By: Aaron Kubahn
Monrovia, Liberia — Former Minister of Finance and Development Planning, Samuel D. Tweah Jr., who presided over the implementation of the government’s controversial harmonization reform under the George Weah administration, has welcomed the Liberian Senate’s call for a comprehensive review of the policy, describing it as timely, necessary, and critical to ending what he called years of misinformation and propaganda.
Tweah, in a detailed statement addressed to the Senate Pro Tempore, said the review is “long overdue” and expressed hope that the Speaker of the House of Representatives will also embrace the process so the country can finally understand what he termed the “honest facts and truths” about harmonization.
“As the minister who presided over the harmonization reform, I welcome this review, particularly for the light it will shed on the misinformation and propaganda that affected the reform,” Tweah said, adding that discussions about reversing harmonization are “illusory and impossible.”
He disclosed that he and members of his technical team, including Del Francis Wreh and Benedict Kolubah, are prepared to appear before the Senate, and he urged other key stakeholders who played major roles in the process to do the same.
Among those he named were Vice President Jeremiah K. Koung, then a Representative from Nimba County; Senator J. Gbleh-bo Browne of Maryland County; former Representatives Clarence Massaquoi of Lofa County and Edward Karfiah of Bong County; and Senator Francis K. Dopoh, whom Tweah credited as instrumental in drafting the National Standardization and Remuneration Act that legally codified harmonization.
Tweah recalled a high-level meeting at the Farmington Hotel, which he said resulted in what he termed the “Farmington Consensus,” reached amid efforts to reduce Liberia’s public wage bill to about US$296 million in order to meet a 1 percent of GDP target. According to him, two key principles guided the consensus: that no healthcare worker or teacher should be affected by wage cuts, and that the judiciary, like the legislature, should contribute its fair share—something he said was only possible through a national law.&&&“In the end, the Farmington Consensus was implemented,” Tweah stated. “No healthcare workers were affected, and the judiciary was taxed.”
Addressing claims that harmonization harmed health workers, Tweah argued that the reform actually benefited several categories of healthcare workers. He cited the case of health workers at the Ganta hospital donated to government by then-Representative Jeremiah Koung, noting that harmonization placed those workers on the Government of Liberia payroll, a move he said was politically beneficial to Koung in his successful senatorial bid.
He also referenced rural health workers previously paid under the Fixed Amount Reimbursement Agreement (FARA), where USAID reimbursed government for salaries. Under harmonization, Tweah said, government assumed full payment responsibility, with the only change being the application of taxes and social security deductions—requirements he said were uniformly applied, including to over 2,000 health workers added to the payroll after donor funding declined in 2018.
Tweah questioned why, despite these protections, some nurses in 2023 protested harmonization, chanting, “You harmonized our pay, we will harmonize your vote.” He challenged stakeholders to explain this narrative during the Senate review.
He further dismissed calls to “reverse harmonization,” arguing that such a move could not logically mean restoring pay inequities, reintroducing the dual system of basic salary and general allowances, removing health workers from the payroll, or ending taxation and social security deductions.
“The public debate on these issues has never been more important,” Tweah said, urging the media to actively question all actors involved in the reform about their specific roles.
While stating that he and his team have already “talked our own,” Tweah said it is now time for others, including Vice President Koung and Senator Dopoh, to publicly account for their roles in the harmonization process.
Welcoming what he described as a “data-driven and evidence-based review,” Tweah expressed confidence that it will finally put lingering controversies surrounding harmonization to rest.
