A sporting chance for George Weah
Ex-footballer leads Liberian presidential elections and hopes to loosen ruling party’s 12-year hold on power.
FOOTBALLER George Weah is leading incumbent vice-president Joseph Boakai in Liberia’s presidential polls, according to early reports.
Preliminary results show that Weah has 39% and Boakai has 30% of the votes, ahead of a host of 18 minor candidates. As a 50% majority is required, this means that a second round run-off between the two is all but certain next month.
Weah’s former manager Arsene Wenger jumped the gun and congratulated his ex-player on the victory. To be honest, while it’s tempting to have a snigger about Wenger’s failed transfer dealings, I do share his hope that Weah will take the election next month.
Regardless of the result, a peaceful ballot will be another step towards cementing Liberia’s recovery from the chaos and violence of the presidencies of Samuel Doe and Charles Taylor in the 1980s and 1990s, which only really came to an end with the election of president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who defeated Weah in 2005.
If you’re not familiar with the history of this West African nation, it was actually formed as a sort of homeland for freed US slaves, and has technically been independent since 1847. However, the tension between the mixed descendants of US slaves, who developed into their own elite class, and the native population such as the Kpelle, Bassa and the Kru, eventually erupted in a military coup in 1980.
At that point, a group of young military officers led by Doe, slaughtered president William Tolbert and many members of his Cabinet, bringing an end to a century of rule by the True Whig Party. Sirleaf was Tolbert’s Finance Minister then but managed to escape.
That coup triggered decades of chaos in which the kleptocrat Doe plundered his nation’s wealth and encouraged tribal divisions. As a poorly-educated army sergeant, his 10-year rule was also characterised by a period of regression.
In 1990, he met his own violent end when he fell into the hands of rebels led by Prince Yormie Johnson who mutilated him on camera before killing him.
While Doe was a nasty piece of work, Liberia fell further into violence with warlords like Johnson and Taylor ruling parts of the country like a personal fiefdom. Taylor’s campaign slogan for president in 1997 was “he killed my ma, he killed my pa, but I will vote for him”.
Quarter of a million deaths, child soldiers often fuelled by drugs, blood diamonds (in trade with insurgents in neighbouring Sierra Leone), the bloody siege of Liberia’s capital Monrovia; all that defined Liberia for a decade during which Weah made his name as a superstar with the likes of Monaco and AC Milan.
To say that today’s Liberia has escaped the ghosts of yesterday, it isn’t true.
For a start, Johnson has re-packaged himself as a repentant democrat and born-again Christian and finished fifth in the polls.
Secondly, Weah’s presidential running mate is Jewel Howard Taylor, whose ex-husband is none other than Charles Taylor.
Taylor himself, while behind bars for human rights violations, is believed to be issuing political directives from his prison cell in the United Kingdom. The fact that Jewel and Charles are divorced but still in the same party has led many to question Weah’s wisdom, but he told the BBC that he selected her because “the people love her” and not because he was interested in letting Charles have a say in running the country.
Weah said that teaming up with Jewel was a reflection of his belief in gender equality.
While parliamentary elections are also being held, there are many parties on the scene aside from Sirleaf ’s Unity Party, Weah’s Congress for Democratic Change and Taylor’s National Patriotic Party, but they appear to be personality and tribal based rather than founded on any conventional ideology.
Weah’s election promises centre around building roads and creating jobs, as well as loosening the Unity Party’s 12-year hold on the presidency. While I am a little uneasy about the tie-up with Jewel, it’s hard to escape the feeling that a Weah presidency is the best hope for a Liberian rejuvenation.
News editor Martin Vengadesan sincerely hopes that Liberia can escape the ghosts of its past.