It was supposed to be a routine inspection. Edward Kolliemen, like so many who keep the iron artery between Yekepa and Buchanan open, climbed down from the rail to check a routine splice.
By the time the stretcher left the scene in December 2025, Edward’s life had been irrevocably altered — an amputation, a family with a new, harsh arithmetic of loss, and a community asking why a worker’s life could be spent so cheaply along a line that should be a national asset.
Edward’s story is not an isolated tragic footnote. It is the most recent chapter in a sequence of failures that began at least as far back as September 2021, when locomotives were sabotaged and wagons disconnected, causing derailments.
In November 2021 a resident, Rhoda, was reportedly killed near Kilometer 8 shortly after a safety campaign — an irony that is as bitter as it is indicting.
January 2022 saw two staff killed and four gravely injured after a maintenance crew collided with stationary wagons. In November 2023 a train derailment shattered an ageing bridge at the St. John River; a near-death avoided was still a stark warning.
These events, spread over several years, sketch a pattern: a commercial concession operating with inadequate safeguards and a regulatory approach that has been slow to impose independent, binding standards.
Liberia cannot afford the impenitence — the stubborn refusal — to adopt independent rail operating standards. For all the promise that ArcelorMittal’s concession holds for jobs, infrastructure and revenue, the repeated accidents point to a systemic problem: when a single operator effectively sets the rules that govern its own behaviour, the incentives to cut corners on maintenance, safety and community protection increase. That dynamic is not a theoretical risk. it is a lived reality for workers, families and towns along the route.
There is a strong, practical case for national, independent oversight. Liberia’s ARREST Agenda aims for transformative growth — a 37% GDP expansion cannot be built on a track record of derailments and amputations.
His Excellency President Executive Orders #136 and #153, would set uniform safety and maintenance standards, enforce compliance, and ensure operational transparency. Independent standards create comparability: make possible evaluate, negligence, and encourage competition on safety and reliability rather than opaque private arrangements.
The benefits are tangible. Independent operating standards would compel concessionaires to invest in infrastructure upgrades, routine maintenance and modern safety protocols.
They would foster coordination between operators and regulators, reducing the risk of collisions, bridge failures and criminal interference. They would also signal to investors that Liberia is a jurisdiction with predictable rules and a commitment to protecting people as well as profit — an essential reassurance in an era when reputational risk can equal financial risk.
But standards alone are not a panacea. They must be accompanied by rigorous, community engagement and meaningful remedies.
Nimba, Bong and Grand Bassa have complained repeatedly about neglect. Their voices cannot be sidelined in favor of ambiguous corporate assurances. Any regulatory framework must enshrine community safety as a primary objective, with clear channels for reporting hazards and independent investigation of incidents.
ArcelorMittal and other operators should welcome, not resist, this framework. Independent standards level the playing field: they reward companies that invest in long-term performance and penalize those that externalize the costs of risk onto workers and communities.
For Liberia, establishing these standards is an act of nation-building. It is about more than iron ore moving from pit to port. It is about the credibility of institutions, the protection of life and the conditions for sustainable development.
Edward, Rhoda, the injured and the bereaved deserve more than condolences and occasional safety campaigns. They deserve a system that treats the railway as a public trust, not merely a commercial conduit.
Executive Orders #136 and #153 point the country in the right direction. What remains is the political will to follow through: to create a National Rail Authority with teeth, to require independent operating standards, and to enforce them without fear or favor.
Liberia’s tracks can connect communities to opportunity — or they can become a recurrent ledger of sorrow. Choosing independent standards is not merely regulatory prudence. It is a moral imperative. The lives already lost demand nothing less.
