Twice in nine months, the official who oversees Liberia’s only music collecting society has stood in front of the artists that society exists to pay and said the same thing: this is not royalties. On 4 October 2024, at the Copyright Society of Liberia’s (COSOL) fourth anniversary event, Liberia Intellectual Property Office (LIPO) Director-General Garmai Koboi told the gathering, “The welfare package (Checks) given to members of the creativity industry is not ‘royalties’.” On 22 July 2025, ahead of Liberia’s 178th Independence Day, she said it again, more bluntly: “Let me be clear to you guys, today’s event is not about Royalties Distribution but Welfare disbursement.”
Both statements came at events built around the same cheques going into the same artists’ hands. Neither was a slip. Koboi is the senior government official responsible for the agency that created COSOL, and she chose the word “welfare” over “royalties” deliberately, on the record, twice.
That distinction matters because COSOL has, at other moments, treated royalty collection as exactly the legal power it was built to exercise, including against a third party it threatened to sue.
What the law actually gives COSOL#
Liberia’s Intellectual Property Act, 2016, adopted 14 June 2016, sets out copyright owners’ exclusive rights in Section 9.6. Item (v) of that section covers “public performance of the work,” one of the rights a copyright owner may authorise others to exercise, confirmed directly against the Act’s own text. The 2016 Act, however, created no collecting society to administer that right. COSOL did not exist in statute; it was established three years later, in 2019, when LIPO and the Ministry of Commerce and Industry signed an administrative regulation setting it up as, in its own officers’ description, the secretariat and enforcement arm of LIPO’s Copyright Department. A further 2021 administrative regulation, cited by COSOL itself as “the 2021 Administrative Regulation for Copyright License Tariff for the use of Music and Movies in Sound Recording,” put a tariff behind that public-performance right at Section 5.3.
COSOL’s own Program Officer, Jamus P. Bannah, stated the resulting mandate plainly at the society’s third-anniversary event on 17 August 2023: “COSOL collects royalties for Liberian Artistes in Liberia and those outside of Liberia.” At that same event, an unnamed artist living with a disability said he had registered with COSOL but had not received any benefit; Bannah’s reply was that the matter would be discussed after the programme. No later source checked reports whether it was.
COSOL has enforced this mandate against someone else#
The clearest evidence that COSOL treats “collect and distribute royalties” as a real, usable legal power is what it did to a third party, not what it has told its own members. In November 2022, COSOL’s then Executive Director, Atty. Prince E. Decker, wrote to the organisers of the Liberia Music Awards, sponsored by Lonestar Cell MTN, warning that staging the ceremony without a public-performance licence would breach Section 9.6(v) of the 2016 Act and Section 5.3 of the 2021 tariff regulation. COSOL said it would seek monetary penalties and an injunction halting the ceremony unless the organisers obtained a licence first. Tony Karbedeh, then Acting President of the Liberia Musician Union, backed the threat publicly, saying the awards had run for years without paying for the music it used.
That is a collecting society asserting, under a specific statute and a specific tariff section, that it is owed money for the public performance of music, and that it will go to court to get it. It is not the language of welfare.
The welfare events, twice#
Set that against what COSOL’s own distribution events actually are. At the October 2024 anniversary event, Koboi’s remark that the cheques were “not royalties” came alongside a separate warning to musicians not to give their songs to radio presenters or DJs free of charge in exchange for airplay, a comment about the same underlying public-performance economy the 2022 MTN Liberia Music Awards letter invoked, but one she still declined to connect to the payments being handed out that day.
At the July 2025 event, at COSOL’s Monrovia offices, Koboi was more direct: “today’s event is not about Royalties Distribution but Welfare disbursement.” LIPO Deputy Director-General Clarence H. Cole, who chairs COSOL’s Advisory Council, called it “a testament to your hard work and dedication,” language of appreciation, not of a calculated payment against licensed use. COSOL Executive Director James Yandan Draper, present at the same event, did not address the welfare-versus-royalties distinction at all; his remarks were about membership growth, telling attendees, “The more our membership grows better, we will have more incentives and opportunities for you rightsholders.”
Koboi also used the July 2025 event to describe a second, still-unrealised revenue line: getting betting companies to pay for using musicians’ songs during promotional airtime on radio. Her own words framed it as work still to be done, not a running arrangement: she said COSOL intended “to ensure that your music played by betting companies during the promotional hours on radio is paid for before playing.” No later source checked reports whether that collection has started. It is the second such announced-but-unconfirmed revenue stream on COSOL’s record; at the 2023 anniversary event, Draper had announced “an upcoming Memorandum of Understanding between COSOL and the Ministry of Transport” to have commercial vehicle operators pay for the registered music they play to passengers. No source checked reports that MOU being signed, either.
No figures anywhere#
Across every source checked for this record, from COSOL’s 2022 enforcement letter to its 2025 welfare event, no collection total, no distribution total, and no current membership count appears. No source gives a Liberian-dollar figure for what COSOL has collected under its 2021 tariff, from any category of licensed user, in any year between 2020 and 2026. No source reports an event at which COSOL or LIPO paid out money that either body itself called a royalty, as opposed to welfare, to a registered artist.
What this means for artists#
If you are a Liberian songwriter or performer, the public-performance right COSOL invoked against the Liberia Music Awards in 2022 is a real entitlement under Section 9.6(v) of the 2016 Act, and COSOL is the body the 2019 regulation and 2021 tariff built to collect it on your behalf, including, as that 2022 letter shows, by threatening legal action against users who do not pay. Registering with COSOL is not pointless on that basis alone.
What this record says is that the money COSOL has actually been seen handing to its own registered members, at its two most recent public distribution events, has been described by LIPO’s own Director-General, in her own words, as welfare rather than a royalty calculated against specific licensed use. If you are weighing whether a COSOL cheque represents your share of what a radio station, a vehicle operator or a betting company paid for playing your song, the clearest answer in the public record, from the agency’s own leadership, is that it has not, so far, been presented to you as that at all.
Liberia is not alone in this gap between a collecting society’s statutory language and what it can show it has actually distributed. The Gambia’s Collecting Society was called “fully operational” by one government official in February 2025, only for a different ministry’s Permanent Secretary to describe making it work as a future plan sixteen months later. What distinguishes COSOL’s record is sharper: it is not two different officials disagreeing about status. It is the same official, twice, naming the one thing the money she was handing out was not.