THE LIBERIA REVENUE Authority (LRA) has handed the nation a number worth celebrating. By September 14, domestic collections had crossed US$1 billion (about L$182.4 billion), a historic threshold. The LRA’s own trend line tells the story: about US$612 million in 2023, US$700 million in 2024, US$848 million in 2025, and approximately US$1.059 billion by the time Commissioner General James Dorbor Jallah addressed the Kapa Kulono town hall in Tubmanburg on Friday.
CREDIT IS DUE. Revenue does not collect itself, and an authority that opens a public dashboard on its collections is inviting the kind of scrutiny most institutions in this country run from. THE ANALYST welcomes both the result and the openness.
BUT A REVENUE total measures what government took in. It says nothing yet about what reached the people. That gap sat in plain sight in the hall in Bomi, among the chiefs, the elders, the market women and the students who live above the minerals now carrying the national budget.
MINING SUPPLIED ABOUT US$432 million of the reported total, roughly 41 percent. In 2020, the same sector brought in about US$54 million. When one industry’s contribution grows eightfold in six years, the communities that host it are entitled to a plain question: where is our share? The answer will not be found in speeches. It will be found in the classroom that still lacks materials, the clinic that still runs out of medicine, and the farm-to-market road that still disappears every rainy season.
GOVERNMENT’S OWN OFFICIALS supplied the standard. Mines and Energy Minister R. Matenokay Tingban told the gathering that minerals alone do not guarantee development. He is right, and his ministry should be held to that logic. As long as Liberia ships its ore and gold out in raw form, the jobs, the skills and the profits of processing will be created somewhere else.
THEN THERE IS the money nobody counts. Abraham S. Kromah of the Protect Our Resources Taskforce told the town hall that 70 to 90 percent of national gold production may be undocumented, a loss he estimated at between US$150 million and US$450 million a year. He spoke of more than 480 excavators in sensitive areas, including the Gola reserve. These are claims, not audited findings. But if even the lower figure holds, the leakage exceeds everything the mining sector paid the State in 2023.
the taskforce will therefore be judged on evenness. Enforcement that seizes a poor miner’s machine while a well-connected operator keeps digging outside the rules is not enforcement at all. It is a toll gate, and the law must reach the big dredge as surely as the small shovel.
THREE STEPS WOULD turn Friday’s promises into something Bomi can measure. The LRA should reconcile and publish its final 2026 figure, with mining revenue broken down by company and by county. The Ministry of Finance and Development Planning (MFDP) should publish how much of that money returns to mining-affected counties, and on which projects it is spent. And the Ministry of Information, Cultural Affairs and Tourism (MICAT), which pledged to document every concern raised at Kapa Kulono, should publish that record with the name of the institution expected to answer each one.
KAPA KULONO MEANS “Come, let’s talk.” Bomi came, and Bomi talked. Government now owes it a reply in the language communities understand best: schools that open, clinics that are stocked, and land that is not left poisoned when the miners move on.
A BILLION DOLLARS is a milestone for the treasury. It becomes a milestone for the nation only when the market woman in Tubmanburg can see it from her table.