MONROVIA – Former Minister of Education and former Director-General of the Civil Service Agency (CSA), George Werner, has rejected claims that Liberia’s civil service reform began with salary harmonization, describing such assertions as misleading and historically inaccurate. In a detailed statement issued on Wednesday, December 31, 2025, Werner said the reform process long predated harmonization and was rooted in rebuilding a dysfunctional state apparatus, not penalizing civil servants.
Werner took direct aim at recent public remarks by former Finance Minister Samuel Tweh, arguing that presenting harmonization as the starting point of reform distorts Liberia’s governance history. “One could easily believe that Liberia’s civil-service reform story began with ‘harmonization,’” Werner said, adding bluntly, “It is a neat story. It is also false.” He stressed that reform began with confronting ghost names on payrolls, duplicate records, political hiring, and unchecked allowances.
According to Werner, the foundation of reform was laid with the Civil Service Reform Strategy approved in 2008, which outlined a disciplined and lawful agenda: payroll cleaning, professional recruitment, rationalized compensation, and institutional restructuring. He noted that this process was anchored in state-building and reinforced by President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s decision to elevate the CSA Director-General to Cabinet rank, giving reform authority and political backing at the highest level.
Werner explained that reform advanced deliberately and sequentially, ministry by ministry and agency by agency. “The sequence mattered,” he said, outlining the process as mandates, restructuring, job classification, grading, pay spine, and then phased salary adjustments. He warned that deviating from this order risked destabilizing the entire civil service system.
He credited the Governance Commission, led by the late Dr. Amos C. Sawyer, for providing constitutional and policy rigor through mandate-and-functions reviews that made restructuring lawful and credible. Werner said this groundwork enabled Liberia to adopt a national pay spine that linked equal work to equal pay, dismantled discretionary allowances, and made base pay the foundation of compensation.
Werner emphasized that allowances were not arbitrarily removed but were phased out only after institutions completed the full reform process and moved onto structured salaries. He said affordability and transparency guided the pace of reform, with changes spread across multiple budget cycles to avoid shocks. “Trust came from predictability,” Werner noted, adding that civil servants were shown clear roadmaps of where they stood and where reforms were heading.
Beyond pay, Werner said reform reshaped governance culture through Cabinet oversight, legislative engagement, written job descriptions, HR manuals, and enforcement of the Code of Conduct. He argued that, for the first time, many civil servants worked under defined expectations rather than political favor, marking a shift toward professionalism and accountability.
Another core pillar, Werner said, was rebuilding the human capacity of government by recruiting qualified Liberians at home and in the diaspora. “A government cannot perform better than the people who run it,” he stated, describing pay reform as an investment in competence, integrity, and retention rather than charity. He also highlighted millions of dollars invested in training civil servants across finance, procurement, ICT, leadership, and policy analysis.
Drawing from personal experience, Werner said he witnessed both resistance and breakthroughs while serving at the CSA, including threats during major restructurings such as dismantling the Ministry of National Security and creating new institutions like the Ministry of Finance and Development Planning and the National Public Health Institute of Liberia. He said reform progressed under difficult conditions, driven by discipline rather than ideal resources, a credibility that attracted sustained support from partners including USAID, SIDA, and the World Bank.
Werner argued that this documented and funded reform roadmap was what the CDC administration inherited, but instead of deepening the process, it replaced it with harmonization. He said harmonization collapsed salaries before institutional reforms were completed, leaving professionals worse off and creating perceptions of injustice. “For many civil servants, harmonization did not feel like reform. It felt like punishment,” Werner said, recalling how resentment eventually translated into political consequences.
Concluding, Werner cautioned against rewriting Liberia’s civil service history, insisting that harmonization was neither the beginning nor the core of reform. “Real civil-service reform was never meant to punish workers,” he said. “It was and must remain about building a state that works fairly, transparently, and in sequence.”
