By George K. Werner (former education minister)
The debate over President George Manneh Weah’s decision to pay the West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE/WAEC) fees and make tuition free at public tertiary institutions is often framed narrowly—either as reckless populism or as unqualified generosity. That framing misses the deeper story. These policies did not emerge in isolation.
They sit at the intersection of reform pain, political mobilization, fiscal constraint, and Liberia’s long, unfinished struggle to make education equitable, and they must be understood within President Weah’s own development strategy, the Pro-Poor Agenda for Prosperity and Development (PAPD).
Context matters.
Liberia’s education system entered the latter half of the 2010s already under strain. Schools were closed nationwide in July 2014 as part of emergency measures during the Ebola epidemic. Instruction was disrupted for months, and when schools began reopening around February 2015, the system faced compressed syllabi, lost instructional time, and a deeply unsettled academic calendar. Examination classes were especially affected, as students tried to complete curricula that had been violently interrupted by a public-health crisis.
Before the political moment on Tubman Boulevard, I was in Zwedru, Grand Gedeh County, during this post-Ebola recovery period.
At Zwedru Multilateral High School, shortly after the resetting of the school calendar, I engaged students in dialogue. Instructional time had been lost. Uncertainty hung over examinations. During that exchange, two female students stood up—in tears.
They spoke about what it took just to remain in school: working odd jobs, relying on relatives, negotiating constantly with administrators over fees. Then they asked the question that stripped policy of abstraction: after everything we have gone through with Ebola and school disruptions, who will help us pay for our exams?
That moment captured, in human terms, what spreadsheets could not. The system had already extracted almost everything these students had—years of schooling and family sacrifice—and now, after Ebola and calendar changes, the burden was again falling on those least able to absorb it.
By 2017, this pressure had become politically visible. It was an election year. The Congress for Democratic Change (CDC), campaigning as a grassroots movement, drew strong support from young people and families who felt excluded from Liberia’s post-war recovery.
Education reforms were underway, including the full transition to WASSCE, but reform is rarely painless. For students—especially those in senior secondary school—the tightening of standards collided with economic hardship and the cost of examinations.
Students responded in the most direct way they knew how. Many of them, still in school uniform, began gathering at the CDC headquarters on Tubman Boulevard. They were not there for slogans or party cards. They were there with a simple plea: we are ready to sit WAEC, and we cannot pay the fees.
At some point, George Manneh Weah called me. I was Minister of Education then. He asked me to come to the CDC headquarters. I went. We spoke candidly. What he wanted to do was not framed in technical language. It was framed in compassion—to help poor children who had done everything society asked of them: stayed in school through Ebola, endured calendar disruptions, prepared for exams—and were now stuck at the final gate.
That moment matters, because it explains something critics often miss. The WAEC fee policy did not begin as a spreadsheet decision. It began as a moral response to visible distress.
Complicating matters further were arrears owed by the Ministry of Finance and Development Planning to WAEC Liberia, which had accumulated over time and contributed to uncertainty around examination scheduling and the release of results. These fiscal delays amplified student anxiety and fed the protests that later became publicly visible.
When President Weah formally addressed the issue, he did so publicly. In his State of the Nation Address on January 29, 2018, he announced that government would pay WASSCE/WAEC fees for all 12th-grade students in Liberia, covering both public and private schools. From an implementation standpoint, precision matters. Dale Gbotoe, Head of WAEC Liberia, has since confirmed that the policy covered all 12th graders across the Republic and that the Weah administration essentially met its financial obligations to WAEC. That distinction separates political announcement from execution.
The same logic extended to the University of Liberia.
For decades, access to public tertiary education in Liberia has been shaped not only by academic merit, but by fees, delays, and informal financial barriers. Poor students routinely faced registration delays, semester interruptions, and the quiet humiliation of being turned away for unpaid balances. Many were first-generation university students navigating a system where one unpaid semester could derail an entire academic trajectory.
Against this backdrop, President Weah announced in October 2018 that undergraduate tuition at the University of Liberia and other public universities would be made free. As with WAEC, critics rightly raised concerns about sustainability and quality. But the policy resonated because it addressed a lived reality students already knew too well: education delayed by fees is education denied.
To understand why these policies found such deep public acceptance, one must step back further—to the long history of exclusion in Liberia’s education system.
Educational attainment has never been evenly distributed. Some exclusions were explicit rooted in geography, class, and political power. Others were subtle embedded in where schools were built, who paid when government could not, and whose children bore the cost of systemic failure. Over time, exclusion compounded.
Successive governments, across very different eras, have grappled with this legacy. Under President William V.S. Tubman, education expansion occurred but unevenly. Where government reach was limited, mission and private schools educated Liberian citizens, often at their own expense. Over time, the state introduced school subsidy policies, compensating non-government schools that educated Liberians where the state itself could not reach.
After the civil war, equity became explicit law. The Education Reform Act of 2011, signed into law on August 8, 2011, under President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, made basic and secondary education legally free and compulsory, decentralized education governance, and emphasized access and infrastructure expansion. On paper, it was one of the most progressive education laws Liberia had passed.
But the promise was imperfectly realized.
Education remained chronically underfunded. Teachers were poorly paid. Learning materials were scarce. In practice, many public schools quietly introduced or tolerated hidden fees—for registration, PTA contributions, examinations, maintenance, or “development.” These charges were coping mechanisms in a system where the law moved faster than financing, and for poor families they reproduced exclusion in subtler forms.
President Weah’s education decisions must be read against this backdrop—and within his administration’s development framework. The Pro-Poor Agenda for Prosperity and Development (PAPD), adopted as Liberia’s national development plan for 2018–2023, was President Weah’s official development strategy. PAPD placed human capital development—particularly education and skills—at the center of poverty reduction and inclusion, recognizing that weak access to education and persistent inequality were binding constraints on national progress.
Although PAPD did not explicitly list free WAEC fees or tuition-free public university education as named flagship interventions, its emphasis on expanding access to basic services and empowering poor and vulnerable Liberians provided the strategic logic within which these decisions were made.
This does not mean the policies were without cost.
From a cost–benefit perspective, the state assumed recurring fiscal obligations and accepted real opportunity costs. Every dollar spent on WAEC fees or tuition was a dollar not spent on teacher training and retention, basic learning materials, or school infrastructure—areas where the system remains weakest, especially in overcrowded urban schools. Public universities face quality risks if tuition revenue is not replaced predictably and adequately.
Yet the benefits were real.
Paying WAEC fees protected a large sunk investment already made by families and the state by preventing exclusion at the final certification step. Tuition-free public universities lowered entry barriers for first-generation and low-income students and reduced campus-level tension. Both policies delivered social stability benefits that matter in a fragile, post-war society.
The counterfactual is instructive. Without these interventions, thousands of students would likely have been excluded, protests would have intensified, and distrust in public institutions would have deepened.
In that sense, the investment was conditionally worth it—as access-protection and system-stabilization measures. They were never sufficient as learning-improvement strategies, and they should not be judged as such.
There is also a political reality that cannot be ignored: these policies are now extremely difficult to reverse. Once declared, they became social entitlements. The debate has shifted from reversal to redesign.
The task ahead is therefore clear. Liberia must now raise the return on that investment by refocusing on teacher training and retention, reliable provision of basic learning materials, targeted rehabilitation of urban school infrastructure, predictable financing for public universities, and a sharper focus on learning outcomes—not just access.
History rarely moves backward from moments of expanded access. It moves forward through correction and institutionalization. If Liberia can preserve the compassion embedded in these two legacy policies while anchoring them in quality and learning, then they may yet be remembered not as expensive gestures, but as chapters in a longer, unfinished struggle—from Tubman to Sirleaf to Weah—to answer a question that has shaped Liberia’s education journey for generations: Who gets to advance—and who gets left behind? © George K. Werner, 2026. All rights reserved.
