By George K. Werner (former education minister)
Grace Guar is right to insist that ports do not function on decentralization slogans alone. Infrastructure matters. Systems matter. Governance and integrity matter. Where I respectfully but firmly disagree is with the notion that Liberia must first fix the Freeport of Monrovia and only then worry about Greenville, Buchanan and Harper. That logic misreads our history and misunderstands how regional economies are built, sustained, and revived.
Fixing the Freeport of Monrovia is necessary. But fixing it alone will not save Greenville, Buchanan or Harper. In fact, without systemic reform, it risks deepening their decline.
I make this argument not only as a policy practitioner, but as someone who has seen a port in Liberia’s periphery work.
Shortly after I completed St. Patrick Junior High School in Grand Cess, Grand Kru County, I traveled to Cape Palmas and onward to Harper. I was just leaving ninth grade. Harper, the port city at Cape Palmas, was then a well-run gateway—orderly, active, and purposeful. It employed people from across the southeast, including men from Grand Cess and members of my own family. One of the managers at the time was Wejlah Wreh.
While there, I visited an Italian couple who were working at the port. They were not tourists or short-term consultants. They lived in Harper. They understood the systems, the workforce, and the discipline required to keep the port functioning. They walked us through the operations with quiet confidence. I remember the shine of the place—not cosmetic shine, but operational order. This was the late 1980s. The port worked.
It worked because it mattered economically.
Harper was not symbolic infrastructure; it was economic infrastructure. Rubber linked to what later became the Cavalla Rubber Company moved through Harper. Timber and logs from the southeast passed through it, anchoring livelihoods and supply chains in Maryland and Grand Kru. LIBSUCO (Liberia Sugar Corporation) was based in Maryland County, with plantations near Pleebo, and its output naturally aligned with Harper as a regional port.
That long history of cane cultivation and processing helps explain why, to this day, the southeast is widely credited with producing Liberia’s best cane juice (nasonoh)—a cultural reputation rooted in real economic practice.
Buchanan tells a parallel story. Located in Grand Bassa County, it served as the export gateway for iron ore from the Nimba Mountains, moved by rail to the coast, alongside rubber and other commodities. This was a deliberate production-to-port logic, not an accident of geography.
Greenville reinforces the same pattern. The city grew out of the Mississippi-in-Africa settlement, and from its earliest days, the port was central to its economic life. Timber from Sinoe’s forests, agricultural produce from surrounding communities, and coastal trade flowed through Greenville’s harbor. Employment, commerce, and regional relevance clustered around the port. Greenville did not thrive despite its port; it thrived because of it.
Taken together, Harper, Greenville, and Buchanan reflected a once-functional regional port logic: ports served nearby production, value chains were shorter, transport costs were lower, and regional economies mattered. The periphery was not waiting on Monrovia to function—it already was.
Later in 1989, while in the 10th grade at St. Francis High School in Pleebo, I traveled to Monrovia to see an optometrist at the intersection of Ashmun and Mechlin Streets. It was December. The city felt tense—uneasy in a way that was hard to explain at the time. A few days later, on December 24, 1989, Charles McArthur Taylor announced his rebel incursion into Liberia, and the country entered a long season of chaos.
The civil war disrupted everything. Expatriates left—the Italian couple among them. Skilled Liberians fled or were displaced. Institutions collapsed across the country, both at the center and in the counties. Harper, Greenville, and Buchanan were all affected.
But war alone does not explain what followed.
When peace returned in the early 2000s, attention did not return evenly. The center recovered first—and largely for itself. Authority over ports was recentralized. Reinvestment followed power. Export flows consolidated through Monrovia. Regional ports were left waiting for rehabilitation, staffing, and capital that rarely came.
This is where the argument that “fixing the Freeport will fix the rest” breaks down.
Under a centralized system, a stronger Freeport of Monrovia does not distribute growth—it absorbs it. Shipping lines consolidate. Revenue capture tightens. Talent, contracts, and decision-making follow the center. Greenville and Harper are not strengthened by this dynamic; they are crowded out by it.
Ports exist to serve where goods are produced, not where ministries sit. Timber from Sinoe belongs closer to Greenville. Rubber and southeastern trade belong closer to Harper. Iron ore from Nimba made economic sense through Buchanan. Routing everything through Monrovia raises transport costs, weakens local economies, and strips counties of economic purpose. Fixing the Freeport alone reinforces this imbalance.
There is also a deeper institutional cost. Capacity is not built by observation. As long as authority, revenue, and accountability remain centralized, regional ports cannot develop the competence critics now say they lack. A polished Freeport does not train Greenville or Harper—it sidelines them.
What we are confronting is what I have described as Liberia’s queen-bee mentality: a political economy in which the center consumes resources, authority, and opportunity, while the periphery is starved—and then blamed for being weak. Centralization did not prepare Harper or Greenville after the war; it finished their decline.
So yes, Grace Guar is right to emphasize governance, systems, and integrity. But those will not emerge by perfecting the center while the rest of the country waits.
Harper once worked because it mattered.
Greenville once thrived because its port anchored the Mississippi-in-Africa economy.
They declined because war disrupted them—and because peace did not restore attention, talent, or reinvestment.
Fix the Freeport of Monrovia—absolutely.
But without decentralization, reinvestment, and a redefinition of the center’s role—from monopolist to regulator—Greenville, Buchanan, and Harper will not be saved by Monrovia’s success.
Liberia does not need one perfect port.
It needs a network of ports that work, each anchored in its regional economy, governed with authority, accountability, and purpose.
That is the reform challenge before us.
2026 George Kronnisanyon Werner. All rights reserved.
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