Published: May 13, 2026
Liberia borrowed $116 million in the name of its people to build a road connecting Roberts International Airport to Monrovia. Four years and nearly $100 million later, the country has 64 percent of a highway, crumbling asphalt, no guardrails, no traffic signs, no street lights, unresolved payments nobody can account for, and a Chinese contractor operating without a certified financial management system. The General Auditing Commission has now put all of this in writing. The question is whether anyone in authority will do anything about it.
The answer, based on Liberia’s institutional track record, should worry every citizen who travels that road or services the debt that financed it.
Let us be precise about what the GAC found, because the details are not abstractions. Auditors documented that the government paid East International Group Inc. $1.15 million without the legally required completion certificate. The Ministry of Public Works denied authorizing the payment. The National Road Fund flagged it as a breach. Nobody has explained who actually signed off on it or where the money went in the context of road construction. The Auditor General rejected the ministry’s response as inadequate and maintained the finding. A government disbursed more than a million dollars to a contractor, cannot show the paperwork justifying it, and the ministry responsible is pointing fingers at a bank.
That alone should prompt an immediate legislative inquiry. It has not.
Then there is the $577,808 variance. Three separate government entities, the Ministry of Finance and Development Planning, the Ministry of Public Works, and the contractor itself, produced three different sets of payment figures that cannot be reconciled. The gap between what government says it paid and what East International says it received runs into the hundreds of thousands of dollars across multiple funding streams. Supporting vouchers and check copies were withheld from auditors. In any serious accountability environment, withheld documents would be treated as obstruction. In Liberia, it is a finding in a report that gets filed.
The physical inspection findings are perhaps the most viscerally damning. Ninety-one percent of Section 1 civil works is declared complete. The contract allocates more than $2.2 million specifically for road furniture in that section. Auditors found not a single guardrail, not one traffic sign, no kilometer posts, no street lights along the completed stretch. Two billboards. The government is paying for completion while the contractor delivers a bare strip of asphalt and calls it progress. Meanwhile, cracks and depressions have already appeared in the asphalt binding course in Section 2, some within three kilometers of fresh laying.
This is not a technicality. This is a road that Liberians will drive on at night, in the rain, at speed, without functional safety infrastructure, on a corridor connecting the country’s only international airport. When accidents happen on that highway, and they will, the question of accountability will point directly back to these findings and to whoever chose to look away.
The governance failures compound the substantive ones. A 2024 addendum expanded the project scope to include pedestrian bridges, an airport extension, solar street light upgrades, and additional intersections, without any increase to the contract price and without legislative ratification as required by the Pre-Financing Agreement Act. The contract required a Dispute Review Board to be constituted from the outset. After four years, none exists. The Ministry of Public Works says it will constitute one if disputes arise. The contract does not say that. The contract says constitute it in advance. The ministry’s reading of its own legal obligations is either willfully convenient or a confession of incompetence, and neither is acceptable.
It must also be said clearly that this project sits on public debt. The $116 million was not a grant. It was borrowed, from EBID and Afreximbank, ratified by the National Legislature, and will be repaid by Liberian taxpayers for years. Every dollar that cannot be accounted for, every kilometer that falls short of specification, every missing safety feature on that corridor is a charge against the public that has no corresponding benefit. The people bearing that debt deserve a road that is complete, safe, and built to contract. They are getting none of the above.
The GAC has done its part. Auditor General P. Garswa Jackson transmitted the report directly to Speaker Richard Nagbe Koon and the Senate President Pro Tempore with an explicit call for urgency. The Legislature now holds the next card. It can summon the Ministry of Public Works, the National Road Fund, and East International to account for the missing paperwork, the unreconciled payments, the absent road furniture, and the scope expansion that bypassed its own ratification authority. It can refuse to authorize further disbursements until the compliance gaps are closed. It can treat its own oversight function as something more than a seasonal ritual.
Or it can do what Liberian institutions have repeatedly done with audit reports of this gravity: receive them, acknowledge them, and let them gather dust while the debt accrues and the road continues to deteriorate.
The Ministry of Public Works and East International Group Inc. did not respond to requests for comment before this editorial was published. Their silence is consistent with the pattern this audit documents throughout. Accountability in Liberia too often depends on who is willing to insist on it.
The Liberian Investigator is insisting. The Legislature should too.
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