By George K. Werner (former education minister)
Some of my readers recently sent me messages asking why I had not yet commented on recent happenings in Liberia, including the now famous yellow machines and what some have jokingly called “yellow-rised legislators.” I took a page from an old French saying: des gouts et des couleurs, on ne discute pas—one does not argue about tastes and colors. In other words, people are entitled to their preferences. So I am not particularly bothered by the coincidence of colors. Politics everywhere has its theatre.
But beneath the theatre lies a more serious matter—how the Liberian state organizes authority, responsibility, and public resources. That is where my concern begins.
Consider the case of the yellow machines. Liberia desperately needs road equipment. Anyone who has travelled across our counties understands that road connectivity is not simply a matter of convenience; it is a matter of economic survival. Farmers cannot move crops, traders cannot reach markets, and basic services remain out of reach without functioning roads.
But the issue here is not the machines themselves. It is the administrative choice surrounding them. The Government recently established a Yellow Machines Board of Authority and appointed a coordinating leadership structure to manage the equipment. Yet Liberia already has a statutory institution responsible for exactly this type of work: the Ministry of Public Works, whose legal mandate includes building, maintaining, and supervising the nation’s road infrastructure.
Instead of strengthening the ministry’s capacity—its engineers, mechanics, maintenance systems, and county deployment structures—the state created an additional layer of governance around the machines. That means more structure, more coordination requirements, and almost certainly additional personnel and operational costs around a function that already has a home in government.
This is not a trivial administrative choice. It reflects a deeper and longstanding pattern in Liberian governance: when institutions are weak, leaders often respond not by strengthening them, but by building around them.
History offers several examples of this habit. Liberia’s Ministry of Youth and Sports was created by an Act of the National Legislature in 1982, with the responsibility to coordinate youth development policy, promote youth participation in national development, and oversee sports programs nationwide.
More than forty years later, Liberia remains a country where the majority of the population is young and where youth unemployment, skills deficits, and limited economic opportunities remain among the country’s most pressing national challenges.
Yet rather than fundamentally reforming and strengthening the ministry charged with addressing these issues, governments have sometimes responded by creating presidential youth advisory structures operating from the presidency itself. The intention may have been to elevate youth issues within national policy discussions.
But institutionally the effect was to create a parallel channel of influence around youth policy while the statutory ministry remained in place. When this happens, ministries continue to exist formally, but the gravitational pull of policy influence shifts toward the presidency.
Even in moments of genuine national emergency, Liberia has sometimes relied on structures that sit above or beside existing institutions. During the Ebola crisis of 2014, for example, President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf established and chaired a high-level national task force to coordinate the response alongside technical actors from the Ministry of Health and international partners.
The urgency of that moment may well have justified extraordinary arrangements. Yet it still illustrated a familiar reflex: when pressure rises, authority gravitates toward the presidency rather than remaining anchored within line ministries.
In other cases, parallel structures have been created in the name of delivery. At various points in the postwar reconstruction period, special coordinating units and project implementation mechanisms were established to drive priority programs in energy, infrastructure, and public financial management. These structures sometimes delivered results more quickly than traditional bureaucracies. But they also reinforced an uncomfortable message—that ordinary ministries could not be trusted to deliver on their own mandates.
Recent developments suggest that this pattern continues. Liberia already has a Ministry of Commerce and Industry, whose responsibilities include monitoring markets, regulating trade practices, and protecting consumers. Yet in response to rising prices of staple commodities such as rice and flour, the President asked the Vice President to chair a Presidential Ad-Hoc Committee on Price Contradictions.
The Executive Mansion later credited the Vice President and his committee for reductions in the wholesale prices of several basic commodities, and the President publicly praised those efforts. At the same time, the Ministry of Commerce was instructed to enforce the adjusted prices through its inspectorates.
This sequence is politically revealing. Policy credit flowed upward to a presidential committee chaired by the Vice President; enforcement responsibility flowed back downward to the statutory ministry. One cannot help but ask a simple institutional question: if the Ministry of Commerce exists precisely to oversee markets and prices, why is it not placed squarely at the center of the intervention?
A similar question arises in the case of the Putu Mountains iron ore concession in Grand Gedeh County. Liberia already has institutions whose mandates cover the negotiation and management of large-scale investments and natural resource concessions: the National Investment Commission, the Ministry of Mines and Energy, and the Ministry of Finance and Development Planning. Yet recent developments indicate that the Vice President has been tasked with leading or coordinating discussions around the revival of the Putu project.
Vice presidents everywhere often play diplomatic or economic roles, and there is nothing inherently wrong with that. But institutionally the question remains unavoidable: when major concession negotiations are led outside the agencies specifically designed for that purpose, what happens to the authority and development of those institutions over time?
To understand why this pattern persists, one must look beyond personalities and examine the political economy of governance. Parallel structures solve certain political problems for leaders. They allow presidents to move around bureaucratic procedures, procurement rules, and civil service hierarchies that can slow decision-making. They create tighter chains of loyalty because committees, boards, and special units typically report directly to the presidency. And they allow political leaders to centralize credit for visible policy outcomes.
From the standpoint of political control, these arrangements may appear efficient. From the standpoint of institution-building, however, they can be corrosive.
They are also fiscally significant. Liberia’s national budget has long been dominated by recurrent expenditures—salaries, operational costs, and administrative spending—leaving comparatively limited room for capital investment in infrastructure and productive sectors. Every additional committee, board, coordinating team, or advisory structure adds administrative overhead to a system already under fiscal pressure.
The deeper cost, however, is institutional rather than financial. When ministries are repeatedly bypassed, their authority erodes. Skilled civil servants lose incentives to innovate when key decisions are made elsewhere. Accountability becomes blurred because multiple actors share overlapping mandates. Institutional learning weakens because ministries cannot develop expertise if their responsibilities are repeatedly transferred to temporary structures.
Over time, the state begins to govern through exceptions rather than institutions.
Liberia does not suffer from a shortage of ministries, commissions, or agencies. We have a dense architecture of public institutions covering nearly every sector of national life. What we often lack is the political discipline to trust those institutions, reform them where necessary, resource them adequately, and hold them accountable for results.
It is easier to create a new board than to fix an old ministry. It is easier to appoint a committee than to reform a chain of command.
It is easier to centralize credit than to decentralize responsibility.
But nations are not built that way.
So yes, others may continue to debate colors—yellow machines, yellow shirts, yellow politics. My concern lies elsewhere. My concern is that Liberia continues to fall back on the same administrative reflex: bypass the institution, create a new structure, appoint new coordinators, and call it action.
That habit may produce short bursts of visibility. But over time it leaves the republic administratively crowded, fiscally burdened, and institutionally thin.
That, to me, is the real story. Liberia’s quiet habit of weakening its own institutions.
