Liberia stands at a pivotal moment in its economic recovery. With President Joseph Boakai’s Executive Order No. 153 building on EO No. 136 to establish the Liberia National Railway Authority (LNRA), the government has signaled an important shift: the country intends to treat railways as national infrastructure rather than the private preserve of a single concessionaire.
That shift is not merely administrative. It is a strategic choice with the potential to unlock investment, diversify the economy, protect national assets and spread the benefits of trade more broadly across Liberian society.
For decades, the Yekepa–Buchanan line has functioned as a single user corridor, built and maintained to serve a single mining operator. When that operator’s fortunes wavered, the rail suffered.
Tying such critical infrastructure to the life cycle of one concession creates fragility: lines fall into disrepair, communities lose employment and the state loses long-term revenue.
A regulated, independently operated multiuser system breaks that dependency. It allows multiple companies — miners, agricultural exporters, passenger services and other commercial actors to use the same corridor under transparent rules and fair access terms. The result is sustained traffic, continued maintenance and durable value for the country.
The economic case is straightforward. More users mean more trains moving more goods, raising revenues from usage fees and dividends that can be reinvested in maintenance and community development.
A shared rail network will improve Liberia’s competitiveness in the region by lowering transport costs, reducing logistical bottlenecks and attracting firms that require reliable bulk transport.
Most tangibly, expanded rail activity will create thousands of direct and indirect jobs across the corridor — from track maintenance to port handling and ancillary services in towns along the line.
This policy direction also strengthens national sovereignty over strategic assets. The LNRA, if properly empowered, can set standards for safety, tariffs and scheduling while ensuring that commercial operators do not capture the asset to the exclusion of others.
The government’s plan to seek international technical advisers is prudent. Expertise in rail regulation and operations will be essential to build capacity quickly and to benchmark practices against global standards.
Yet the promise of a multiuser system will not be delivered by decree alone. Parliament must move promptly to enact enabling legislation that codifies the LNRA’s mandate, ensures transparent procurement and contracting, and creates robust oversight mechanisms.
Equally important are governance safeguards: independent audits, clear financial controls, an impartial tariff setting mechanism, anticorruption measures and avenues for stakeholder redress.
The transition must include consultations with affected communities and workers, concrete plans for skills development and credible arrangements for environmental and social impact mitigation.
The alternative is to repeat past mistakes: a corridor that runs only when a single concessionaire prospers, then stagnates when it does not.
Liberia’s railways should be engines of national development, not one company’s private line. By committing to a multi-user, transparent and professionally regulated rail system, Liberia can turn a relic of the past into a durable asset for the future — connecting producers to markets, creating jobs, and reinforcing sovereign control over infrastructure that belongs to all Liberians. The time to act is now.
