LEC Managing Director, Mr. Mohammed Sheriff
The Liberia Electricity Corporation (LEC), through its Managing Director Mohammed Sheriff, has outlined factors responsible for the inadequate supply of electricity to public and private institutions, households and businesses across Monrovia and other parts of the country. In recent times, the supply of electricity has been unstable in Monrovia and other parts of the country, prompting the LEC to revert to load shedding and outages. According to him, the LEC was receiving over 50 megawatts of electricity from Ivory Coast, but a technical fault on its hydro made the neighboring country to loss about 200 megawatts generation of electricity.
Mr. Sheriff pointed out that Liberia has been identified and placed on “red line” for being indebted to Ivory Coast, dating back from the immediate past government. He made these assertions when he appeared before the Plenary of the Liberian Senate on Tuesday, March 17. He maintained that as a result of Liberia’s failure to settle its indebtedness and the technical fault on Ivory Coast’s hydro, the neighboring country took a decision to reduce the supply of electricity to Liberia from over 50 megawatts to around 10megawatts. “When that happened (the situation in Ivory Coast), their first dispatch of priority is basically to look internally and supply themselves before they can look externally,” he stated. He admitted that the decision taken by Ivory Coast to lower its supply of electricity to Liberia, affected the LEC’s capacity to address the demand of electricity to thousands of its customers back home.
He emphasized that the situation compelled the LEC to revert to load shedding and outages in the supply of electricity in Liberia. Speaking further, Mr. Sheriff disclosed that the demand for electricity was about 92 megawatts when he took over the LEC . He stated that with the support of various stakeholders, the corporation was able to increase the demand to about 140 megawatts. He said the entity has been working with the Independent Power Producers (IPPs) to increase the generation of electricity. “The way the generation aspect looks like, you don’t build generation overnight. The minimum you take to build generation facility is about 12 to 18 months. So what we did, we decided to work on our thermal plant and our hydro to repair some of our engines, try to introduction some innovations,” he added.
“Inspite of the fact that we still have some outstanding debts that were brought forward with Cote D’Ivoire, yet still Cote D’Ivoire was supplying Liberia. So for the first time in many years, the stability was from all the way June to December and part of January (this year) without outages,” he noted. He recalled that the LEC reduced load shedding from 8 to 12 hours to almost zero when it was fully receiving the over 50 megawatts from Ivory Coast. He observed that the supply of electricity across Montserrado and other areas was stable between June to December 2026, leveraging on the importation of electricity from Ivory Coast.
Mr. Sheriff mentioned that the domestic generation of electricity was optimized and increased following engagements with major stakeholders. He asserted that the entity also intends to expand connections in various counties across Liberia. He pointed out that studies would be conducted to identify the areas and communities that would benefit. Mr. Sheriff noted that every year, the corporation intends to connect about 100,000 customers, with 60,000 of that number connected to the grid, while the remaining 40,000 would be connected off-grid. He said the LEC would continue to work with the private sector to grow its generation capacity. “Our goal between now and 2030 is to have the five to seven hundred megawatts,” he said.
