Fact Checking SONA: Did President Boakai Get Facts Correct about Jobs Creation and Roads

In Summary:

• During his State of the Nation Address, President Joseph Boakai claimed that his administration has created more than 70,000 short- and medium-term jobs and increased the proportion of paved roads in Liberia from under 12% to at least 20%.

• We have verified the claim of creating 70,000 jobs and found no publicly available data to substantiate the reported figure.

• The claim that his administration has increased paved roads to 20% is incorrect; the actual road network grew from 8.8% to roughly 9.7% following the addition of 121.87 kilometers.

• Information Minister Jerolinmick Piah later clarified that the 20% figure was a “misquotation” by speechwriters and intended to be a future goal rather than a current achievement.

• We therefore conclude that both the employment and infrastructure milestones highlighted in the 2026 State of the Nation Address lack verifiable evidence.

As enshrined in Article 58 of the Constitution of the Republic of Liberia, President Joseph Nyumah Boakai, on Monday, January 26, delivered his State of the Nation Address.

Article 58 mandates that “the President shall, on the fourth working Monday in January of each year, present the administration’s legislative program for the ensuing session, and shall once every year report to the Legislature on the state of the Republic, including the economic condition and progress of the country, and shall recommend such measures as he may judge necessary or expedient.”

In his address, President Boakai claimed that his administration has created more than 70,000 short- and medium-term jobs and increased the proportion of paved roads in Liberia from under 12 percent to at least 20 percent.

The President made these claims while highlighting what he described as progress achieved by his government over the past two years.

Claim #1

An excerpt of his speech reads: “We have created more than 70,000 short and medium-term jobs across Infrastructure, Agriculture, Social Protection, and small businesses, among other sectors.”

Rating Justification

To verify whether his administration has created 70,000 jobs, we reviewed the websites and publications of key government ministries and agencies responsible for employment and labor statistics. We checked the websites of the Liberia Institute for Statistics and Geo-Information Services (LIGIS), the Ministries of Labor, Youth and Sports, and Public Works, but we found no publicly available data to substantiate the President’s claim.

However, one initiative frequently cited by officials of government is the World Bank–supported REALISE Project, indicating that the project has created 15,000 of the 70,000 jobs in 2025.

Our review of the project’s official website shows that under Component Two—Labor-Intensive Public Works—the project provided approximately 10,000 short-term jobs.

Meanwhile, on social media, some government officials have circulated what they describe as job-creation figures, as seen here. Although these figures are attributed to sources, we found no database to further verify the numbers published on Facebook.

Conclusion

Based on our findings, we conclude that President Boakai’s claim of creating more than 70,000 short and medium-term jobs is unproven. We have not found publicly verifiable evidence to support the figure he cited.

Claim #2

The claim about the road pavement reads: “We increased Liberia’s paved roads from under 12 percent to at least 20 percent, and maintained more than 780 km of major routes, ensuring year-round access.”

Rating Justification

To verify whether the government has increased Liberia’s paved roads to 20%, we contacted the Minister of Public Works, Roland Giddings, to request data on the number of kilometres of roads paved by the Ministry.

However, Minister Giddings did not respond to our inquiry up to the time of producing this fact-check report. This report will be updated if and when a response is received.

We then reviewed previous fact-checks and media reports and found that Liberia’s total road network is estimated at approximately 13,000 kilometres.

By the end of 2017, before the previous government assumed office, the Ellen Johnson Sirleaf administration had paved about 745 kilometres of roads, representing roughly 5.7 percent of the total road network.

Before the Weah administration left office in December 2023, an additional 400 kilometres, or about 3.1 percent of the road network, had been paved.

This brought the total paved roads to approximately 1,145 kilometres, or 8.8 percent of the national road network, before the Boakai administration took office in 2024.

According to an Op-Ed written by Deputy Minister of Information Nat Bayjay, citing data from the Ministry of Public Works and published by FrontPage Africa, the Boakai administration has paved a total of 121.87 kilometres of roads since assuming office.

This represents about 0.9 percent of the road network and brings the country’s total paved roads to approximately 1,266 kilometres, or 9.7 percent of the total network.

Meanwhile, Information Minister Jerolinmick Piah, speaking at the Ministry of Information’s regular press briefing on Tuesday, stated that the figure cited by the President was a misquotation of data provided by the Ministry of Public Works, attributing the error to the speechwriters.

According to Minister Piah, the intended statement was that “the administration has taken bold steps to increase Liberia’s paved road portfolio from less than 12 percent to at least 20 percent.”

Conclusion

Based on these findings, we conclude that President Boakai’s claim that his administration has increased Liberia’s paved roads from under 12 percent to at least 20 percent is incorrect.

The administration inherited a paved road network of about 8.8 percent and has increased it to approximately 9.7 percent—not 20 percent—although the Minister of Information has acknowledged that the President’s statement resulted from a quotation error.