Liberian Engineer Urges Senate to Reject $365 Million Road Financing Agreement

A prominent Liberian engineer is calling on the country’s Senate to cancel a proposed $365 million road financing agreement with a Sierra Leonean firm, citing concerns over the deal’s potential to undermine Liberia’s economic sovereignty and technical capacity. John Kpehe Boimah, Team Lead of Boimah Engineering Incorporated (BEI), a Liberian professional services firm specializing in highway engineering, argues that the agreement with Pavi Fort – Al Associates (SL) LTD poses significant risks to the country’s development.

Boimah’s appeal is based on his professional expertise and patriotic duty, and he emphasizes that his position is not merely a critique but a constructive pathway toward responsible and inclusive national development. He asserts that Liberia’s development must be engineered by and for Liberians, and that the proposed concession is structurally flawed and lacks the necessary technical and financial expertise to manage a project of this magnitude.

The engineer outlines five critical areas where the Pavi Fort concession threatens to undermine Liberia’s sovereignty and sustainable development, including the systematic exclusion of Liberian professionals from national resources, the loss of employment and unavailability of professional empowerment, the absence of meaningful technical transfer and capacity building, economic disempowerment and the deepening of poverty, and the perpetuation of a neo-colonial dependency model.

Instead, Boimah urges the Senate to direct the Ministry of Public Works to engage a competent international firm through a transparent and competitive bidding process, ensuring value for money, technical soundness, and the inclusion of binding clauses for local content and capacity transfer. He emphasizes that true, sustainable development lies in empowering Liberians themselves, not in outsourcing the nation’s future.

Boimah’s firm, BEI, represents the expertise that should be leveraged and grown within Liberia, with twenty years of experience in highway development and adherence to international standards. The engineer’s appeal is a call for the Legislature to choose a path of sovereign reason over short-term expediency and to champion a new model of development that places Liberian professionals and Liberian capacity at its core.