Published: April 8, 2026
MONROVIA — Finance and Development Planning Minister Augustine K. Ngafuan said Tuesday that the government is finalizing plans to subsidize fuel costs for the National Transit Authority to prevent a spike in public transportation fares, even as Liberia grapples with the economic fallout from the ongoing war involving Iran.
Speaking in a wide-ranging birthday interview on OK FM with host Clarence Jackson, Ngafuan said the economic management team has been meeting regularly to monitor the impact of surging petroleum prices on the Liberian economy, and that an announcement on mitigation measures is imminent.
“Our goal is to ensure that the National Transit Authority does not increase prices, and we intend to keep it stable,” Ngafuan said. “The economists at the ministry are finalized, we are working on a lot of things, and as soon as we are finalized with all the numbers, we will put them in effect and announce them.”
The minister also said the government is preparing targeted interventions for critical hospitals whose operating costs have climbed sharply because of the rising price of fuel, which directly affects power supply.
Record Revenue, Then a Shock
Ngafuan opened the interview by touting what he described as an unprecedented run of fiscal performance. Liberia recorded economic growth of 5.1 percent in 2025, he said, and domestic revenue reached approximately $840 million — surpassing the previous record of roughly $700 million set in 2024. The national budget crossed the $1 billion mark for the first time in the country’s history, he added, and for 2026 the government has projected a budget of $1.2 billion, with growth estimated at 5.6 percent.
But that momentum was immediately tested. When the United States Agency for International Development abruptly suspended most of its programs in Liberia, the country lost more than $300 million in aid that had funded agriculture, education, health services, school feeding programs and drug supplies. USAID had been operating roughly 29 projects in the country, nearly all of which were shut down, Ngafuan said.
“It was a shock for us,” he said. “But thanks to having a good captain, President Boakai, and a good team, we retreated, we re-strategized, and we worked hard.” He credited robust domestic revenue collection, led by the Liberia Revenue Authority, with allowing the government to close the gap.
“You don’t determine the result of a match after 30 minutes,” Ngafuan said. “Wait for 90 minutes. It is at the end of the match you know the result.”
War in Iran Hits Liberia’s Pump
Now, a new exogenous shock has arrived. According to the Finance Minister, the conflict involving Iran and its effects on oil transit through the Strait of Hormuz are reverberating across the global economy and Liberia is not insulated.
“Liberia is an oil importer, and we are not shielded from the effects,” he said, noting that Liberia Petroleum Refining Company has already adjusted prices upward. He said some neighboring countries have faced product shortages, but Liberia has largely maintained supply. The government is also taking steps on the monetary front to ensure LPRC can service its financing obligations, he said.
“We are hoping for the best, but preparing for the worst,” Ngafuan said.
From Logan Town to Cabinet
The interview also gave the minister, who was celebrating his birthday, an extended opportunity to speak about his personal history — a story that moved from a humble upbringing in Monrovia’s Loking Town community to the highest levels of government.
Ngafuan was born at the old government maternity hospital in Monrovia’s Bassa community and raised in Logan Town, where his father Dennis worked as a restaurant supervisor at the Duke Palace Hotel and his mother, who never attended school, sold goods to support the family. His father did not finish high school either, but Ngafuan said both parents understood the value of education deeply.
“The fact that they didn’t go to school did not mean they didn’t know the value of education,” he said. His mother, he explained, had been hidden by her own father as a girl to prevent missionaries from taking her to school, an act of love that she came to regret throughout her life.
His father, even in financially constrained circumstances, made sure Ngafuan had his textbooks. “Sometimes we were deprived of other things, but my father would ensure that the books I needed he would buy, or he would borrow money so that I got them.”
Growing up, Ngafuan said he harbored dreams of playing for the Liberia national football team — the Lone Star. He played midfield, wearing the number 10 jersey, for a team called Young Eagle, alongside future Lone Star players Jonas Sawyer and Fofi Kamara. Soccer, he said, nearly cost him his enrollment at the Booker Washington Institute in Kakata, because his team had just qualified for the third division when he was set to leave.
He attended A.B. Tolbert Elementary School, then Boatswain Junior High School for four years, before matriculating at BWI in 1986 and graduating in 1989. He entered the University of Liberia in 1990, just as the civil war erupted.
A Decade to Earn a Degree
Ngafuan said the war, displacement, and repeated campus closures meant he spent nearly a decade pursuing what should have been a four-year degree. During the conflict, he returned to Lofa County, where he farmed, played soccer for neighboring towns that would “borrow” him for matches, and witnessed a grinder accident that cost a fellow worker his hand.
When the university eventually stabilized, he was elected president of the University of Liberia Student Union, a role he said classmates initially pushed him into, after years of deliberately avoiding the spotlight.
“I was always running away from attention,” he said. “I was very introverted.”
His opponent in that student union race was Samuel Tweah, who went on to serve as finance minister under President George Weah. Ngafuan recalled that the two men shared a common passion for academic excellence and public service, even while competing on opposite sides.
“In order to have a good game, there must be two teams,” he said.
The BWI Protest That Made Him Wanted
One of the most dramatic stories Ngafuan recounted was the 1988 student boycott at BWI during the military government of Samuel Doe. Ngafuan, then vice president of the student council government, helped lead a peaceful protest over campus conditions. Two truckloads of soldiers from a military facility arrived on campus and opened fire, killing at least one student who was wearing jeans, the standard BWI student dress. Forty students were arrested.
Ngafuan and four other student leaders fled and hid in a house in a remote community in Kakata before eventually escaping to Monrovia, by which time their photographs had been circulated and they were listed as wanted.
His family, desperate to find him, eventually located a house where Augustine Ngafuan was reportedly hiding — only to find a different person with the same name.
“I thought I had monopoly over the name,” he said, laughing. It was that experience, he explained, that led him to insist on always spelling out his full name, Augustine Kpehe Ngafuan, rather than using a middle initial.
“I wanted to be unique because of that 1988 experience.”
The Speech That Brought Him to Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s Attention
In 1998, when President Charles Taylor convened a national Vision 2024 conference and initially excluded youth and students, Ngafuan delivered what he described as the most courageous speech of his life before the assembled delegates and Taylor himself.
He told the gathering that Liberians were divided into two camps, those who viewed Taylor as a messiah and those who viewed him as a demon, but that students considered him neither, and would commend him when he did commendable things and condemn him when he did condemnable things.
He then challenged Taylor directly on the status of political exiles, the non-factional army provisions of the Abuja Accord, and the suspicious death of activist Samuel Dokie. Taylor, instead of dismissing him, engaged him one-on-one on the stage, at one point instructing his justice minister to retrieve the Abuja Accord on the spot. When the document brought forward turned out to be a communique between Taylor and Nigerian leader Sani Abacha rather than the Accord itself, Ngafuan declined three times, respectfully, to read from it.
“Three times,” he said. “And I cannot read this document.”
The standoff left the conference hall tense. Intelligence reached Ngafuan and his colleagues that they needed to leave. He spent nearly nine days in hiding before the situation subsided.
The speech, later published in a newspaper and preserved by veteran journalist Kenneth Best in his archive, was read by Ellen Johnson Sirleaf from her exile in Abidjan. She sent an assistant to find Ngafuan, and the two formed a working relationship that would eventually lead to her appointing him budget director and then finance minister.
“She was struck by the speech,” he said. “She found that it was courageous, forward-looking, visionary.”
He noted that Taylor, despite his well-documented record of human rights abuses, deserves credit for establishing an independent central bank, implementing financial sector reforms, and producing the revenue code of 2002 – achievements Ngafuan said he refuses to ignore.
“We have all the dark things about the Taylor era, but we also have some bright things,” he said. “Taylor had a good eye for competence.”
It was at the Central Bank of Liberia, where he was hired by then-Governor Elie Saleeby, that Ngafuan’s graduate education was sponsored.
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