Published: April 13, 2026
The Cabinet of the Republic met on April 9 and did what Liberian governments have done for decades when confronted with a crisis that has gone unaddressed long enough to become undeniable. It formed a plan to review a plan.
The Greater Monrovia Urban Redevelopment Program will be further reviewed next week before endorsement. The Infrastructure Policy Roadmap covering 2026 to 2029 is pending final review. The Ministry of Public Works’ Compendium of Regulations is under consideration. The National Infrastructure Conference may be institutionalized as a triennial platform. Public-private partnerships will be promoted. Development partners will be engaged.
Anyone who has lived in Monrovia for the past 20 years has heard variations of all of this before. The capital’s crisis is not a crisis of insufficient planning documents. It is a crisis of governance — of a state that produces regulations it does not enforce, frameworks it does not fund, and announcements it does not follow through on. Adding another layer of framework to that stack does not solve the problem. It deepens it.
President Boakai’s observation at the Cabinet meeting was at least grounded in the visible reality that any resident of Monrovia navigates daily. The proliferation of building materials stores across the city, he noted, is evidence of widespread unregulated construction, contributing to congestion, traffic obstruction, and what the Cabinet politely termed “visual blight.” He directed the Ministry of Public Works to take swift and decisive action.
We would like to know what that means. Swift and decisive action by whose authority, under what legal framework, with what enforcement mechanism, and funded by whom? Those are not rhetorical questions. They are the difference between a Cabinet directive and a Cabinet declaration, between governance and performance.
Monrovia is a city where zoning regulations exist on paper and nowhere else. Buildings go up in alleyways. Commercial structures spread into residential zones without consequence. Drainage channels are blocked by construction. Roads that were designed to carry a fraction of current traffic volumes are flanked by structures that were never supposed to be there. The Ministry of Public Works knows this. It presented the Cabinet with a detailed briefing on exactly these conditions. The 2026 National Infrastructure Conference apparently documented all of it. The crisis, in other words, is well understood.
What is not well understood, or at least not well explained to the public, is why the Ministry of Public Works, which has had regulatory authority over construction standards for years, requires a new Compendium of Regulations to begin enforcing the standards it already possesses. Liberia does not lack building codes. It lacks the political will and institutional capacity to apply them consistently, equitably, and without the intervention of the well-connected.
That is the harder conversation the Cabinet did not have in public, or at least did not report having. Urban redevelopment in Monrovia is not merely a technical challenge. It is a political one. The structures going up in violation of zoning rules are often financed by people with enough influence to ensure that enforcement never reaches their doorstep. The unplanned commercial sprawl the Ministry of Public Works described is not the product of ignorance, it is the product of a regulatory environment where the price of non-compliance is negotiable and the cost of compliance falls disproportionately on those without connections.
Any policy roadmap that does not address that dynamic directly will produce the same outcome as every roadmap that preceded it.
We are not dismissing the Cabinet’s deliberations. A National Infrastructure Policy Roadmap, if genuinely implemented, could provide a needed framework for investment and accountability. Public-private partnerships, structured correctly and transparently, could help finance infrastructure that public budgets cannot. A triennial infrastructure conference, if it produces enforceable commitments rather than documents, could create the kind of sustained policy dialogue that Liberia’s infrastructure sector has never had.
But the sequencing matters. Endorsing a roadmap before the government has demonstrated the capacity and will to enforce existing regulations is not a policy shift. It is an announcement. Liberia has enough announcements. What Monrovia’s residents need is a zoning inspector who shows up, a fine that is levied and collected, a building permit denied on its merits rather than its connections, and a road cleared of the encroachments that were allowed to accumulate in plain sight of the ministry responsible for preventing them.
When the Ministry of Public Works returns to Cabinet next week with its updated presentation on the Greater Monrovia Urban Redevelopment Program, the members of Cabinet should ask one question before endorsing anything: What will be different this time?
If the answer is another framework, another roadmap, another conference, the people of Monrovia already know how that story ends. They are living in it.
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