On September 26, 2023 Liberia’s Minister of Finance and Development Planning Samuel D. Tweah Jr appeared in a special radio interview on ELBC which was simulcast cast on many other radio stations and online TVs in Monrovia.
Minister Tweah throughout the special interview highlighted the successes of the government of President George Weah who is a seeking a second term in office.
At around 31 minutes of the nearly 3 hours video, Mr. Tweah claimed that access to electricity in Liberia has increased like never before in the history of Liberia.
Minister Tweah words were: “Since Liberia was founded about 1 million Liberian almost 1 million Liberia now has access to electricity”.
To fact check this claim, we first sent a WhatsApp message to LEC through its Head of Communications, Mr. Adolphus Scott. He requested that we do an official letter requesting information on access to electricity in Liberia.
We wrote the letter, but LEC did not reply up to the time of production of this fact check report. We will update report when we shall have gotten reply from the LEC.
Liberia Electricity Corporation is a public utility created by the Government of Liberia through an act of legislature with the mandate to produce and supply economic and reliable electric power to the nation.
On September 27 after the publication of this fact check report, LEC replied by directing our fact checker to its website which has a banner showcasing the recent statistics.
The portal shows that 1,003,508 Liberians have access to electricity currently. However, there is no statistics on the portal to show access to electricity for 2017.
We also check for publicly available statistics on access to electricity in Liberia and found a World Bank graph on the percentage of the total population that have access to electricity in Liberia.
The World Bank graph shows that access to electricity in Liberia was at 29.8% as of 2021.
LISGIS recently announced that Liberia’s population is at 5, 248, 621.
By calculation of the World Bank data on access to electricity in Liberia and LISGIS population data, a total of 1,564,089 Liberians had access to electricity as of 2021.
We compared this statistics with the 2017 data. The World Bank’S graph shows that in 2017 access to electricity in Liberia was at 24.2%.
The World Bank population graph of Liberia shows that in 2017 Liberia had a population of 4,796,631. This means, by calculation, a total of 1,160,784 Liberians had access to electricity in Liberia in 2017.
Conclusion
Based on these facts, we therefore conclude that Minister Tweah’s claim that since Liberia was founded it is now that nearly 1 million Liberians have access to electricity is incorrect.
World Bank graph shows that in 2017, a little over 1.1 million Liberia had access to electricity, that number has however increased to over 1.5 million Liberians as of 2021.
Editor’s Note: This report was updated following response from LEC.
Local Voices Liberia, in partnership with the United Nations Development Programme, has implemented the iVerify Liberia system with the objective of strengthening capacities to address threats to information integrity, especially in view of the upcoming 2023 elections, to ensure all Liberian citizens have access to credible, reliable and verified information, everywhere and at all times.
This initiative is funded by Irish Aid, Embassy of Sweden in Monrovia, European Union Delegation in Liberia and the United Nations Peacebuilding Fund. The donors have no say in the production of this fact check report.
