17/02/2026
Mohammed Sheriff, as CEO of the Liberia Electricity Corporation, you are doing a great job, much as Monie Captan did under the CDC before you. As your press release explains, Liberia’s electricity problem is structural, not political, so don’t follow the politics, which is based on LIES and MISINFORMATION!
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Preliminary technical findings indicate that the Paynesville Substation has reached its saturation point, a condition that has been developing over the past three to four years due to increasing load demand. The paynesville substation currently supplies power to Schiefflin, Paynesville, Duport Road through the Soul Clinic to Fendell corridor, and some parts of Gardnersville which has experienced exponential growth in electricity consumption.” — LEC Press release explaining explosion at Paynesville Sub station due to overload February 17, 2017.
The above quote from the LEC press release says it all. I am adding to support this press release, an image of evolution of peak electricity demand in Liberia from 2016 to 2025. Data is sourced from LEC, the World Bank, AfDB and other publicly available sources. Data for 2025 is based on projection from previous years.
On the image, you can say how peak electricity demand has been rising over the last 8 years. Most of the dry season under the CDC were without the CLSG. CDC was adding more people without changing generation. It became the victim of its own success
It’s like a household of five living on a bag of rice per month. When a displaced brother brings in his five children and we don’t go to two bags per month, everybody’s bowl of rice would have to be cut in half. Some of the host children would stop speaking to their guest cousins because their stomachs wouldn’t be getting “full.” That’s the story with LEC under the CDC before the CLSG came!
When the CLSG came online it obviously made load shedding in dry season much better than before. But this is because UP signed the CLSG and CDC modified and executed it help solve this problem. This is a Liberia win for Liberia and our RESCUE people should say it.
Between 2018 and 2023, about 240,000 households, some 1.2 million people were added to LEC grid, on top of 49,000 households, or 294,000 people that were on LEC prior to 2018. In the last two years 63,000 households, or 378,000 people have been added. All this puts us at 30% the population with access to power. Imagine connecting the other 70 percent and not adressing the generation problem.
Good news for LEC is that World Bank project called , RESPITE, signed in Jan 2023 , is coming with a helping hand. It’s adding two turbines to Mount Coffee and bringing solar to help with the dry season. UP should give CDC credit for this.
As the Minister of Finance Augustine Kpehe Ngafuah has recently noted, if Liberia’s MCC Compact targets electricity, through the via dam project as I have variously argued, which is our only serious viable option, we might see strong generation dividends by 2033. Under the CDC, the World Bank committed $150 million to this project. If the Rescue Government commits Accelor Mittal’s $200 million sign-on bonus in the 2026 budget and we crowd in MCC’s $250 - $500 million contribution, which cannot be available before 2029, speaking as the Chief Economist on Liberia’s first MCC Compact, we might be able to solve Liberia’s electricity generation challenge for the next 100 years.
But that choice is the current Government’s. Until then Mohammed, the Liberian people can only grade you on how you are solving power theft and making LEC more profitable so that it stops depending on the Government. This means they are grading you on how fast you are doing connections, solving meter issues that will contribute to efficiency and profitability. But load shedding is not your grading area.
Blaming you and Monie for Mount Coffee’s dry season shortfall we have experienced since President Tubman is seriously unfair!
Didn’t know Liberians can forget like this or is it the CDC-UP politics!
