The powers that be in Liberia and their foreign partners continue to define decentralization as the strengthening of the County Service Centers (CSCs) within the context of the implementation of the Local Government Act (LGA). In fact, the UNDP and its partners(i.e. USAID, EU and ADB), through the UNDP Representative to Liberia, consider "the County Service Centers to be symbolic of decentralization in Liberia, a platform for social cohesion between citizens and the government (i.e. Liberia)as well as a source for domestic resource mobilization". By resource, the UNDP Representative Louis Kuukpen is referring to financial resource. Decentralization is about building up People's Power, not about just building up CSCs!
The UNDP Representative continues by saying that "accordingly, I would like to encourage the government to consider increasing budgetary allocations to the County Service Centers while we await the implementation of the Revenue Sharing Act which calls for the 40% retention of all revenue generated at the CSCs for its operations". Furthermore, the UNDP Representative insists that the sustainable way to render the challenges doable is to keep the CSCs working well. The UNDP and its partners fund the implementation of the Revenue Sharing Act.
If the CSCs were operating in the interest of the Liberian people, nearly all of the Liberian people would not be having access to at most less than LD300 a day. If the CSCs were operating in the interest of the Liberian people, the Liberian people would not be saying that Liberia is headed in the wrong direction (Afrobarometer, 2020). As you can observe, the evidence points to the operation of the CDCs in ways that are not in the interest of the people of Liberia. Ironically, while the UNDP and its partners are calling for increased funding of the CDCs, the leading foreign partner of Liberia, the United States of America (USA) government has placed sanctions on top Liberian government officials, citing corruption and money laundering as the rationale for the sanctioning.
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In the midst of the lack of a strategy for minimizing corruption, the call for giving more money to government is tantamount to maximizing corruption. This is the reason for the results that came out of the Afrobarometer study of 2020 and the Center for Transparency and Accountability in in Liberia (CENTAL) Report of 2021. In their respective findings, they concluded that corruption is on the rise and that the people of Liberia have no trust in the National Elections Commission NEC) of Liberia.
With the people of Liberia having no trust in NEC on the eve of general and presidential election, the situation in Liberia remains scary. This situation is scary mainly because it is impossible for NEC to supervise any FAIR election. When election is UNFAIR, violence happens. Therefore, the people who love Liberia have to work together better to transform the prevailing UNFAIR electoral system into the enduring FAIR electoral system. It is only through this transformation that persons with good records can get elected to bring in Justice, the indispensable ingredient for Peace and Progress in Liberia and in any other country.
