MONROVIA: Liberians on Friday feted former football star George Weah’s presidential victory in the country’s first democratic transfer of power in seven decades scarred by civil wars, political assassinations and an Ebola crisis.
Weah, idolized in Liberia as “Mister George,” is set to replace Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who took over in 2006 at the helm of the west African state founded by freed US slaves. He will be sworn in on Jan. 22.
The 51-year-old starred at top-flight European clubs Paris Saint-Germain and AC Milan in the 1990s, before briefly playing for Chelsea and Manchester City toward the end of his career.
Weah, who entered politics after retiring from football in 2002, easily beat Vice President Joseph Boakai in Thursday’s run-off vote, gaining 60.5 percent of the ballot against 38.5 percent for his rival. Weah won in 14 of Liberia’s 15 counties.
“My fellow Liberians, I deeply feel the emotion of all the nation. I measure the importance and the responsibility of the immense task which I embrace today. Change is on,” Weah said on Twitter.
Congratulations poured in from all quarters. French President Emmanuel Macron hailed the ex-star striker’s victory, saying: “Congratulations to Mister George for this election! Great moment for Liberia!”
His former club Paris Saint-Germain tweeted: “We knew George Weah way before he became President-elect of Liberia. Congrats to the PSG and world football legend on the latest chapter of his brilliant career!!!”
Hundreds of his supporters took to the streets of the capital Monrovia, singing, dancing and embracing each other as news of his victory spread.
“I’ve never been so happy in all my life. We were in opposition for 12 years. We’re going to make history, like the children of South Africa did,” said Josephine Davies, vice president of the youth wing of Weah’s Congress for Democratic Change.
Ahead of Thursday’s result announcement, armed and helmeted police deployed outside the poll body’s headquarters as Weah supporters gathered and began rejoicing.
Sirleaf’s office said it had set up a team “for the proper management and orderly transfer of executive power from one democratically elected president to another,” adding that it included several ministers.
The tumultuous events of the past 70 years in Liberia, where an estimated 250,000 people died during back-to-back civil wars between 1989-2003, have prevented a democratic handover from taking place since 1944.
Sirleaf’s predecessor Charles Taylor fled the country in 2003, hoping to avoid prosecution for funding rebel groups in neighboring Sierra Leone. Two presidents who served prior to Taylor were assassinated.
The UN and regional bloc ECOWAS hailed the peaceful nature of the vote, with UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres praising “the government, political parties and the people of Liberia for the orderly poll,” which the EU said “generally respected constitutional rules.”
The Sirleaf administration, elected in 2005, guided the nation out of the ruins of war and through the horrors of the 2014-16 Ebola crisis, but is accused of failing to combat poverty and corruption.
Boakai, who served in Sirleaf’s government for 12 years, was “riding on a ticket with excess baggage,” Liberian daily Frontpage Africa said Friday.
“In the eyes of many, nepotism, corruption, waste, and a messy educational system have dogged the government’s legacy, and its by-product is a shrinking economy,” it said.
Weah, the only African ever to have won both FIFA’s World Player of the Year and the coveted Ballon D’Or, missed out on the presidency in a 2005 bid.
Weah’s latest campaign was not without controversy, however.
He has drawn some criticism for picking Jewel Howard-Taylor, the powerful ex-wife of former warlord and president Charles Taylor, as his vice president. Taylor is serving a 50-year sentence in a British jail for war crimes.
Weah also had the backing of a notorious former warlord Prince Johnson who sipped a beer as his men brutally tortured former president Samuel Kanyon Doe to death. He was also allegedly supported by President Sirleaf.
Liberians celebrate ex-soccer star’s victory
Liberians celebrate ex-soccer star’s victory
Russia slams Western peacekeeping plan for Ukraine
- “The new militarist declarations of the so-called Coalition of the Willing and the Kyiv regime together form a genuine ‘axis of war’,” Zakharova
- She called the plans drafted by Kyiv’s allies “dangerous” and “destructive“
MOSCOW: Russia on Thursday slammed a plan for European peacekeepers to be deployed to Ukraine as “dangerous” and dubbed Kyiv and its allies an “axis of war,” dousing hopes the plan could be a step toward ending the almost four-year-war.
US President Donald Trump has been pushing the warring sides to strike a deal to halt the conflict, running shuttle diplomacy between Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky and Russia’s Vladimir Putin in a bid to get an agreement across the line.
An initial 28-point plan which largely adhered to Moscow’s demands was criticized by Kyiv and Europe, and now Russia has slammed the attempts to beef-up protections for Ukraine should an elusive deal be reached.
Ukraine’s allies said they had agreed key security guarantees for Kyiv at a summit in Paris earlier this week, including a peacekeeping force.
But in its first comments since the summit, Moscow said the statements were far away from anything the Kremlin could accept to end its assault.
“The new militarist declarations of the so-called Coalition of the Willing and the Kyiv regime together form a genuine ‘axis of war’,” Russia’s foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in a statement.
She called the plans drafted by Kyiv’s allies “dangerous” and “destructive.”
The remarks come as Russian strikes plunged hundreds of thousands in Ukraine into darkness, leaving families without heat in below-freezing temperatures — attacks that Zelensky said showed Russia was still set on war.
- ‘Legitimate military targets’ -
European leaders and US envoys announced earlier this week that post-war guarantees for Ukraine would include a US-led monitoring mechanism and a European multinational force to be deployed when the fighting stops.
But Moscow has repeatedly warned that it would not accept any NATO members sending peacekeeping troops to Ukraine.
“All such units and facilities will be considered legitimate military targets for the Russian Armed Forces,” Zakharova said Thursday, repeating a threat previously uttered by Putin.
Zelensky also said Thursday that a bilateral agreement between Kyiv and Washington for US security guarantees was “essentially ready for finalization at the highest level with the President of the United States” following talks between envoys in Paris this week.
Kyiv says legally-binding assurances that its allies would come to its defense are essential to convince Russia not to re-attack if a ceasefire is reached.
But specific details on the guarantees, the European force, and how it would engage have not been made public.
Zelensky said earlier this week he was yet to receive an “unequivocal” answer of what they would do if Russia does attack again after a deal.
Zelensky has also said that the most difficult questions in any settlement — territorial control of the eastern Donbas region and the fate of the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant — were still unresolved.
- Russian strikes cut heating -
Ukraine was meanwhile scrambling to restore heating and water to hundreds of thousands of households after a new barrage targeted energy facilities in its Dnipropetrovsk and Zaporizhzhia regions.
“This is truly a national level emergency,” Borys Filatov, mayor of Dnipropetrovsk’s capital Dnipro, said on Telegram.
He announced power was “gradually returning to the hospitals” after the blackouts forced them to run on generators. The city authorities also extended school holidays for children.
About 600,000 households in the region remained cut off from power in Dnipropetrovsk, Ukrainian energy company DTEK said.
In a post on social media, Zelensky said the attacks “clearly don’t indicate that Moscow is reconsidering its priorities.”
In addition to the unrelenting pummelling of Dnipropetrovsk, Russia pressed on with its ground assault on the region, claiming to have taken another village there.
It is not one of the five Ukrainian regions that Moscow claims to have annexed.
