WEAH POISED TO SCORE A WORLD FIRST
Former football star is the favourite to win Liberia’s presidential run-off, but critics doubt his off-the-field skills
Former Chelsea striker George Weah was ready to become the world’s first football star to be elected a head of state yesterday as Liberia went to the polls.
Weah, 51, who was one of the world’s best players in the 1990s, is the favourite to win in the tiny West African state’s third presidential election since a 14-year civil war ended.
The vote is to choose a successor to Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, the former World Bank economist who made history in 2005 by becoming the first woman to be elected as an African head of state.
Yesterday’s polls were a runoff vote after an 11-candidate first-round race in October. Mr Weah won 38.4 per cent of the vote, with Joseph Boakai, Ms Johnson-Sirleaf’s vice president, taking 28.8 per cent.
As neither candidate won an outright majority, the two are now in a second-round showdown that was delayed by nearly three months because of court challenges after claims of fraud.
A victory for Mr Weah would cap a remarkable rags-toriches story that started with his childhood in Clara Town, one of the poorest neighbourhoods of Monrovia, the Liberian capital.
Having begun his football career playing for local clubs for US$10 (Dh36.73), his skill caught the attention of a Cameroonian coach, who passed his name on to Arsene Wenger, then at AS Monaco.
Signed to AS Monaco for only £12,000 (Dh58,900), Weah went on to play for clubs including Chelsea, Paris Saint-Germain and AC Milan, and was the only African to be named Fifa World Player of the Year.
It is not just his football success that makes him a hero in his home country.
Despite a playboy lifestyle at the height of his career, he made many trips back to his home country as a Unicef ambassador during the civil war, promoting vocational training for former child soldiers and spending much of his own cash on coaching the national football team.
For the many Liberians who suffered under warlord and president Charles Taylor, Weah was the only one of their countrymen famous for deeds other than amputations and cannibalism.
But since entering politics at the end of his sporting career in 2004, he failed to become president in 2005 and vice president in 2011.
While most critics do not doubt his good intentions, they say the former slum boy lacks the intellectual qualifications for Liberia’s top job.
“Weah is a humanitarian but he lacks credibility, moral rectitude and strategy,” said Nelson S Jallah, a teacher at the University of Liberia. “Running a country isn’t like running the national football team.”
Benoni Urey, a losing presidential candidate who has now switched his allegiance to Mr Boakai, said: “It is a disservice to Liberia for someone as unprepared as he is to even consider running.”
Weah’s supporters point out that in recent years he has gained a college education and political experience as sena- tor for Montserrado County, which includes Monrovia. But the challenges a Liberian president faces would test even the most experienced politician.
While Ms Johnson-Sirleaf is credited with doing a good job courting foreign donors and steering the country through the 2014 Ebola crisis, which killed nearly 5,000, Liberia is still ranked as the fourth-poorest country in the world.
Weah’s agenda has also been criticised for a lack of detail beyond vague-sounding mantras about economic and social development. That is where Mr Boakai, a 73-year-old career technocrat, will hope to prevail.
Although he lacks Weah’s showmanship – his nickname is “Sleepy Joe” for his habit of nodding off during long meetings – diplomats credit him with innovative policies.
He wants to end the country’s dependency on foreign aid, and also plans a new rule demanding that all government ministers must educate their children locally rather than sending them to private schools abroad.
“If we are to build our schools to an international standard, our own ministers must have sufficient confidence in that school to send their own children there,” he said in Monrovia in October.
Something else that could play against Weah is his decision to choose Jewel Howard-Taylor, the former wife of Charles Taylor, as his running mate. Ms Howard-Taylor is now a powerful politician in her own right and claims to have little to do with her former husband, who is serving 50 years in a British jail for war crimes.
But Weah is believed to have teamed up with her because she brings a reliable bloc of votes from Bong County, a stronghold of her former husband, where she now serves as a senator.
Many are uncomfortable at the idea of the Taylor name re-entering Liberian politics at the highest level.
Of more immediate concern is the prospect of violence if the election does not deliver a clear winner either way, or is dogged again by allegations of fraud.
While October’s first round passed peacefully, the stakes are higher now that the contest is a stand-off between two candidates.