A Senate committee wants US$792,552 in the FY2027 budget for pay raises inside the Senate, with 70 percent going to senators’ personal offices. With half of Liberia below the poverty line and senators unwilling to cut their own US$8,000 monthly pay, the Pro Tempore should shelve the plan and put the poorest first.
SOMEWHERE IN MONROVIA this morning, a mother is deciding which of her children eats today. She sells pepper and bitter balls in the market, earns less than the US$5.50 a day the law says an unskilled worker should get, and spends most of it on a cup of rice. Her children’s school fees are overdue. Her story is not unusual. It is the story of half of Liberia.
AGAINST THAT BACKDROP, the Liberian Senate’s Committee on Rules, Order and Administration wants US$792,552 more in next year’s budget to raise salaries inside the Senate. Some of the raises run as high as 71 percent. The proposal now sits on the desk of President Pro Tempore Nyonblee Karnga-Lawrence, who ordered the committee to draw it up.
WE URGE HER, plainly and respectfully: put the brakes on it.
A Raise for the Senators’ Own Offices
THE COMMITTEE CALLS its plan a standardization of staff pay. Look closer. Seventy percent of the money, US$554,712, goes to the personal staff of senators: the chiefs of staff, political advisors and assistants each senator hires and keeps. The 29 chiefs of staff alone would cost taxpayers an extra US$166,692 a year. This is, in effect, a raise for the senators’ own political operations, paid for by a public that is already stretched to breaking.
IT COMES FROM a body whose members each earn US$8,000 a month, more than 50 times what a security guard or market worker is legally owed. Since 2020, a bill to cut that pay to US$5,000 has gathered dust. When it resurfaced last year, senators answered with murmurs of resistance. A Senate that will not trim its own salary has no moral standing to ask taxpayers for more, whatever the label on the envelope.
AND LOOK AT who gains most. The Senate’s Legal Counsel would jump from US$1,704 to US$2,920 a month. An executive secretary would get US$96. The committee cites the 2019 Remuneration Standardization Act, whose stated purpose is to narrow the inequality gap in government. Its own figures nearly double the gap between the top and bottom of its staff list. That is not standardization. It is the same old pyramid, made taller.
WE DO NOT dismiss the staff’s grievance. Many have not seen a raise since 2015, and they have every right to fair pay under the law. But so do the teachers whose US-dollar salaries went unpaid for months, the nurses now demanding a US$500 floor, and the civil servants still waiting for the harmonization cuts to be reversed. The US$792,552 the committee wants could pay 440 civil servants at the US$150 government minimum for a full year. Fairness that starts at the top of Capitol Hill never seems to reach the bottom.
A Test of Leadership
MADAM PRO TEMPORE, this decision is yours to shape. You commissioned the plan, and the Senate leadership will decide whether it goes into the FY2027 budget the Executive must submit by October 31.
IT IS NO secret in Monrovia that many see you as a future contender for the Presidency. If that ambition is real, there is no better place to show the country what kind of leader you would be. Liberians will remember who stood with them when a cup of rice cost more than a day’s wage, and who stood with the comfortable few.
TO RAISE PAY in the halls of the Capitol while families skip meals, while children sit at home for lack of fees, while millions live below the poverty line, is a slap in the face of the Liberian people. It tells them their suffering does not count.
WE ASK THE Senate leadership to do five things:
1. Shelve this package in its current form and keep it out of the FY2027 budget.
2. Reject any raise that benefits senators’ offices while senators refuse to cut their own pay.
3. Pass the long-stalled bill reducing senators’ salaries, and let the savings fund the lowest-paid Senate workers first.
4. Publish the Executive benchmarks the committee claims to match, so the public can judge whether a US$2,920 salary is justified.
5. Put teachers, nurses and the lowest-paid civil servants at the front of the line when new revenue is shared.
THE GOVERNMENT HAS just crossed US$1 billion in domestic revenue for the first time. President Joseph Boakai has said that money should improve the lives of ordinary Liberians. The Senate should not be the first to reach into that pot for itself.
MADAM PRO TEMPORE, the people are watching. Put the brakes on this raise, and put the bottom of the ladder first.