Reality Check at Midterm – Where Liberia Stands!

TWO YEARS INTO the life of the Unity Party–led administration, Liberia stands at a familiar crossroads—one shaped by hope, impatience, skepticism, and history. The national mood today is neither outright despair nor unquestioned optimism, but something more complex: a cautious public weighing promises against performance, rhetoric against results.

IT IS IMPORTANT to begin with realism. No government inherits a blank slate, and no administration—especially in a fragile, post-conflict state—can deliver transformation overnight. Campaign seasons are fertile ground for ambition; governance, however, is the terrain of constraint. Liberians must guard against overblown expectations that ignore fiscal limits, institutional decay, and the weight of unfinished reforms carried from one regime to another.

YET REALISM CANNOT become an excuse.

THE UNITY PARTY government came to power on a message of rescue and reset—captured in its ARREST Agenda—promising to stabilize the economy, restore integrity, and deliver visible improvements in daily life. Two years on, progress is uneven. Gains in foreign affairs and diplomatic credibility contrast sharply with slow movement in roads, sanitation, education infrastructure, and urban livelihoods. For many citizens, particularly the poor and rural, life has not materially improved.

THIS DISCONNECT BETWEEN promise and perception is the administration’s most pressing political challenge.

LIBERIANS ARE NOT asking for miracles; they are asking for movement. They are asking to see roads opened, schools repaired, markets organized without brutality, and livelihoods protected alongside law enforcement. Where these are absent, frustration grows—and with it, the dangerous belief that every new government will inevitably resemble the last.

THAT BELIEF—THAT “nothing good can come out of Nazareth”—has haunted Liberia’s political class for decades. It is the cynicism born of repeated disappointments, where successive regimes arrive with fresh slogans only to depart with familiar failures. If left unchallenged, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that corrodes civic trust and weakens democracy itself.

THE CURRENT ADMINISTRATION still has time—and opportunity—to prove that narrative wrong.

BUT DOING SO will require more than patience and explanations. It will require urgency, humility, and a recalibration of how power is exercised and communicated. Bad relations with segments of the public, civil society, street vendors, teachers, and even parts of the media are not merely public relations problems; they are warning signs of governance drifting from lived realities.

GOVERNMENT MUST ACKNOWLEDGE early missteps openly. There is no shame in admitting delays or underperformance; there is danger in denying them. Citizens are more likely to extend patience to leaders who speak plainly about challenges than to those who insist all is well when evidence suggests otherwise.

AT THE SAME time, Liberians themselves must resist the temptation to retreat into fatalism. Democracy does not mature through despair alone. Holding leaders accountable requires engagement, not withdrawal; criticism, not cynicism. Elections confer authority, but citizenship confers responsibility.

THIS MOMENT THEREFORE demands a dual awakening.

FOR GOVERNMENT, IT is a call to double down—on delivery, on humane enforcement, on inclusive planning, and on rebuilding trust with those who feel forgotten. Infrastructure must move from planning rooms to communities. Sanitation must be about dignity, not intimidation. Education reform must be visible in classrooms, not only in policy papers.

FOR CITIZENS, IT is a reminder that transformation is neither instant nor automatic. Progress is often uneven, contested, and hard-won. But accountability must be relentless and informed, grounded in facts rather than partisan nostalgia or despair.

HISTORY HAS NOT been kind to Liberian governments—but history is not destiny.

THE COMING YEARS will test whether this administration can translate diplomatic goodwill into domestic renewal, whether it can turn restraint into resolve, and whether it can replace the politics of promise with the politics of performance.

LIBERIA DOES NOT need perfection. It needs proof—proof that learning is possible, that failure can be corrected, and that leadership can rise above the cycle that has trapped so many before.

THE WINDOW IS still open. Whether it closes in disappointment or opens into progress will depend on choices made now—by those in power, and by those who put them there.