Every Liberian knows the road. In the dry season it is passable; when the rains come, it becomes a river of mud. A truck sinks to its axles. A line of vehicles waits for hours. A farmer in Bong or Lofa watches his harvest rot because no vehicle can reach him; a child misses school; a clinic runs short of medicine. Twenty years into this century, this is still the daily experience of moving through our country. Between 91 and 96 percent of our roads remain unpaved.
None of this is new, and none of it was unforeseen. Two decades ago, in Liberia's own newspapers, I wrote two commentaries -- "Roads, Roads, Roads" and "A Call to Arms" -- warning that our future would be decided by whether we built and maintained these roads, and setting out what it would take. The warning was read, but the solutions are far short of the challenge. I do not recall it here to say "I told you so." I recall it for one reason only: it means we have known what is wrong for a very long time. Our difficulty has never been the diagnosis.
Our difficulty has been acting on it -- and acting in a way that survives the turnover of governments. Liberia has never truly lacked plans, or partners, or capable people. What it has lacked is a disciplined national system for execution: a way of turning intention into finished, maintained roads, held steady across administrations instead of reset to zero every few years.
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But I write today not in despair, and not to indict. I write because, for the first time, the situation has genuinely changed -- and the change is in our favor. We can now both see this problem whole and answer it. The measure of it is no longer a matter of argument: the Liberia OneMap portal is live and free at LrOneMap.com, where any Liberian can see, county by county, the 24,508 kilometers of road we have digitized -- and the more than 21,000 kilometers of county roads that cannot be maintained from Monrovia. What I could only assert in 2006, even a student with a phone can now confirm.
And we now have more than a measure; we have a method. In those 2006 articles I called for its pieces -- our young people mobilized and trained as builders, a permanent Corps of Engineers and Technicians, a national geospatial foundation, leadership earned by performance rather than connection. Two decades of work have turned those calls into a worked-out system, set down in a new book, Re-Building Liberia. Its five pillars are not a wish list; they are a buildable plan: put our youth to work as a National Development Service of reconstruction; stand up a permanent technical Corps that belongs to the Republic, not to any party; rest every road and design on the geospatial foundation now live; connect the interior through our secondary cities rather than routing everything through the capital; and insist, without exception, on leadership earned through integrity and results.
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Here is the heart of it. The materials of our own rebuilding are already in our hands. We have the map. We have the method. And above all, we have the people -- a generation of young Liberians waiting only to be organized and put to purposeful work. There is honor in that work. In a nation recovering from war and hardship, those who build its roads are not background figures; they are among its true heroes.
We are not condemned to circle this same mountain forever, watching each rainy season undo us again. Nations do not drift into prosperity; they are built -- deliberately, with discipline, and with effort sustained over time. The warning of twenty years ago are still here. But, now, there is an answer that meets the challenge. We have the map, the method, and the people. Let us build.
Matthew W. Elious is a Liberian American geospatial/infrastructure professional with more than three decades in geospatial/GIS, surveying and infrastructure, and a former University of Liberia mathematics instructor. He is the author of Re-Building Liberia: Infrastructure Strategy, Human Capital, and the Road to Prosperity. The Liberia OneMap Geospatial Portal is freely accessible at www.LrOneMap.com.
