Alternative National Congress political leader Alexander B. Cummings, has launched a forceful criticism of a long-running natural resource concession system.
Cummings described the system as a decades-old governance failure that continues to enrich foreign companies and political elites while ordinary Liberians remain poor.
He spoke during a live podcast interview on extractive sector. Cummings argued that successive governments have repeatedly failed to reform the way mining, gold, diamond and iron ore concessions are negotiated and monitored.
The result, he said, has been a cycle in which the vast natural wealth leaves the country, while the communities that host these operations continue to suffer from underdevelopment.
Cummings said, Liberia has spent years “doing the same thing with the same results.”
He warned that concession regime has become a “symbol of policy stagnation rather than national progress.”
At the center of his criticism, is the widening gap between resource extraction and public benefit.
He noted that counties and towns sitting on some of the richest mineral deposits still lack paved roads, functioning clinics, decent schools, electricity, safe drinking water, and modern communications infrastructure.
For communities living closest to mining operations, Cummings said, the contradiction is impossible to ignore, their land produces wealth, but their lives show little evidence of it.
He pointed to recurring reports from the Liberia Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, which he said, continue to expose an imbalance in the sector, where concession companies appear to enjoy the greatest rewards while local citizens see little direct benefit.
“The problem is not new.” He argued that many of the weaknesses now visible in concession framework can be traced back to the administration of former president Charles Taylor, when the country had emerged from conflict and urgently seeking foreign investment.
Rather than being corrected, he said, those flaws persisted under former president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, and remained unresolved throughout the administration of former president George Weah.
That continuity, Cummings argued, represents one of deepest governance failures, different administrations, but the same broken concession outcomes.
In one of his sharpest attacks, Cummings referenced the long-standing controversy surrounding Bea Mountain Mining Corporation, saying: “the concerns over transparency, community benefits and accountability did not begin recently.”
Instead, he suggested that the company has become a powerful example of how concession model has repeatedly failed to convert resource extraction into visible social development.
He said, communities near major mining operations continue to wait for promises that were written into concession agreements years ago, promising jobs for local youth, scholarship opportunities, hospitals, schools and community development funds.
For many residents, those commitments have either been delayed, poorly implemented, or in some cases never fulfilled.