By E. J. Nathaniel Daygbor
Liberia’s National Legislature has come under scrutiny after a new civil-society report painted a picture of a legislature that is “procedurally present but substantively absent.” The 2025 Legislative Monitoring Report, released by InfoQuest Liberia under the provocative title “Power, People, and Plenary: Who Really Runs the Legislature?”, raises urgent questions about attendance, debate, oversight, and the creeping dominance of the Executive Branch.
The report reveals stark disparities in lawmakers’ presence. While representatives like Thomas P. Fallah and James Kolleh recorded perfect attendance, others—including Roland Cooper, Musa Bility, and Yekeh Kolubah—were present less than 30 percent of the time.
In the Senate, Nyonblee Karnga Lawrence and Darius Dillon topped attendance charts, but several colleagues were absent for more than half of sittings. Most strikingly, four senators logged 60 excused absences—the exact number of Senate sessions held—raising questions about whether excusal rules are being abused to mask chronic absenteeism.
Attendance alone, however, is not the only measure of engagement. Debate participation was equally uneven. Fallah led House contributions with 40 interventions, while nine representatives—including Abu Bana Kamara and Bintu Massaley—never spoke at all. In the Senate, Jonathan Sogbie emerged as the most vocal, but others managed only a single recorded contribution. For citizens, the silence is deafening: if lawmakers are not debating, how can voters judge their performance?
Legislative productivity also tells a troubling story. Between January and December 2025, the House passed 79 bills and the Senate 38, with nearly 100 more stuck in committee limbo. Yet InfoQuest found that 42 of the 117 passed bills—about 36 percent—originated from the Executive Branch.
While executive-sponsored legislation is common in presidential systems, the report warns that Liberia’s Legislature risks becoming a rubber stamp if it fails to scrutinize, amend, or reject proposals in the national interest.
Perhaps the most damning revelation is the Legislature’s failure to enforce budget accountability. Of 120 ministries, agencies, and commissions, only six submitted mandatory quarterly budget-performance reports—a compliance rate of just 5 percent. Without these reports, lawmakers cannot track whether billions in public funds are being spent as intended.
Roads, schools, hospitals, and salaries all hang in the balance, yet oversight remains dangerously weak. As InfoQuest bluntly notes, Parliament risks becoming “an appropriating institution rather than an accountability institution.”
The report also highlights troubling opacity. Frequent closed-door sessions, delayed sittings, and the absence of an electronic voting system mean citizens cannot easily see how their representatives’ vote. In an era of digital democracy, Liberia’s Legislature lags behind, leaving voters dependent on speeches and press conferences rather than hard records.
InfoQuest insists that transparency is not optional: “Citizens should not have to rely exclusively on political rhetoric to determine where their elected representatives stand.”
Legislators argue that numbers alone do not tell the full story. Committee work, negotiations, and constituency duties often go unseen in plenary records. Excused absences may reflect legitimate medical or family obligations. And the sheer number of bills passed does not necessarily measure quality. Still, InfoQuest counters that weak documentation, absent voting records, and poor budget compliance point to systemic institutional failure, not just individual shortcomings.
To restore credibility, InfoQuest recommends sweeping reforms: Mandatory audits by the General Auditing Commission, strict enforcement of attendance rules, electronic voting for transparency, quarterly budget reporting by all government agencies, sanctions for chronic absenteeism, and public access to committee reports and meetings.
These measures, the report argues, would modernize Liberia’s Legislature and strengthen its independence from executive influence.
Liberia’s democratic journey since 2006 has been defined by elections, peaceful transfers of power, and constitutional governance. But democracy is not measured by ballots alone. It is tested in the daily work of institutions—whether lawmakers attend, debate, scrutinize, and hold government accountable.
As InfoQuest warns, “The ultimate measure of parliamentary performance is not the number of people seated in the chamber. It is whether those people use the authority entrusted to them to protect the public interest.”
The report leaves Liberia with a sobering question: When the doors of the Capitol close, who truly holds power—the politicians, the Executive, or the people?
