By Sherman C. Seequeh
Government is still congratulating itself on a revenue milestone. On Bushrod Island, schoolchildren are chanting in the road because their teachers are not in class. Somebody should explain the arithmetic.
Go to Bushrod Island today and you will hear the sound of this government’s billion dollars. It is not a brass band. It is children shouting in the road.
Government school students have poured out of their classrooms and into the street, uniforms on, chanting slogans at passing cars and at anybody holding a microphone. Ask them why they are not in school and they answer you straight: they have not been taught in three weeks.
Their teachers are not coming to class, and the teachers say it is because government has not paid them. So, the children, with nothing else left, have done the one thing a child can do when the grown-ups fail. They have come outside to shout.
Their teachers’ complaint is not new and not a secret. On October 7, the Monrovia Consolidated School System Teachers Association met at Tubman High and declared a go-slow: sign in, but do not teach, until government answers. Some of those standing before our children are volunteers with no government pay cheque at all.
Of the 459 volunteers the Civil Service Agency verified, only 208 had been placed on payroll by its 2025 report. Salaried teachers who upgraded their degrees are still being paid at the old rate. And the agreement government signed with them in March 2025 has not been fully carried out, by their own account. MCSS says it is lobbying for money in the 2027 budget. In other words: wait.
ONE BILLION, ONE LIBERIA
Now hear the other sound coming from this same government. In September, Finance Minister Augustine Kpehe Ngafuan announced that domestic revenue had crossed one billion United States dollars between January and September, the first time in our 179 years as a nation.
President Boakai went before the country with a special address titled “One Billion, One Liberia.” Government has fixed its eyes on $1.3 billion by December. There were speeches, there were congratulations, there were photographs. The finance minister went on the radio and told the nation that this money was paying salaries.
Paying whose salaries?
I give the Liberia Revenue Authority its due. Collection has climbed from about $612 million in 2023 to past a billion this year, and that took work. But money is not an achievement. Money is a tool. The ma selling pepper at Duala does not come home and boast that she made plenty sales today. She boasts that her children went to school. A billion dollars that cannot keep one teacher in front of one blackboard on Bushrod Island is a billion dollars that has not yet learned its job.
THE SHAME INSIDE THE CELEBRATION
Cross town and the picture do not improve. The University of Liberia, our flagship, is also not teaching. Classes were suspended after the Faculty and Staff Association struck over benefits and the conditions on campus, and renovation work is now going on at Capitol Hill, repairs that came only after months of agitation.
This week a student leader from Tappita was begging the administration for online classes so his members do not lose the semester. Our children in the high schools are on the road; our young people at the university are at home. Between them, the whole ladder of public education is standing still.
And let nobody tell me this is new. In March last year, police fired teargas on students who marched between the Capitol and the Executive Mansion to demand that their teachers be put on the payroll. Eighteen months later, with a billion dollars collected, the children are back in the road. Monkey work, baboon draw: the children carry the suffering, and the government carries the applause.
If this is not the biggest shame and the sharpest contradiction in the whole revenue story, I do not know what is.
THE GHOST OF THE GOVERNMENT THEY CONDEMNED
The people now in power spent six years in opposition telling Liberians that the Weah government was the worst thing ever to happen to this country. They condemned it crudely; from every platform they could find. Fine.
But under that same condemned government, tuition at our public universities and colleges was made free, and I do not remember our schoolchildren being driven into the streets, season after season, to beg government for their teachers. If the government you called a disaster could keep the children in class, what is the excuse of the government that now has a billion dollars?
Celebrate the billion if you must. Print the banners. But before the next speech, send one minister to Bushrod Island. Let him stand in front of those children in their uniforms and tell them, in plain Liberian English, how one billion dollars entered our treasury and their teacher still could not enter the classroom. If he can answer them, I will write the congratulation myself.
Until then, the biggest number in this country is not one billion. It is three weeks: three weeks a Liberian child has lost and will never get back.
