Former President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf has reopened one of the country's oldest and most consequential economic debates--why a country endowed with extraordinary natural resources has struggled for generations to convert that wealth into broad-based prosperity.
Speaking at the Governance Commission's inaugural Good Governance Month symposium in Monrovia on October 6, Sirleaf argued that the country's problem is no longer simply a question of individual corruption, weak enforcement or inadequate policy.
It is, she suggested, a structural problem.
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Her warning reaches back a century to the 1926 Firestone concession, which she presented as a symbol of an economic model that has remained remarkably durable. She said Liberia grants concessions, foreign or concession-linked companies extract resources, raw materials leave the country, and the deeper transformation of those resources into manufacturing, employment and domestic wealth largely occurs elsewhere.
"This year marks 100 years since the Firestone concession of 1926," Sirleaf said. "Not a single tyre has been made for a century. Liberia has earned its living by granting concessions and exporting raw materials--rubber, iron, timber, gold."
Her central question is therefore not whether Liberia should have foreign investment. It is whether a resource-rich country can continue to organize its economy primarily around concessioning and extraction without building sufficient domestic capacity to capture the value generated by those resources.
That question has haunted the country for decades.
The historical record illustrates the scale of the Firestone arrangement that helped establish the country's concessionary model. The 1926 agreements provided Firestone with a 99-year lease covering up to one million acres for rubber production, alongside other concessions and a $5 million loan arrangement involving the Liberian government.
The Firestone experience was never entirely one-dimensional. It brought employment, infrastructure and economic activity, while also becoming the subject of longstanding criticism over labor, environmental and concessionary practices. Sirleaf herself previously described the relationship as "a mixed story."
The resource-curse argument is not that natural resources are inherently harmful. Rather, the danger emerges when a country possesses valuable resources but lacks the institutions, economic diversification, transparency and bargaining power required to ensure that resource wealth produces broad public benefits.
The country's own history provides a particularly stark example.
The International Monetary Fund has identified several classic risks associated with resource wealth, including economic distortions, vulnerability to commodity-price volatility and the possibility that resource revenues can encourage institutionalized corruption and elite capture of decision-making.
For Liberia, those risks have not remained theoretical.
The country's Truth and Reconciliation Commission documented how economic crimes, illicit trading in natural resources and the exploitation of public assets contributed to the country's conflicts, while corruption and weak accountability continued to deprive ordinary Liberians of the benefits of national resources.
Former President Charles Taylor's era provided perhaps the most devastating illustration of the connection between natural resources and political power, as diamonds and timber revenues became intertwined with conflict financing. Human Rights Watch similarly documented how corruption surrounding natural resources contributed to political instability and armed conflict.
Sirleaf's warning: the danger is where wealth and power meet
It is against that history that Sirleaf's latest remarks acquire their greatest significance.
The former president warned that the emerging critical-minerals economy could reproduce the same vulnerabilities if Liberia simply replaces rubber, timber and iron ore with new minerals while retaining the same institutional and economic structures.
"Moreover, today there are serious questions and concerns about how our critical minerals are taken away when a nation's wealth flows through a few contracts signed in a few offices," she said.
"Power and money gather in the same few hands. This is the very ground on which corruption grows."
The warning is particularly relevant as Liberia seeks to attract new investment in mining and other resource sectors.
The government itself has acknowledged the need for stronger mineral governance. In June 2026, President Joseph Boakai established a multi-agency task force to combat illicit mining, citing environmental destruction, revenue losses, smuggling and threats to community livelihoods.
The issue, therefore, is no longer merely how much Liberia can attract in investment.
It is what Liberia receives in return, who benefits, how contracts are negotiated, what happens to the resources after extraction, and whether communities and Liberian businesses participate meaningfully in the value chain.
The country 's dependence on raw exports has been recognized by successive administrations.
Former President George Weah, in his own assessment of the Liberian economy, acknowledged that traditional exports such as iron ore and rubber were largely shipped abroad in raw form, limiting opportunities for industrialization and employment while leaving Liberia vulnerable to international price fluctuations. He argued that structural transformation required producing more goods and services locally and adding value to raw materials before export.
The current administration has similarly begun moving toward value addition.
In June 2026, President Boakai issued an executive order banning the export of unprocessed natural rubber, explicitly arguing that raw-rubber exports have deprived Liberia of downstream manufacturing, industrial employment, tax revenue and foreign-exchange opportunities. The policy seeks to encourage domestic processing and production of finished goods such as tires, gloves, footwear and adhesives.
That policy represents precisely the type of economic shift Sirleaf is advocating.
But the larger question is whether such interventions can become part of a sustained industrial strategy rather than isolated policy measures.
Sirleaf is hardly the first prominent Liberian to describe the country's natural-resource problem in terms of a vicious cycle.
In 2012, while president, Sirleaf herself acknowledged Liberia's experience as a resource curse, saying: "We have always had these natural resources. They just haven't been used well for development of the people."
More recently, Press Union of Liberia President Julius Kanubah warned that Liberia must avoid treating the development of its natural resources as "business as usual," arguing that resource exploitation has too often been accompanied by inadequate transparency, accountability and impartiality. He urged the government to ensure that national resources become a blessing rather than a curse.
Civil society has raised similar concerns.
At a mining-sector roundtable in October 2026, CENTAL Executive Director Anderson Miamen called for stronger mining laws and regulatory institutions, pointing to weak enforcement, corruption, inadequate beneficial-ownership disclosure and limited community participation.
And in a particularly poignant expression of the resource-wealth paradox, Morris Kiazolu of the Resource Equity Alliance of Liberia described seeing mothers in mining areas who had been told for years that they lived on rich land, yet still lacked basic services.
"They have no clean water, no clinics, and no schools for their children," he said.
That may be the most powerful measure of the resource curse. Not the size of the mineral deposit.
Not the value of the concession. Not the volume of exports. But whether people living on resource-rich land experience a measurable improvement in their lives.
Sirleaf's argument therefore goes beyond economics. Her contention is that the concession model becomes dangerous when economic concentration and political concentration reinforce each other.
"When a nation's wealth flows through a few contracts signed in a few offices," she warned, "power and money gather in the same few hands."
That is why she placed transparency and citizen oversight at the center of her prescription.
"To the citizens of Liberia, our Freedom of Information Law belongs to you. Ask for the records," she said.
"To the journalists, keep asking the hard questions."
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The call is significant because Liberia already possesses important transparency institutions and laws. During Sirleaf's presidency, the country strengthened the General Auditing Commission, Liberia Anti-Corruption Commission and Public Procurement and Concessions Commission, while establishing or strengthening mechanisms such as the Liberia Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative and the Freedom of Information Act.
Yet Sirleaf now acknowledges that institutional creation did not automatically produce institutional effectiveness.
"I wish that I could, with all these efforts, have won the corruption fight. We did not. And we are facing the same thing today," she said at the symposium.
That admission adds weight to her current call for structural change.
The fundamental challenge facing Liberia is consequently not whether it should continue working with investors.
The challenge is whether Liberia can move from being primarily a host for extraction to becoming an active participant in the economic value chains created by its resources.
That requires roads and electricity, which Sirleaf acknowledged. It requires broadband and stronger infrastructure. It requires agricultural modernization. It requires financing for Liberian businesses. It requires technical skills. It requires competitive local enterprises capable of supplying concessionaires. And ultimately, it requires factories.
A rubber-producing country that imports finished rubber products illustrates the problem vividly. An iron-ore exporter that imports machinery and manufactured goods faces a similar structural dilemma. A country exporting gold or strategic minerals without building significant domestic processing capacity risks repeating the same pattern under a different commodity.
This is why the government's recent emphasis on local manufacturing and industrialization matters. Its US$26 million agreement for the country's first electrical manufacturing plant, for example, is intended to produce transformers, conductors, switchgear and smart meters domestically, reducing dependence on imported electrical equipment while creating industrial jobs.
