14.7% to 15.8% of GDP even as foreign grants declined (World Bank, 2026). By mid-2026, revenue collection had already reached 761.1 million United States dollars against a full-year budget of about 1.3 billion, evidence that the government is meeting its own targets rather than simply announcing them.
Food inflation fell from 9.7% year on year in December 2024 to negative 1.7% by December 2025, though the fuller annual average for 2025 stood at 8.5% once the earlier months of the year are counted (World Bank, 2026). By July 2026, price pressure had edged back up to 5.4%, driven by imported food and fuel costs. This administration did not look away. The Central Bank of Liberia responded by trimming its policy rate by 25 basis points to 16.00%, a deliberate move to defend the ordinary household’s purchasing power (Central Bank of Liberia, 2026).
For the ordinary Liberian, this does not mean life has become cheap overnight. It means the theft of purchasing power, the slow bleeding that inflation inflicts on every household, is being watched, measured and answered by a responsible government that is paying attention. A trader can price inventory with more confidence than she could two years ago. A salaried worker can hold more of the value of a wage. A family can plan a month with less dread. Under President Boakai, this is what evolutionary progress looks like: economic uncertainty, the great tax on the poor, is in retreat.
No reformer worth the name pretends the struggle is over because the indicators have improved, and the honest reformer does not hide the numbers that sting. The World Bank’s own account of 2025 is blunt: mining, iron ore above all, did the work, while growth outside mining was flat or worse, with manufacturing beyond the mining sector contracting 2.8% even as the headline expanded. The Bank says the upswing had limited reach into the rest of the economy (World Bank, 2026).
The human arithmetic behind that finding is sobering. Extreme poverty is projected to have risen to 35.8% in 2025, easing back to only 29.8% by 2028 (World Bank, 2026). The World Bank describes recent growth, plainly, as largely jobless. Meanwhile, about 87% of workers still labor in smallholder farming or unregistered micro enterprises, and 14.8% of Liberia’s young people, aged 15 to 24, are neither in education, employment nor training (World Bank, 2026).
Minister Ngafuan did not soften this picture when he delivered on the government’s own two-year scorecard. He said plainly that unemployment remains a significant problem. That is not a slip of the tongue from a careless official. It is the mark of a government still answerable to the people it serves, instructed by its own President to level with the public rather than perform for it.
This is precisely why the next chapter of the Boakai program cannot rest on the growth chart alone. It must be about turning national growth into the daily bread of working families, one job, one wage, one harvest at a time.
Here is where practical reform speaks louder than theory. A road is not just asphalt laid by a contractor. It is the difference between a farmer’s produce reaching market fresh or rotted on the roadside. A port is not simply a maritime facility. It is the gate through which the labor of Liberian hands finds a buyer in the world. Electricity is not just megawatts on a ledger. It is the difference between a small tailor’s shop that thrives and one that dies slowly under the cost of diesel.
The World Bank’s current partnership framework for Liberia (World Bank, 2025) places four priorities at the centre of its jobs agenda: education, energy access, accountable governance and private investment, particularly in agro-industry and forestry. The Boakai administration has read this agenda correctly, because it is, in the end, the agenda of the ordinary worker.
Consider the emerging mining and rail corridor now taking shape under this government’s stewardship. Here is a chance, seized with real foresight, to ensure the wealth beneath Liberian soil does not simply pass through Liberian hands on its way to someone else’s factory, as the 42% surge in raw iron ore exports risks becoming if left unchecked. Liberian firms should provide the transport, the catering, the maintenance, the warehousing, the construction, the professional services and the agricultural supplies this corridor demands. Let the profit of the land build the wages of the people who live on it.
Fail at this, and Liberia becomes an efficient conduit for the extraction of others. Succeed, under the patient reformist hand now guiding the Republic, and Liberia becomes a nation building its own house, brick by honest brick.
Few questions touch the dignity of labor more directly than electricity. World Bank (2025) data put national electricity access at only 32.5% in 2023, a figure that should trouble any government claiming to serve the common man. Yet the record under this administration shows real, cumulative, and accelerating gain. Between January and December 2025 alone, an estimated 81,776 new household connections, reaching nearly 376,000 Liberians, were brought onto the grid through World Bank financed projects and the government’s own Mission 300 program (World Bank, 2026).
President Boakai has personally overseen the launch of the Mission 300 Compact Delivery and Monitoring Unit, and the repair of Mt. Coffee Hydropower Plant Unit 1, adding 22 MW, is nearing completion, with the plant’s full 88 MW capacity set to be restored by the end of 2026. A tender for a further 42 MW of hydropower capacity has already been launched (World Bank, 2026). This is not a promise on a podium. It is a machine being rebuilt, turbine by turbine, under a government’s direct instruction.
Every household newly connected gains more than a bulb overhead. It gains the light by which a child studies for school, the refrigeration by which a family’s food and medicine are kept safe, the small margin of safety that comes when a street is no longer dark. Every connected workshop gains longer hours of honest labor and freedom from the daily tax of the generator.
Let the government be judged not on the ribbon it cuts at the opening of a substation, but on whether, by 2029, the ordinary citizen can say plainly that power is more available, more reliable, and more affordable than it was. On the current trajectory of connections and capacity, that standard is within reach.
It is in the clinic and the classroom that the state ceases to be an abstraction and becomes, quite simply, a friend or an enemy of the common family. No macroeconomic success can excuse a government whose pregnant women cannot reach a functioning hospital, or whose children leave primary school unable to read a single sentence.
Here the record under President Boakai gives working Liberians real, if unfinished, cause for confidence. The administration’s effort to expand targeted social spending, formalize teachers and health workers, and strengthen education and health systems carries a weight no ledger can capture. The IMF (2026) has explicitly welcomed the government’s effort to protect priority investment and targeted social spending on health, education, and vulnerable groups even as fiscal space tightens.
But the honest reformer never mistakes a good beginning for a finished task. Liberia’s constraints remain stubbornly human: limited access to quality education and healthcare, weak water and sanitation systems, low electricity access, and a poverty that, as the latest figures show, has in fact risen even as growth accelerated. The World Bank’s poverty assessment (World Bank, n.d.) is direct on this point: more than half of poor Liberians depend primarily on agriculture, and low human capital remains a central obstacle to durable poverty reduction.
This calls for a plain shift in thinking, one the working people of Liberia already understand instinctively even when economists are slow to say it. Social spending is not charity handed down from above. It is investment in the productive capacity of the nation’s own people.
A child who learns is the Republic’s future labor and future genius. A healthy worker is productive wealth walking on two feet. A functioning rural road is capital laid in stone. Reliable electricity is capital carried on a wire. This, and nothing grander, is how the ordinary citizen should understand the Boakai development project: not as charity, but as the patient construction of a nation by and for the people who work it.
Let this be said plainly, in language the masses do not need translated: growth on a chart does not vote. People vote. And people vote their kitchen table, not their GDP report.
The real question before the electorate in 2029 will not be whether an indicator improved on paper. It will be whether the ordinary citizen believes, from lived experience, that the country is moving in the right direction, and that the movement is his movement too.
Here the governing Unity Party holds a case that deserves to be made plainly and repeated often: growth confirmed at 5.1% for 2025, with the government itself projecting 5.5% for 2026 and the IMF close behind at 5.4%, a narrowing fiscal deficit, expanding infrastructure and investment, deeper international partnerships, and a more coherent national development plan. The World Bank’s 2026 financing package of 55.8 million United States dollars for fiscal resilience and private sector development (World Bank, 2026) is explicitly aligned with the AAID-Agenda and the goal of creating more and better jobs for ordinary Liberians.
But no reformer worth his salt confuses an improving balance sheet with a finished revolution of daily life. That confusion is the beginning of political defeat, and President Boakai’s government would do well to say so itself, before the opposition says it first. Even the World Bank’s own caution deserves a hearing here: the current account deficit, having narrowed to 6.5% of GDP in 2025, is projected to widen again to 13.4% in 2026 as investment-linked imports rise (World Bank, 2026). Growth financed by imported machinery is not growth to be ashamed of, but it is growth that must be watched.
The opposition’s sharpest weapon will be a plain question, the kind that needs no economics degree to ask: the economy is growing, they will say, but where is the money in my pocket? There is only one honest answer to that question, and it is not rhetoric. It is delivery.
When a young person finds work, the growth chart becomes personal. When a farmer reaches market before the harvest spoils, the new road becomes personal. When electricity lowers the cost of running a small workshop, reform becomes personal. When a child learns to read, investment becomes personal. When a patient survives because the county hospital finally works, governance itself becomes personal.
That is the conversion this administration must keep making, again and again, between now and 2029: from the statistic to the lived hour, from the page to the pocket of the working Liberian.
As of September 2026, the evidence gives President Boakai and the governing Unity Party a real and defensible record of gain for the common people. It does not hand them the future free of charge. No government, however patient and however honest, earns tomorrow on the strength of yesterday alone.
This administration has built a stronger foundation than either its harshest critics or its own quieter supporters often admit. Growth is confirmed at 5.1% for 2025 and projected above 5% again for 2026. The fiscal deficit has narrowed from 7.1% of GDP to 1.1% in two years. Domestic revenue collection is rising and on pace with its own targets. Nearly 376,000 Liberians gained electricity access in a single year. And the world’s development partners are placing real resources behind Liberia’s recovery, a vote of confidence not easily won.
And yet, in the spirit of honest reform, let it be said without flinching, in the same words the government’s own review used: the country remains poor, and recent growth has been largely jobless. Extreme poverty rose to an estimated 35.8% in 2025. Employment remains overwhelmingly informal. Manufacturing outside of mining actually contracted (World Bank, 2026). A movement that hides its unfinished work from the people it serves is a movement that has already begun to fail them. This administration’s strength lies precisely in its willingness, through its own President’s steering committee, to name the distance still to travel.
The task between now and 2029 is therefore plain, and it belongs to the whole nation, not to the government alone: convert the growth of the Republic, so far concentrated in a handful of mines, into the progress of every household. Not someday. Visibly, steadily, and at scale, in the manner that working people can verify with their own eyes.
President Boakai’s administration does not need to convince the masses that Liberia has become a wealthy nation overnight. No honest reformer would even attempt such a claim, and this one, to its credit, has not. It needs only to make the direction of travel undeniable, plain enough for a market woman in Ganta and a student in Zwedru to see it without being told twice.
The winning equation of this steady, evolutionary path is simple, and it deserves to be repeated in every county, at every rally, in every marketplace, until it is common knowledge among the people:
Growth must become jobs. Investment must become local enterprise. Roads must become market access. Electricity must become productivity. Mining must become domestic value creation.
If these conversions become visible at scale by 2028, the Unity Party will enter 2029 with more than the advantage of incumbency. It will carry the one argument that no slogan can match: that under President Boakai’s steady stewardship, the Republic began the long, unglamorous, honest turn from stabilization toward transformation, and said so plainly at every step of the way.
And that is the true contest before this nation. Not whether Liberia was remade overnight by decree, for no honest movement promises that. But whether, after years of drift and deprivation, the ordinary Liberian, the farmer, the teacher, the market woman, the young apprentice, can finally look at the Republic and say it in her own plain words:
The Republic is moving, and this time, we, the people, are moving with it.
Forward steadily- President Boakai, no apology!
Jusu Kamara is a Liberian political analyst, public affairs strategist, and development communicator whose work examines governance, political economy, institutional reform, and national transformation. He writes with an authoritative, evidence-driven voice on Liberia’s politics, public policy, and development trajectory.
