In Summary
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Former Assistant Minister Benedict Kolubah has claimed that the US$14 million Kuwaiti Fund loan for the Port of Greenville was contracted in 2014 under the Unity Party-led government.
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Kolubah made the post to refute Public Works Minister Roland Giddings, who accused the CDC-led administration of failing to service the debt and causing road project delays.
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While official documents confirm the loan was ratified during President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s tenure, our research shows that the Weah administration did not complete repayments.
On August 4, Benedict Kolubah, former Assistant Minister for Development Planning at the Ministry of Finance and Development Planning, claimed in a Facebook post that the US$14 million loan from the Kuwait Fund for Arab Economic Development to rehabilitate the Port of Greenville was conceived under the Unity Party-led government, not the administration of former President George Weah.
Mr. Kolubah made the claim in response to Public Works Minister Roland Giddings, who alleged that the CDC-led government failed to repay the Kuwaiti loan and that this contributed to delays in the Gbarnga–Salayea road project.
Said Minister Giddings during a radio interview: “The loan that was given to the last government for the port of Greenville by the Kuwaiti, that loan was not paid and the Kuwaiti withheld their disbursement on that project, (rehabilitation of Port of Greenville) so it affected the Gbarnga–Salayea road project.”
The Claim
Mr. Kolunbah’s post reads: “Loan ID 323 Valued $14M for Greenville Port was contracted in 2014 by UP not CDC. Minister Giddings lied on CDC today!”
Rating Justification
To verify Kolubah’s claim, we reviewed the Greenville Port loan agreement and other official government documents. Our review found that the loan amounted to four million Kuwaiti dinars, equivalent to approximately US$14 million at the time, with a 22-year payment period.
Negotiations for the loan occurred in 2012 under President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. In her January 2013 Annual Message, President Sirleaf informed the Legislature that her government had successfully negotiated and guaranteed the loan to finance the rehabilitation of the Port of Greenville.
The agreement was subsequently submitted to the Legislature and ratified in 2014. The financing covered navigational aids, marine vessels, cargo-handling equipment, institutional support and other works connected to the port’s rehabilitation.
However, the origin of the loan does not, by itself, disprove Minister Giddings’s allegation that the Weah administration later did not service the inherited debt.
Did the Weah Administration Service the Loan?
Minister Roland Giddings told the OK Morning Rush that the Coalition for Democratic Change-led government failed to repay the loan, something he attributed to the delays in the Gbarnga–Salayea road pavement project.
We have reviewed news articles and official public-debt documents and found that, as of December 2024, approximately US$6.57 million of the loan remained outstanding. This indicates that a portion of the loan had been repaid, although the publicly available reports do not provide a complete year-by-year record of payments made between 2018 and 2023.
In April 2025, The Liberian Investigator reported that Liberia had been delinquent for successive years in servicing the Greenville Port loan, something the paper said prompted the Kuwait Fund to suspend disbursements for the Gbarnga–Salayea road project in early 2023, during President George Weah’s administration.
After taking office in 2025, officials of the Joseph Nyuma Boakai administration traveled to Kuwait in April to negotiate the restructuring of the outstanding debt. Following the negotiations, the article revealed that the Kuwait Fund agreed to resume disbursements to contractors working on the Gbarnga–Salayea highway to facilitate the project’s completion.
Conclusion
Based on these findings, we conclude that Benedict Kolubah’s claim that the US$14 million Greenville Port loan was negotiated and contracted under the Unity Party-led government of former President Sirleaf is correct, contrary to Minister Giddings’s claim that the loan was contracted by the CDC administration.
Meanwhile, Minister Giddings’s claim that the CDC administration failed to repay the Greenville Port loan is mostly correct. Available evidence indicates that payments were made toward the loan, but the administration failed to keep the scheduled repayments current, resulting in prolonged delinquency and the suspension of Kuwait Fund disbursements.
