…Why the Local Government Act is falling like an axe on our region — and the long history Monrovia pretends it does not know.
By Sherman C. Seequeh
Let us begin with the plain statistics, because the numbers tell the story before I say a single word. Under the Local Government Act, the Ministry of Local Government has gone across the country and stripped city status from scores of our towns. And by the accounting that has reached the public, look well at how the axe fell. Sinoe County once carried forty-four cities.
Today it is left with one — just one. Grand Kru has lost thirty-two. Maryland kept only two of its seventeen. Lofa came down to three. But now hear the part that tells the whole truth: Nimba County kept all six of its cities. Every last one.
So, ask yourself one plain question and ask it slowly. How did Nimba keep everything, while Sinoe lost forty-three and Grand Kru lost thirty-two? When the knife cuts one side of the house clean and leaves the other side whole, that is no longer an accident. That is a choice. And it is a choice that will cost thousands of our people their jobs and bring fresh hunger to a region that already has far too little. As I see it, that is not reform. That is punishment.
THE MOCKING ON RADIO AND FACEBOOK
And how has Monrovia received all of this? With laughter. Turn on the radio talk shows these days and you will hear them going at it. Scroll through Facebook and the WhatsApp groups and you will see it written plain. “The Southeast people and their plenty cities,” they joke. “Down there, every small village calling itself a city.” They make our region a punchline. They drop the laughing emojis, they share and they share, and then they shrug — as though there is no reason at all behind our many cities.
But there is a reason. There is a deep history. And more often than not, the loudest mockers on that radio and on that Facebook are the very ones who never once opened a history book in their lives. So let me open it for them today.
THE SAILOR PEOPLE WHO WOULD NOT BOW
The Kru and the Grebo of our Southeast are no ordinary people. Long before many Liberians knew the wider world, our sons were already out on the water. The Kru sailor — the Krooman — worked the big ships up and down the African coast and far beyond. They traveled. They saw the world. They carried a proud and stubborn spirit, and they refused, flatly, to be captured into slavery.
That same spirit turned against the excesses of Monrovia. Given the fact that our people had already seen how men ought to be governed, they would not bow quietly to the heavy hand of the central government. And so came the wars.
The Grebo rose against Monrovia in 1875. The Kru coast rose again in 1915, and the government could only put it down with the help of an American gunboat. Then came the Sasstown War of the early 1930s, when the great Juah Nimley of the Kru coast stood against the hut tax and the forced labor of that cruel day. Later, a Kru statesman, Didwho Welleh Twe, dared to challenge the one-party monopoly itself, and was hounded into exile for his trouble. These things are documented. Any honest researcher will find them.
Frankly speaking, the Southeast earned itself a name in Monrovia: the troublesome region. The people who would not sit down and keep quiet.
PUNISHED WITH NEGLECT
And how did the central government answer that spirit? Not with roads. Not with schools. It answered with neglect — cold, and deliberate.
In as much as our people agitated, successive administrations paid them back in the cruelest currency of all: they kept development away. Investors were quietly steered elsewhere. The money that built up other corners of Liberia was never allowed to reach down to us. And so the jobs stayed away. The clinics stayed away. The good schools stayed away. The region was left behind on purpose, as a lesson to the stubborn.
Now watch the wicked twist in this new law. The Act says a town must have piped water, electricity, good roads, clinics and schools before it can keep its city status. But who was supposed to bring that water and that current? The central government. The very government that refused, for generations, to bring it.
So, they starve a man for fifty years, and then they mock him for being thin. They deny you the road, and then they cancel your city because you have no road. That, my people, is not justice. That is a trap.
SO THE PEOPLE MADE THEIR OWN CITIES
So what were our people to do? When their own sons and daughters finally entered the government, they reached for the only tool left within their hand. If the center would not bring jobs down to the Southeast, then the Southeast would make its own small offices.
And so they multiplied the subdivisions — cities, townships, chiefdoms, clans, districts. Each one carried a few positions. Each small office fed a clerk, a chief, a little staff, and the market woman who grew her trade around them. It was never greed. It was survival. It was a people cutting themselves one small, honest slice of a national cake that Monrovia had always eaten alone. The “plenty cities” the big people laugh at were never foolishness. They were a cry for inclusion.
FROM EMPATHY TO THE AXE
Now here is a thing the record will plainly show. The decentralization drive began under Madam Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, and the Local Government Act was passed in 2018, in her time. But she did not rush it. As many believe, she let it move slowly, in quiet empathy for these very facts. President Weah, too, allowed the matter to crawl at a gentle pace.
But President Boakai is in a hurry. He is swinging the axe fast, and he is swinging it hard. And so the skeptics are asking out loud: why the sudden speed? Why now, and why mostly on the Southeast? Many down here believe they already know the answer. They believe it is payback — payback for 2023, when the Southeast looked at the ballot and did not give this government the love it wanted. If that is so, and the pattern surely whispers it, then a national law is being bent into a political weapon against a whole region.
THE CONSTITUTION SAYS NOT SO FAST
And here is the other thing Monrovia is rushing right past. This whole dissolution may not even be lawful. Under the Local Government Act, the power to create a city, and the power to bring a city down, belongs to the Legislature — to the lawmakers — and not to a Deputy Minister sitting in an office in Monrovia. The Minister only reports; the lawmakers decide. That is the plain separation of powers our Constitution rests upon.
And our own sons in the Senate have said so, loudly. Senator Albert Chie of Grand Kru, Senator Numene Bartekwa, also of Grand Kru, and Senator Augustine Chea of Sinoe have all warned that to dissolve these municipalities without the hand of the Legislature is to trample the Constitution itself.
In as much as this government wants to move fast, it cannot move above the law. This thing is not settled. It is a rush. And a rush aimed at one region, then dressed up in the fine clothes of “reform,” is the very mischief our Constitution was written to prevent.
THE JOBS THAT WILL VANISH
Now let us talk plainly about the suffering that is coming, because it is coming fast. Thousands of rural government workers will be cut from the payroll, and in our region a lost job is not a small thing.
When you kill a city office, you do not kill one job. You kill a whole chain of them. The mayor loses his pay. The clerks lose theirs. The woman selling cooked food by the office loses her market. The young man who ran the errands loses his daily bread. In Monrovia, a laid-off worker can at least go and knock on another door. In Grand Kru, in Sinoe, in River Gee, in River Cess, there is no other door to knock.
Because what investment do we truly have down here? As we speak, the only major post-war investment standing in the whole Southeast is Golden Veroleum, the oil-palm company — and beside it, only a handful of tightly restricted loggers and miners. That is all. There is no industry waiting to catch these falling workers. So, the layoff will not merely bite. It will multiply. Kill one small office, and a whole town goes dark.
MONROVIA SHOULD REMEMBER
So let the government call it reform if it wishes. Down here, we know the smell of punishment, because we have been smelling it for a hundred and fifty years.
Make no mistake about what is happening. The Boakai administration is weaponizing the Local Government Act against the people of the Southeast. It is trying to finish, with the stroke of a pen, the old Monrovia project of keeping our region small, poor, and quiet.
But Monrovia should remember its own history before it swings that axe again. The Kru and the Grebo have never been a people who bow for long. Our fathers answered neglect with resistance, and the record of those wars is written and kept.
Take away the small offices if you must. But you cannot take away the memory. And a people who remember, frankly speaking, are a people who will one day answer back — at the only place that now truly matters: the ballot box.
