Published: October 14, 2026
Monrovia – The agency that oversees Liberia’s state-owned enterprises told the National Budget Committee Monday that it has 65 employees and three vehicles to monitor the whole sector. It also said a new law is turning it from a bureau into a full authority, with broader powers over companies whose payments help fund the national budget.
By Lennart Dodoo
Mr. J.S.B. Theodore Momoh, director general of the Bureau of State Enterprises, said the agency’s responsibilities had grown faster than its resources. He asked for more money in the 2027 budget to hire staff, buy vehicles and finish building a digital reporting system for state-owned enterprises.
“So, because of our new situation, we’re not the same again as the Bureau,” he said at the executive budget hearing at the Ministry of Finance and Development Planning. “We have serious capacity gap in human resources within manpower.”
He said the agency wants to grow from 65 staff to 105. “And we are bringing in real professionals,” he said.
Vehicles are a bigger problem. “We are running an institution of three vehicles,” the director general said. Each of the three belongs to one of the agency’s top managers. When staff must travel to check compliance or report at state-owned enterprises, he said, the managers give up their vehicles for fieldwork.
The director general said the agency needs the extra resources because it is becoming the State-Owned Enterprises Authority of Liberia. The Legislature passed the law creating the authority, and President Joseph Boakai signed it in February, he said, and the bureau is now in transition. Until then, he said, the bureau had operated under a decree issued by the military government in 1985 that had serious shortcomings.
He tied the case for higher revenue directly to the case for more money. Some state-owned enterprises contribute to the national budget, and others regulate sectors of the economy, he said, so aggressive, comprehensive oversight would increase revenue and improve compliance in their programs and projects.
He said the current management team took over in November 2025 and inherited a 2026 budget it had to work within. He described the situation as a “straight jacket.”
The director general said the agency met two European Union budget support triggers in 2026. The first required collecting financial reports from state-owned enterprises. He said the bureau gathered hard and soft copies of the enterprises’ 2025 financial and operational reports and delivered them to the Ministry of Finance, after delays under previous management. The second trigger required a new legal framework for the agency, which the authority law satisfied.
A third EU-linked measure remains pending. The bureau first drafted an omnibus act to put the authority’s powers into effect, the director general said, but the Law Reform Commission concluded that the proposal should be an amendment to the authority law instead. The amendment has been submitted to the Office of the President for transmission to the Legislature, he said.
Once that amendment is passed, he said, the authority will be able to review each state-owned enterprise’s mandate and operations and design regulations and policies for each one. The agency has already begun analyzing the enterprises’ debt portfolios, asset lists and human resources practices in preparation, he said.
The agency is also shifting its reporting from paper to a digital platform that state-owned enterprises will use to file reports on human resources, procurement, and finances. The director general said the platform would speed compliance and oversight and reduce delays that affect the national budget process. A baseline study underway will feed into the system, and the agency plans to complete digitization in 2027.
In response to a committee member’s question, the director general said the most important lesson from the agency’s study tours abroad was the use of performance contracts. Under the system the agency plans to adopt, each state-owned enterprise would sign a performance compliance contract with the authority at the start of every fiscal year, setting out its reporting and compliance obligations so the authority can monitor them.
He said the agency had sent a mission to Ghana to compare oversight systems, sent two legal staff to Nigeria and three staff to China for training in state-owned enterprise governance, and enrolled 16 staff in specialized training at a local university.
His other priorities for 2027 included optimizing revenue contributions from state-owned enterprises, setting protocols for prompt remittance of those contributions, strengthening governance structures, working with the enterprises and the Finance Ministry to reduce wasteful spending, and improving debt management.
A Civil Service Agency official at the hearing said the bureau told an earlier manpower hearing it would request a little over US$ 403,000 for personnel in fiscal 2027. The official asked the director general to confirm the figure, and the question was taken offline.
The hearing’s chair praised the agency’s transition. He recommended that it allocate its limited training budget to group training through local and regional institutions rather than sending staff abroad, which he said costs far more in airfare, hotels and allowances.
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