By Wonderr K Freeman and Ansony Sieh

Liberia’s Fiscal Year 2026 national budget contains an entry that demands public scrutiny. Across 13 government ministries and agencies, the government of President Joseph Nyumah Boakai has allocated a combined USD18.3 million under the label of intelligence gathering. This is not a line item for roads, schools, hospitals, or food security. It is money designated for covert operations that, by institutional convention, carries no obligation for public accounting.

The National Security Agency alone receives USD 8.3 million, nearly half the total. Arrayed around it are agencies whose statutory mandates have little or nothing to do with field intelligence: the Financial Intelligence Agency, the National Fire Service, the Ministry of Information, and the National Commission on Small Arms, among others. Each now draws from a pool of public funds that successive governments have treated as beyond the reach of transparency laws.

Three presidents USD239 million in intelligence spending since 2006. No public accounting.

This is not a new problem. Under three consecutive administrations, from Ellen Johnson Sirleaf through George Weah and now into the Boakai era, the Liberian government has channeled a cumulative USD239 million into intelligence and covert operations as of the close of fiscal year 2026. That figure does not appear in any audited accounts. It does not feature in any report to the legislature that the public has been allowed to examine. It has been treated, year after year, as sovereign secret, immune from the controls that the law itself explicitly requires.

The result is a governance pattern with two defining features: the systematic misuse of a legal classification to launder accountability, and the diversion of scarce national resources away from the human development priorities that six million poor Liberians depend on.

Liberia at the Bottom: What the Budget Priorities Reveal.

Liberia ranks 177th out of 191 nations on the United Nations Development Programme Human Development Index, placing it among the most underdeveloped countries on earth. Its GDP per capita of approximately USD665 is the lowest in its immediate neighborhood. Cote d’Ivoire registers USD2,400. Ghana stands at USD2,200. Even Guinea-Conakry and Sierra Leone, themselves fragile states, outpace Liberia at USD1,050 and USD1,100 respectively.

Against that backdrop, the government’s intelligence allocation for fiscal year 2026 surpasses its budgetary commitments to agriculture, youth and vocational training, and commerce and industry. A country that cannot feed, employ, or educate its people has decided that intelligence gathering is a more urgent public expenditure than any of those. The question this raises is not simply one of priorities. It is a question of what the intelligence budget actually funds, and whether the legal framework that is meant to govern it has any operational meaning at all.

The Legal Framework That Is Routinely Ignored

The National Security Agency Act of 2011 is unambiguous on oversight. Section 6(f) mandates internal audits and Inspector General inspections. Section 11(c) requires financial audits. Section 6(d) places the NSA under joint supervision by the Ministry of Finance and Development Planning and the Ministry of Justice. Section 8 establishes legislative oversight authority. Section 11 grants the president direct directive and control powers.

LEGAL FINDING

None of these provisions are enforced. The NSA Act of 2011, combined with the Liberian Constitution of 1986, the Public Financial Management Act of 2009, the General Auditing Commission Act of 2014, and the Code of Conduct Act of 2014, creates a legal architecture that fully prohibits unaccountable public spending. The ruling political class has chosen to ignore every instrument in it.

The arrangement works as follows. An agency requests a budget line under intelligence gathering. The appropriation is approved by the legislature without public scrutiny. The funds are disbursed. No expenditure report is published. No audit is completed. The money disappears into what is effectively a legally branded slush fund, protected by the claim that disclosure would compromise national security.

This is not what the law provides. Nowhere in the NSA Act or in any related statute does the legal framework grant agencies the right to receive public funds and spend them without accountability. The claim that intelligence work is categorically exempt from financial reporting is a political invention, not a legal one.

Who Is Now Claiming Intelligence Funds

A detailed review of the FY2026 National Budget document, presented by the Ministry of Finance and Development Planning, confirms the following allocations under intelligence services line items:

The breadth of this list is itself an indictment. The National Fire Service has no intelligence mandate. The National Commission on Small Arms is a regulatory body, not a field operations unit. The Ministry of Information’s USD400,000 media intelligence allocation raises direct questions about state surveillance of the press. Each of these agencies has observed, over years, that the intelligence label creates unaccountable access to public money. The institutional logic is self-replicating: where the model of impunity goes unrebuked, others follow.

The Financial Intelligence Agency: An Anti-Corruption Body Knee-Deep in the Problem

The Financial Intelligence Agency offers the clearest illustration of how the system has inverted its own purpose. The FIA is Liberia’s statutory financial intelligence unit. Its function, as defined by the FIA Act of 2022 and the Anti-Money Laundering and Countering the Financing of Terrorism Act of 2012, is to receive Suspicious Transaction Reports and Currency Transaction Reports from commercial banks and other financial institutions, conduct analytical work on those reports, and forward credible findings to law enforcement agencies for investigation. This is analytical work, not field work. The FIA does not run surveillance operations. It does not conduct undercover investigations. Critically, it receives the foundational data it requires, the transaction reports from financial institutions, free of charge, as a matter of legal obligation under Section 15.3.20 and Section 15.3.21 of the AML/CFT Act of 2012. Yet the FY2026 budget allocates USD1.8 million to the FIA under intelligence gathering. This is money for analysis the agency is already resourced to do with mandatory data it already receives at no cost.

The director of the anti-corruption body stands trial for corruption. The intelligence budget that enabled the alleged theft has been increased and institutionalized.

The logic of this arrangement becomes fully visible in the current prosecution unfolding before Criminal Court C in Monrovia. The immediate past director of the FIA, Stanley Ford, and other finance and security officials from the prior administration, are standing trial in 2026 on charges related to a USD6.2 million corruption matter. The core defense argument advanced by the accused is that the money in question was spent on security operations and intelligence gathering, and therefore requires no accounting.

That argument is precisely what the intelligence budget framework was designed to enable. The money, the accused contend, was covert. Its expenditure was lawful. The public has no right to know. Whatever the court ultimately decides on the facts, the structural problem is clear: the intelligence classification has become a primary legal defense for alleged theft of public funds.

Meanwhile, the FIA’s intelligence allocation has not been reduced in response to the scandal. It has been institutionalized in the annual budget. The same mechanism that allegedly enabled the misconduct under examination remains fully operational. If a different political administration comes to power in a future electoral cycle, the current director of the FIA faces the same structural exposure that now confronts the last one.

What USD18 Million in Shadow Funds Costs the Public

The human arithmetic of this budget is direct. The USD18.3 million allocated to intelligence services in FY2026 is money that does not go to primary healthcare facilities operating without basic medicines. It does not go to rural road construction connecting farming communities to markets. It does not go to teacher deployment in counties where classrooms sit without educators. It does not go to youth vocational training that might absorb some portion of Liberia’s severe unemployment burden.

Liberia has been an independent nation for 179 years. Its development statistics are not the result of natural scarcity. They are the result of accumulated governance choices. The consistent prioritization of executive perks, legislative salaries, security expenditures, and intelligence budgets over productive public investment is a choice that is made anew in each budget cycle, ratified by a legislature that has the authority to reject it, and signed into law by a president who bears executive responsibility for the outcome.The intelligence budget is not simply a line item. It is a mirror of institutional priorities. And what it reflects is a government that has decided its own protection and the protection of its financial discretion is worth more than the development of the people it governs.

The Pattern Will Not Break Itself

Three administrations have maintained and expanded this system. The Unity Party under Ellen Johnson Sirleaf established the template. The Congress for Democratic Change under George Weah inherited and continued it. The Unity Party under Joseph Nyumah Boakai has not reformed it. The USD239 million figure is the cumulative legacy of that continuity.

Reform would require a legislature willing to compel genuine financial reporting on intelligence expenditures. It would require an auditor general with the institutional mandate and political protection to examine intelligence accounts. It would require a president prepared to issue and enforce directives that actually carry the oversight obligations that the NSA Act of 2011 already mandates on paper. None of that has happened. The controls exist in statute. They are simply not applied.

As long as the intelligence classification functions as a legal exemption from accountability, it will be used as one. That is not a prediction. It is the documented record.

What the FY2026 budget makes plain is that this is no longer an informal arrangement. It has been regularized, expanded across 13 agencies, and embedded in the national budget in a form that will require deliberate political will to reverse. Without that reversal, the USD239 million figure will keep rising, the human development rankings will keep declining, and the same pattern of unaccountable public spending will keep producing the same scandals, in the same courtrooms, with the same defenses. Liberia does not lack the la