Ex-soccer star wins presidency, unofficial tally shows
MONROVIA, Liberia — George Weah, the former soccer player known around the football-watching world as the scorer of one of the greatest goals of all time, has won the Liberian presidency, provisional results show. It was his third effort to lead this nation founded two centuries ago by freed American blacks.
Weah defeated Vice President Joseph Boakai, bestknown for a curious fallingout with the president under whom he served for 12 years, Nobel Peace Prize winner Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Africa’s first democratically elected female president.
Sirleaf, 79, is stepping down after two terms in office that brought the impoverished country out of back-to-back civil wars and grappled with a deadly Ebola outbreak.
In the weeks leading up to the runoff presidential election on Tuesday, Boakai accused Sirleaf of secretly orchestrating his defeat. The vice president went all the way to the Liberian Supreme Court with his charges, and managed to delay the final runoff election by two months.
The runoff, originally set for October, was finally scheduled for the day after Christmas.
That is a day when many voters might be expected to be recuperating at home after the holiday — and the result was as many people expected. Voter turnout was low. It was a last-gasp effort by the vice president’s forces to save him from defeat, critics in Monrovia said. But in the end it did not work.
Liberia’s National Elections Commission announced on Thursday that Weah was beating Boakai handily with 98 percent of votes counted with 61.5 percent of the more than 1 million votes tallied, while Boakai had 38.5 percent. Armed guards surrounded the NEC headquarters in advance of the announcement of the results. The commission said 56 percent of the country’s 2.2 million registered voters cast ballots in the runoff vote.
Neither Weah nor Boakai made any public comment after the provisional results were released.
The elections commission stopped short of declaring Weah the outright winner at a news conference on Thursday. Final results were expected Friday.
But at Weah’s CDC Party headquarters, hundreds of people with crackling radios held to their ears erupted over the results. Party members began celebrating, though results from four of Liberia’s 15 countries were yet to be released.
This is the first time in more than 70 years the West African nation founded by freed American slaves is seeing one democratically elected government hand power to another.