The United States Ambassador to Liberia, Michael McCarthy, has raised a red flag on the Liberian government’s failure to fulfill promises made to its citizens in leeward counties under the national budget.
McCarthy who has been raising top questions of priorities to the pro-poor agenda disclosed that representatives and senators appropriate items in the national budget for selfish interests forgetting their obligations to the people in the counties and districts they represent outside Monrovia.
According to the US Ambassador, his recent tour to the Southeast completed his access to the 15 political subdivisions of the country where he received series of report revealing that counties service centers and health facilities had been abandon and deprived from getting the US$100,000 appropriated in the budget for them.
He said, “Multiple county hospitals received not one penny of what they were promised in the 2022 budget. Hospitals on which lives depend; where outbreaks are prevented and suffering is alleviated, did not receive any portion of the US$100,000 or more appropriated by the Legislature for them to operate.”
“I also visited most of the County Service Centers, and in 2022, none had received any of their budget allocation (usually around US$13,333). One Center has not printed marriage certificates for four years because the printer broke, and their last allocation was received five years ago,” he added.
Ambassador McCarthy said the United States Government is about to spend a total of over US$40 million constructing Liberia’s state-of-the-art National Reference Laboratory (NRL) that, when completed, will require US$3 million to US$4 million a year from the Government of Liberia to operate.
With the report of the bridge of obligations of the government to fulfill US$100,000 to the county hospitals that are currently underfunded, McCarthy sees the possibility of Liberia pledging about three-four million on the NRL is a biggest mountain to climb.
McCarthy described the blocking of the county resources as complete syndicate set by all authorities responsible for the operations of county center and health facilities.
“The blocking of resources is so complete that it must be institutional and the lack of any alarm being raised indicates a syndicate involving players at the Legislature, the Ministry of Health, and the Ministry of Internal Affairs,” he disclosed.
The ambassador added that the current status of the county service centers still look as a contribution made by UNDP and other international partners over nearly five years ago and has only an office fully functioning for the Liberia Revenue Authority to collect duties and report to Monrovia.
He said, “The one functioning office in every center, the Liberia Revenue Authority (LRA), has representatives who collect duties and regularly forward funds to Monrovia apparently a one-way street,” adding;
The Legislature has spent more every year for the past three years buttering their own bread, allocating over US$65 million in 2022 for salaries and operations while hospitals went without, and service centers withered on the vine, the 30 senators and the 73 representatives spent sixty-five million U.S. dollars feathering their own nests.
