By George K. Werner (former education minister)
I just read LEC’s brazen press release posted on its official Facebook page and feel compelled to respond—not out of emotion, but out of responsibility to the many Liberians who pay for electricity and yet continue to endure instability, outages, and rising costs explained away rather than accounted for.
Many Liberians do not receive electricity as a gift; we pay for it—yet many do not receive it at all. That is the reality that must anchor any honest discussion about power supply in Liberia.
The Liberia Electricity Corporation’s statement is out of order. It is not accountable. It is a catalogue of justifications wrapped in technical language, attempting to explain away what customers are plainly experiencing: frequent fluctuations, unpredictable load shedding, and prolonged outages that are unbearable for people who pay and reasonably expect service.
Liberians are not ignorant of how electricity systems work. We understand dry seasons. We understand imports. We understand maintenance. In fact, most customers already expect fluctuations during the dry season—for obvious, long-standing reasons. Liberia’s dry season typically runs from November to April, a period when hydropower systems such as Mt. Coffee do not benefit from peak inflows and the system becomes more dependent on imports and thermal generation. These are known, predictable conditions.
Praising LEC for improved supply during the rainy season is like praising a pig for being clean—or a white chicken for being white. Seasonal abundance is not performance; it is circumstance. The real test of competence is reliability during constraint—when water levels drop, imports tighten, and systems are under stress.
But if, as LEC now insists, the current instability is not driven by seasonal factors, then the situation is even more troubling.
Many communities live under transmission lines, beside substations, or within areas officially declared “served,” yet receive electricity intermittently—hours one day, minutes the next. Service remains uncertain and uneven for large segments of the population who are nonetheless expected to plan their lives and livelihoods around it.
Calling public frustration “misinformation” is not clarification. It is deflection.
LEC now attributes the outages to maintenance on regional power supply from Côte d’Ivoire and Guinea. Maintenance is normal. What is not normal is invoking maintenance without timelines. If this is a maintenance problem, when does it end? Are paying customers expected to endure weeks or months of instability—or to wait until May, when the rainy season returns and hydropower conditions improve?
Maintenance without timelines is not transparency; it is uncertainty. And uncertainty imposed on households, hospitals, schools, and businesses that pay for electricity is unacceptable. If outages are externally driven, the duration and expected impact should be stated plainly. If they are scheduled, the schedule should be published. If supply constraints will persist for months, the public deserves that honesty so people can plan, protect equipment, and manage costs.
There is no apology in the statement. No acknowledgment of inconvenience. No mea culpa. Just so-so talk—long explanations and technical language—without a single sentence that says plainly to paying customers: we recognize the hardship this has caused, and we take responsibility. That absence matters. Accountability begins with acknowledgment.
We do not only pay for electricity when it works; we also pay for outages—professionally and otherwise. Businesses absorb lost productivity, damaged equipment, missed deadlines, and higher operating costs. Households pay for generators, fuel, inverters, batteries, candles, and constant repairs. Hospitals, schools, telecom towers, water systems, and cold-storage facilities incur additional costs simply to remain operational when grid power fails.
These costs do not disappear. They are passed on.
Electricity instability raises commodity prices across the economy. Higher energy costs flow through supply chains into the price of rice, bread, water, ice, transportation, telecommunications, and basic services. Power unreliability becomes a hidden tax—quietly inflating prices and squeezing households already under severe economic pressure.
Technical language does not change lived experience. Statistics do not keep lights on. Complexity cannot be used to normalize failure. Darkness remains darkness. Bills remain due. Generators still require fuel.
Climate change is happening in my freezer. Rainy-season ice is melting fast—not because of emissions, but because the light gone.
A public utility is not judged by how well it explains outages, but by how consistently it delivers service—or, at minimum, how honestly it accounts for failure. Electricity is not a favor extended by the state. It is a contractual public service.
We had small light yesterday. Today, we expect big light. We pay for it. Anything less is failure—not explanation. © George K. Werner
