CSA’s Misstep Exposes Deep Ignorance of Liberian Public Universities’ Autonomy

IN PHOTO: CSA Chief Joekai with his latest circular to public universities

MONROVIA, Sept 27 – There are few spectacles in public administration more telling than a regulator overreaching his brief. The recent circular from Josiah F. Joekai, Jr., Director-General of Liberia’s Civil Service Agency (CSA), achieves precisely that, serving as a case study in bureaucratic presumption and misunderstanding of his scope of authority. Put plainly, lecturers are not civil servants and universities—along with their administration—do not take instruction from the CSA.

Liberia’s public universities are not colonies of the CSA or, for that matter, of any government ministry save for matters strictly financial. Their governance is rooted in charters, conferring absolute control over the hiring, firing, and discipline of faculty to university Boards of Trustees—bodies appointed directly by the President. These are the legitimate authorities, not the administrative antagonist at the CSA.

Joekai, having access to the centralized ATAPS payroll system, would have the nation believe that university lecturers are mere civil servants subject to his agency’s disciplinary hammer. This notion is as false as it is audacious. The presence of faculty names on a government payroll is a bureaucratic convenience—hardly an annexation of authority. Payroll access is not, and has never been, a substitute for governance powers conferred by statutory charter.

Moreover, only the Ministry of Finance and Development Planning (MFDP) retains any limited authority here—and even that is circumscribed to negotiations about budgets and salary disbursements, not academic freedom or personnel decisions.

The CSA’s claim to jurisdiction is, at best, a misreading of its own enabling statute; at worst, it is a brazen maneuver to project power where none exists.

The danger is not merely administrative confusion—it is the erosion of the very independence that shields Liberia’s intellectual life from political and bureaucratic interference. The Boards of Trustees, not faceless officials at the CSA, are charged with holding these institutions to standards of excellence and integrity. For the CSA to pretend otherwise is not just ignorance; it is institutional arrogance, reduced to near farce.

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