Liberia’s Ineptitude on the Arts of Fine Prints

Jul 15, 2016 | Front Page Africa
View Original

In 1926, Liberia negotiated a Firestone Concession Agreement and two additional agreements, obtaining a one-million acre concession for a 99-year period, granting the company exclusive rights and exemptions from future taxes. The company was granted unlimited rights over an area equal to 4 per cent of the country’s territory and nearly 10 per cent of what was considered the arable land in the country. As part of the icing on the cake, Firestone lent $5 million to the Liberian Government through a wholly-owned and especially for this purpose created subsidiary, the Finance Corporation of Liberia.

The story was similar with the much-touted Buchanan Renewables, who with backing from the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, a little known U.S. government agency, received some US$217 million in loan approvals from 2008 to 2011 to convert nonproducing rubber trees into biomass chips that would help power Liberia. The travails of concessions like BRE were summed up by in 2013 when an audit of lucrative resource deals in Liberia found that almost all the concessions awarded by the government since 2009 were not compliant with the law.

Quite recently, the Liberian government was at it again with yet another controversial plan when it entered into a public-private partnership education plan by signing a memorandum of understanding with Bridge International Academies, a low-cost nursery and primary private school chain that uses a technology-based approach to provide standardized education to students in developing countries.