Listening to former Finance Minister Samuel Tweh on Spoon Talk, one could easily believe that Liberia’s civil-service reform story began with “harmonization.”
It is a neat story.
It is also false.
Reform began with rebuilding a broken state
Civil-service reform started long before harmonization — and it began with rebuilding a broken state. Payrolls carried ghost names, duplicate records, discretionary allowances, and political hiring.
The Civil Service Reform Strategy approved in 2008 laid out a disciplined agenda: clean the payroll, professionalize recruitment, rationalize compensation, and restructure ministries so they could function. This was not improvisation. It was state-building, grounded in policy and law.
President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf understood that reform fails when the institution leading it has no authority. She elevated the Director-General of the Civil Service Agency to Cabinet rank — placing reform at the center of national decision-making. That decision gave reform legitimacy — and protection.
The work was slow, technical, and sequenced
Then the real work began — slow, technical, relentless. Reform did not happen by slogan. It happened ministry by ministry, agency by agency, commission by commission.
Each institution went through a mandate-and-functions review. Only when mandates were clarified did restructuring follow. Only after restructuring did classification and grading follow. And only after grading did pay reform take effect.
The sequence mattered. Reform moved deliberately:
Mandates → restructuring → job classification → grading → pay spine → phased salary adjustments.
Anything else would destabilize the system.
Governance Commission and the constitutional grounding
A crucial partner in this process was the Governance Commission, led by the late Dr. Amos C. Sawyer. The Commission guided the mandate-and-functions reviews and shaped the initial frameworks for new or restructured ministries and agencies.
It provided the constitutional grounding, intellectual discipline, and policy rigor that made restructuring lawful and credible.
The pay spine: equal work, equal pay
Liberia then adopted a national pay spine — a structured system to ensure equal work meant equal pay. Jobs were mapped into grades from unskilled through professional and management levels. Allowances stopped functioning as a shadow salary system. Base pay became the anchor.
Promotion became earned — not negotiated — and budgeting finally became predictable.
An important point is often forgotten: base pay improvements were phased in first for ministries and agencies that completed the full reform process. Once mandates were clarified, structures approved, and jobs properly mapped to the pay spine, compensation became transparent — and allowances stopped.
Allowances did not vanish arbitrarily; they disappeared only after pay-and-grade reform had replaced them with structured salaries. Reform created order first — and then adjusted pay.
Why pacing had to be honest
Because the reform was honest, the pacing had to be honest. We knew the entire government payroll could not be changed overnight. Affordability across multiple budget cycles mattered.
So reform was phased, costed, and sequenced carefully. Transition bands avoided shocks. Civil servants understood this because we were transparent. Roadmaps showed people where they were — and where they were going. Trust came from predictability.
Reform as governance: Cabinet, Legislature, continuity
Reform was also deeply embedded in governance. There were multiple Cabinet meetings where ministers were assigned tasks, deadlines, and follow-ups. At the same time, there were repeated meetings with legislators to align laws with restructuring — clarifying mandates, creating institutions, retiring obsolete ones.
Reform was not decree. It was negotiation, persuasion, and institutional alignment.
And it changed professional culture. Job descriptions were written for almost every institution. HR manuals and the Code of Conduct reinforced standards and ethics. For the first time, many civil servants worked from written expectations rather than verbal instructions or political favor.
Rebuilding the human engine of government
Another pillar of the reform was rebuilding the human engine of government. We made a deliberate effort to recruit qualified Liberians — both from the diaspora and within the country — into the civil service. These were economists, planners, IT specialists, auditors, health professionals, policy analysts, and administrators who believed they could serve competently and with integrity.
Our philosophy was simple: a government cannot perform better than the people who run it — and capable people must be paid fairly to stay and deliver. Pay reform, therefore, was not charity. It was an investment in the life-blood of government: a professional, motivated civil service.
Another dimension of the reform was investment in people. Under President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, millions of dollars were committed to training a new generation of civil servants — in public finance, procurement, human resource management, ICT, monitoring and evaluation, leadership, and policy analysis.
The vision was to professionalize the workforce, attract talent, retain it with fair compensation, and ensure that those who served the nation could eventually retire with dignity. Reform was never only about cleaning payrolls. It was about rebuilding a capable state by investing in the people who keep it running.
I tell this story because I lived it
I tell this story because I lived it. I served first as Senior Technical Advisor to Dr. C. William Allen and later as Director-General of the Civil Service Agency. I saw the resistance. I saw the breakthroughs. Reform was real — line by line, rule by rule.
It was not without risk. I was there when the Ministry of National Security was dismantled — and I received death threats. I was there when we created the Ministry of Finance and Development Planning, restructured the Ministry of Health, stood up the National Public Health Institute, and created the Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection.
These reforms touched power, budgets, and mandates — and they demanded courage as much as technical skill.
Much of this unfolded in cramped rented rooms on Carey Street — with few computers, constant noise, unreliable power, and mountains of paperwork. Payrolls were cleaned manually. Policies were drafted by hand. Reform advanced not because conditions were ideal — but because discipline carried it.
Credibility attracted support
Development partners noticed. SIDA, USAID, and the World Bank did not fund rhetoric. They funded systems — biometric controls, pay rationalization, organizational restructuring, professional HR management. Money followed credibility.
When I eventually led the CSA, we stayed the course.
“One employee, one salary” became real.
Hidden allowances gave way to structured salary bands.
Biometric verification expanded.
Dignity in retirement was rebuilt.
Reform meant fairness — not punishment.
All of that happened before harmonization.
What was inherited — and what changed
This was the roadmap the CDC administration inherited — fully documented, technically sound, and backed by funding from partners such as USAID, SIDA, and the World Bank. The expectation was simple: continue the reforms, deepen restructuring, and complete pay-and-grade across the service.
Instead, the government chose a different path. It replaced a sequenced, evidence-based reform process with harmonization — collapsing salaries before finishing the institutional work that made reform fair and sustainable.
He began by trying to discredit what came before — giving the impression that the CDC inherited nothing — even though records clearly show a functioning reform roadmap, partner support, and measurable progress already in place.
At the end of his remarks, Minister Tweh urged Liberians to “carry politics up” — to rise above the noise and focus on national interest. Yet he did not acknowledge a basic truth about what the CDC inherited in both education and the civil service: a documented reform roadmap, costed and supported by development partners.
One panelist gently reminded him that government is continuity — you inherit progress and problems alike, and your responsibility is to build on what works. Ignoring those foundations while calling for maturity in political debate is not consistency — it is contradiction.
Leadership requires honesty about what was inherited, what was changed, and what was abandoned.
How harmonization felt to workers
Harmonization came later. On paper, it promised equity and affordability. In practice, it also created fiscal space to absorb partisans while presenting itself as reform.
Salaries collapsed faster than institutions were reorganized. Professionals lost income without promotion pathways. Teachers, nurses, and career civil servants absorbed the shock, while politically protected offices largely escaped.
For many civil servants, harmonization did not feel like reform. It felt like punishment.
And during election season, a bitter chant captured that sentiment:
“You harmonized my pay — I will harmonize your vote.”
That was not anger for its own sake. It was a message: people will not support policies that strip dignity while claiming fairness on paper.
And the political consequences eventually appeared at the ballot box.
The warning
Harmonization borrowed the language of reform — but abandoned the logic. It skipped the sequence. It ignored the pay spine. It confused cost-cutting with governance.
Liberia’s civil-service journey is documented — in Cabinet records, donor agreements, wage-bill reforms, and institutional restructuring. It is a story of accountability, professional standards, and dignity in service.
Harmonization is part of that story — but it is not the beginning, and it must never be remembered as the core.
If we allow that history to be rewritten, we will repeat mistakes that weakened the state.
Real civil-service reform was never meant to punish workers. It was — and must remain — about building a state that works, fairly, transparently, and in sequence.