A Quarter-Million Dollars, Seven Budgets, and a School That Was Never Built

Published: June 12, 2026

Dear Readers,

Somewhere in Foya District, Lofa County, sits 150 acres of bare ground that was meant to change lives. Town elders surrendered it so their children could earn a higher education at home instead of crossing into Voinjama or into Sierra Leone in search of a classroom. For seven fiscal years, the national budget of Liberia treated that ground as the site of a functioning institution, the Foya Polytechnic, and set aside more than a quarter of a million United States dollars to build it. Today the land holds tall grass, a survey nobody can produce a blueprint from, and the memory of a promise. There is no school. There has never been a school.

The Liberian Investigator has spent weeks tracing where that money went and where it did not go. What our reporting establishes is not a story of a project delayed by hard times or honest difficulty. It is the record of a line item that has been carried in the national budget since 2018 for an institution that was never lawfully created, never constructed and, by the account of the very officials who should know it best, does not appear in their files at all.

The figures are precise, and they are public money. Budget records reviewed by this newspaper show US$15,000 in 2018, US$50,000 in 2019, US$35,000 in 2020, US$70,000 in 2023, US$54,000 in 2024, US$20,000 in 2025 and US$20,000 in 2026. That is US$264,000 routed through budget line code 251102 under the Ministry of Education subsidy to an account that residents on the ground say corresponds to no institution they have ever seen. Just as telling is what happened in between. The allocation vanished from the 2021 and 2022 budgets after public pressure raised questions about the entity, and then quietly reappeared once the scrutiny faded. Money does not behave that way by accident.

Follow the paper trail and it leads to a legal foundation that was never laid. The polytechnic began as a bill proposed by the late Representative Eugene Fallah Kparkar of Lofa County District 1, who died in December 2016. No record shows that any legal instrument establishing the institution was ever enacted by the House or the Senate. After Kparkar’s death, Francis S. Nyumalin, who won the 2017 by-election to succeed him and now serves as minister of local government, went so far as to set up a board for the so-called polytechnic, even though the law required to bring it into existence had cleared neither chamber. A board was seated. A budget line was opened. A school was not built.

When this newspaper went to Foya to ask the people the school was meant to serve, the answer was the same in every conversation. “No Foya Polytechnic here,” a student told us, explaining that families keep spending money they do not have to study in Voinjama and across the border because the institution promised to them exists only in the budget. A resident who helped hand over the land said the community is still waiting, year after year, for a groundbreaking that is always coming and never comes. These are not abstractions. They are citizens who gave up land in good faith and have watched the state collect an appropriation in their name while delivering nothing.

Most damning is the silence of officialdom. The Foya statutory superintendent says the project was not among the documents handed to him when he took office and that he cannot speak to something that is not on his desk. The Foya city mayor says his turnover notes make no mention of it either. A woman named as co-chair of the institution’s board distanced herself from it entirely and dared anyone with proof of her involvement to take her to court. And the officials best placed to account for the spending, Education Minister Jarso Maley Jallah, whose ministry carries the subsidy, the finance minister, who disburses the funds and holds the account details, current District 1 Representative Thomas P. Fallah and Nyumalin himself, all declined to answer the questions this newspaper put to them by message and by repeated telephone calls. When public money disappears and every official either pleads ignorance or refuses to speak, that is not a coincidence of busy schedules. It is the architecture of impunity.

A quarter of a million dollars is not a rounding error in the budget of a country where students walk to other counties and other nations for want of a classroom. Every dollar appropriated for a school that was never built is a dollar taken from a clinic, a road, a teacher’s salary or a real institution that could have served the people of Lofa County. The question is no longer whether something went wrong. The question is who authorized it, who benefited from it, and why a line item with no legal foundation survived seven budget cycles and the death of the man who first proposed it.

This newspaper does not pronounce guilt. That is the work of courts and of competent investigative bodies, and we say so deliberately. But the facts we have gathered demand answers, and they demand them now. We therefore call on the General Auditing Commission to open a full audit of budget line code 251102 and to trace every disbursement made in the name of the Foya Polytechnic since 2018. We call on the Liberia Anti-Corruption Commission to determine whether the appropriation, the board and the movement of these funds amount to misuse of public resources or worse. We call on the Legislature, which appropriated this money year after year, to explain how a school that was never lawfully established came to sit in seven national budgets, and to remove it from the next. And we call on the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Education to disclose, in full, where the US$264,000 went.

The coordinator of NAYMOTE Partners for Democratic Development put it well when he told us that the facts must guide the conclusion, that the individuals connected to these funds must be held accountable, and that if anyone is found guilty in a court of competent jurisdiction, they must bear the full weight of the law. We endorse that standard without reservation. The culture of impunity that allows ghost projects to feed on the public purse will end only when the people responsible are named, examined and, where the evidence warrants, prosecuted.

The Liberian Investigator will not let this story rest in tall grass the way the Foya Polytechnic has. We will keep asking the questions that the responsible officials have so far refused to answer. We will follow this money for as long as it takes. And we will report, plainly and without fear, whatever the documents and the witnesses reveal. The people of Foya were promised a school. The people of Liberia are owed an accounting. We intend to see that they get one.

In the public interest,

Lennart Dodoo

Managing Editor,

The Liberian Investigator