Ex-Soccer Star George Weah Nears Goal Of Becoming President of Liberia

BOBOJAY December 23, 2017 0

Liberia will hold a delayed presidential run-off vote on December 26 with former soccer star George Weah facing Vice-President Joseph Boakai.

 

Liberian presidential poll was held up for several weeks by a court challenge by the candidate who came third in round one in October, which Weah won with 39 percent of the vote.

 

Weah, a national hero in Liberia, became the first non-European to win European soccer’s player of the year award in 1995, the same year he picked up the African and world player of the year awards.

 

“King George”, as Weah’s supporters call him, is wildly popular among the youth and the disenfranchised, especially in the shanties of the rundown seaside capital Monrovia. Many of them feel they have not benefited from Liberia’s post-war recovery, a sentiment that has counted against Boakai.

 

Weah, 51, has served as a senator from the opposition Congress for Democratic Change since 2015, after returning home from an international soccer career to immerse himself in politics. As a political novice in 2005, he lost to Johnson Sirleaf in a presidential election.

 

Liberians are eager for change after Nobel Peace Prize-winning Sirleaf’s 12-year rule, which sealed a lasting peace in a country that for decades had only known war, but which has failed to tackle corruption or much improve a lot of the poorest.

 

-Reuters

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