By George K. Werner (former education minister)
People sometimes ask why I am writing “so much” these days — as if reflection were a luxury or a performance. The truth is simpler: I write because experience, memory, and conscience do not give me permission to stay quiet. Writing is not my hobby. It is how I think, how I hold myself accountable, and how I refuse to forget.
Silence, when we know better, becomes a form of betrayal — of oneself and of others. Not a loud betrayal, but a quiet one — the kind that allows history to be rewritten by convenience, power, or forgetfulness.
My writing often begins in silence — the intentional kind. Many times it starts on the beach, where the tide breathes in and out like a patient elder. There, I talk honestly to God. I speak to my ancestors, who lived by fishing and farming, and I imagine their mornings on the water and their hands in the soil.
From the ocean they learned humility. From the forests they learned restraint. They named God Nye-Swa — “the One Who Gives Fish and Meat.” The spelling changes from county to county in southeastern Liberia, but the meaning never does: God sustains. My people did not fear storms or rough currents. They trusted the sea, the forest, and one another. I carry that courage with me — even when my storms are different.
I travel with a notebook and pen the way others carry keys — always within reach. I watch. I listen. I gather fragments of life as they pass. And when the notebook is not in my hands, it moves into my mind — a quiet photographer storing moments, scripting meaning, refusing to let me sleep until I have released what the day has taught me.
Sometimes I joke with friends that maybe I am writing more because I am getting older — and the mind, sensing the passing of time, becomes urgent about recording what matters. My memory is still lively, sometimes annoyingly detailed. But I have also learned that if I do not jot certain things down, they slip quietly into the fog of forgotten wisdom. Writing, in that sense, is both discipline and self-preservation. It saves lessons from being swallowed by time.
Those quiet moments are not escapes; they are confrontations. I measure the distance between who I am and who I ought to be. I interrogate ego. I search for meaning in disappointment. In many ways, I am my own therapist — asking hard questions before life forces them on me. It was with this spirit that I entered public service.
My government journey began in June 2011, when I joined the Civil Service Agency as Senior Technical Advisor to Dr. C. William Allen under the Transfer of Knowledge Through Expatriate Nationals program. I chaired the Inter-Ministerial Scholarships Committee and later became Director-General of the CSA. Then Ebola arrived — and the country changed. We created the “non-essential workers” policy not because it was popular, but because it was necessary. Lawmakers condemned me.
The late Senator Prince Y. Johnson called me “human Ebola.” I accepted the anger because sometimes leadership requires protective choices that only make sense in hindsight. I co-chaired the National Health Workforce Task Force, answered repeated legislative summons, faced contempt, experienced a failed nomination to Health — and was then appointed Minister of Education in June 2015.
When the transition from President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf to President George Weah came, I joined the 2017 transition team at President Sirleaf’s instruction and helped oversee the human development sectors. Transitions test whether institutions stand beyond personalities.
We were not handing over papers; we were handing over futures. I witnessed the creation of the Ministry of Finance and Development Planning, the establishment of the Liberia Revenue Authority, the birth of the National Public Health Institute, and the elevation of Gender, Children and Social Protection to a ministry. Some institutions merged.
Others disappeared so stronger ones could grow. Reform is never abstract. It is emotional, contested, human. Along the way, I signed off on capacity development for young civil servants while learning from giants — Dr.C William Allen, Dr. Edward McClain, Dr. Florence Chenoweth, Dr. Walter Gwenigale, and others. Capacity building was never paperwork. It was faith in people.
Leaving government did not end my service. It simply changed where I sit. In 2025 alone, I helped guide the Ellen Johnson Sirleaf Presidential Center through leadership transition and institutional stabilization. With the Mastercard Foundation’s Leaders in Teaching work in Liberia and Sierra Leone, I worked with teams to align partners around teacher workforce reform — fair deployment, leadership, coaching, and sustained support. Liberia’s work is increasingly locally owned.
Sierra Leone is moving into final conceptualization. Through writing, board service, and policy engagement — from WISE to pandemic preparedness — I have tried to ensure African experience helps shape global thinking.
More and more, one truth has become unavoidable to me: Africa’s real engine for youth employment lies in secondary education. Across the continent, most young people who complete schooling are not university graduates.
They are high-school leavers — young men and women standing at the doorway of adulthood with shrinking options. Our secondary schools must prepare them for work, life, entrepreneurship, apprenticeships, digital opportunity — and further study if they choose. This is why the Mastercard Foundation is investing deeply in secondary education. If secondary systems fail, universities cannot rescue the majority.
The rooms I have sat in have changed — from village gatherings to cabinet meetings to multilateral boardrooms — but the stakes have not. Power does not always shout. Sometimes it whispers, testing whether your principles travel with you. I do not write because commentary fascinates me.
I write because I feel a moral obligation. And yet I worry about something quieter and more dangerous: the slow rearranging of conscience. When comfort begins to feel reasonable. When invitations become oxygen. When sentences that should be spoken become sentences postponed. I fear becoming an accomplice if I keep quiet.
Dave Chappelle recently said he feared being co-opted. I understood him. Sometimes power does not silence you — it welcomes you, and waits for comfort to finish the job. That is why, after every meeting and every essay, I ask myself: Was I honest — or careful in the wrong way? Integrity is the fragile unity between what we believe and what we do. Without integrity, intelligence becomes manipulation. Without conscience, talent becomes cruelty. Without truth, leadership becomes performance.
So I keep walking. I keep thinking. And then I write — not out of outrage, but as reflection, witness, and resistance to easy lies. If the day comes when I can no longer question systems I belong to, admit mistakes, or speak honestly without seeking permission, something essential in me will have disappeared. Until then, I will keep searching for meaning — in the painful, the beautiful, and the unfinished — offering my words as a gift: imperfect, honest, human.
As I move into 2026, I want to lean even more deeply into conscience, public engagement, institution-building, youth opportunity, and truth-telling — and to help build platforms where young people can speak, question, and shape the future with their own voices.
I hope you walk with me — questioning, reflecting, disagreeing where necessary, and staying anchored in truth when comfort tempts us away from it. Because the deepest work of leadership — and of life — begins in the conscience. And when enough of us listen there, quietly and courageously, the world around us does not merely react — it begins to change.
