After years of instability brought on by the latest civil war and the Ebola crisis, Liberia’s appears to be starting to rebound after the election of new President George Manneh Weah and a recent investment and trade conference.
Liberia has endured and overcome more than a decade of civil war, was plagued by an Ebola crisis and was declared Ebola-free in May 2015 as West Africa continues to experience flare ups.
At a trade and investment conference held last spring in Liberia’s Grand Bassa County, Minister of Public Works Mabutu Vlah Nyenpan told prospective investors that Liberia has “countless opportunities in the infrastructure sector that both national and international investors can take advantage of to maximize profits while our pro-poor development agenda is attained.” The government is focused on lifting its citizenry “out of abject poverty,” he said.
The Grand Bossa Investment Conference is to become an annual event highlighting potential investment opportunities.
In an exclusive interview from Grand Bassa County, Liberia, Senator Jonathan L. Kaipay told the writer the conference was organized around his legislation, which was signed into law. The legislation included the establishment of a free zone in Grand Bassa to create manufacturing companies and transform Liberian raw material into finished products.
The ultimate goal, according to Kaipay, is to transform Grand Bassa County into “an economic hub for economic activity in Liberia.” The plan is to have the conference act as a catalysis to transform Grand Bassa’s capital city, Buchanan, into a commercial city.
The senator, who is trained as an accountant, made a name for himself in project management in Ghana and as the United Methodist Church (Liberia’s largest Christian denomination) project manager. During his time working for the church, he helped coordinate international funding for various projects.
Bleejay Innis, the son of the bishop of the United Methodist Church, who studied International Business at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, said Kaipay didn’t come from a political background. He said, in an interview from Washington, D.C., the people saw Kaipay through the work he did for the church “and essentially asked him to become a political leader and represent them and their county.”
Innis, who, along with the senator, helped develop the conference, said his father, Bishop John G. Innis, put the two together.
Innis said, “He connected with me in Washington, D.C.,” where the father helped familiarize Kaipay with the international business world. Kaipay began traveling in America, putting together meetings and introducing Innis to many of his contacts.
Innis and Kaipay shared the vision of bringing development to Grand Bassa, where Innis lived as a child and where Kaipay became senator. One of their biggest hurdles was creating a mechanism that facilitated potential investors. Liberia, said Innis, had many obstacles to overcome, including devastation left by the civil war and the Ebola virus.
Grand Bassa has much potential, which both Kaipay and Innis used the conference to highlight. According to the conference Investors’ Guide, “Economic diversification, agro-processing and manufacturing are vital for Liberia. … The focus is to move away from raw commodities, toward priority value chains—cocoa, rubber, palm oil, fisheries and aquaculture, horticulture, rice and cassava (and timber). All of which are at the core of Grand Bassa’s growth and development aspirations.”
After a century of signing its first rubber concession agreement with Firestone, the country is still only an exporter of raw undervalued rubber. “What Liberia needs is a manufacturing plan to transform one of Liberia’s value chain commodities [rubber] into a high-end finished product, which can be used in the home, hospitals, schools, etc.,” said Innis.
Grand Bassa tourism offers unique and competitive sites that remain relatively untapped. It includes a flat coastline with a narrow coastal plain that extends inland from the seashore and gradually rises to the hilly hinterland of the county. The county has several major rivers, including the St. John, Farmington, Mechlin, New Cess, Illor, Timbo and Benson. The shore is broken by estuaries, tidal creeks and rocky capes.
“The conference was impressive,” said participant and global travel facilitator Abdul Akbar Muhammad. It “showed the interest of the Liberian people,” which included students from the local community college and students from the capital city Monrovia, said the international representative of the Nation of Islam. He was also impressed with the number of Africans in attendance from other countries looking for potential investments “along with the Europeans and a few Americans.”
Muhammad, who has sponsored many tours to Africa and was invited by Vice President Jewel Howard Taylor, said the political leader was “really aggressive about getting retired African-American teachers” to come and work in Liberia.
Next steps? Kaipay said, “We’ve already created a secretariat that will run the day-to-day operations.” Once they “finish renovation on the new office space,” and finish hiring staff, they “will begin to process the conference results and begin planning for the second annual investment conference.”
He added, “We are now moving forward with receiving [and reviewing] some of the companies showing interest in doing business in Liberia in Grand Bassa. We’re going to review the prospects and their challenges … and how their businesses can be sustained and how their businesses benefit both Liberia and the investors.”