The House Speaker’s decision to set up a Conference Committee to review the Third Amendment to the Mineral Development Agreement (MDA) between the Government of Liberia and ArcelorMittal Liberia (AML) has raised a basic but important question: has the agreement actually been ratified?
Speaker Richard Nagbe Koon told the House of Representatives on Thursday, February 5, that he was forming a joint committee with the Senate to look at the Third Amendment. Normally, conference committees are used when the House and Senate pass different versions of a bill and need to reconcile them.
But Senate leaders have repeatedly said that the Senate already agreed to the same version passed by the House. That has left many observers wondering why a conference committee is needed at all. If the substance of the concession is in dispute, a Conference Committee does not have the mandate to amend. Rather it would require the concession to return to the Executive and, where necessary, the Inter-Ministerial Concessions Committee (IMCC) process for renegotiation.
“Minor errors” or something more?
The Speaker later said the committee’s job was only to correct “minor grammatical errors” caused by copying and pasting. He insisted the changes were not substantive.
Legal experts are skeptical. Simple clerical mistakes are usually fixed administratively, not by a formal committee made up of members from both chambers. The use of a conference committee suggests that something more than spelling or formatting may be involved.
This matters because concession agreements are different from ordinary laws. Under Liberia’s Constitution, the Executive negotiates concessions, and the Legislature can only approve or reject them as they are. Lawmakers do not have the power to change the terms.
A constitutional lawyer explained it this way: once lawmakers start “fixing” wording that affects rights, duties, penalties, or enforcement, they may be acting outside their legal authority. If there are real problems with the text, the agreement should be sent back to the Executive for renegotiation, not adjusted by the Legislature.
Senate approval with side promises creates confusion
The Senate initially approved the House version of the Third Amendment. Later, however, senators raised concerns from communities in Grand Bassa, Bong, and Nimba counties.
To address those concerns, senators discussed adding an “annex” or separate commitment letter. Senator Amara M. Konneh said this approach was meant to protect community benefits without delaying the reported US$200 million signing bonus.
Senate Pro Tempore Nyonblee Karnga Lawrence also stressed that the Senate did not change the agreement itself but instead sought extra commitments through a separate social infrastructure arrangement.
The problem, according to legal analysts, is that promises made outside the main agreement are often weak. If benefits are not written directly into the ratified concession, they can be delayed, changed, or ignored more easily. Enforcement then depends on goodwill rather than clear legal obligations.
So what exactly has been ratified?
By forming a Conference Committee, the Legislature is signaling that something is unresolved. But if there are differences between what the House passed, what the Senate approved, and what new side documents are meant to add, then it is no longer clear that there is one final agreement.
Under Liberia’s concession rules, lawmakers cannot rewrite or adjust an agreement after negotiation and still call it ratified. If there are real differences, the agreement must go back to the Executive for review and renegotiation.
That makes this more than a technical issue. The real question is whether the Third Amendment stands as a properly approved concession, or whether it now sits in legal uncertainty.
A small process with big consequences
Conference committees are not allowed to fix or reshape concession agreements. If the Third Amendment needs more than simple typo corrections, the Legislature does not have the authority to make amendments.
Until lawmakers clearly say whether the agreement is final and fully approved, or whether it needs to be returned to the Executive, the status of the AML Third Amendment remains unclear.
At the heart of the debate is a simple question: did the Legislature ratify the AML Third Amendment, or did the process go off track?
