By Mark Mengonfia, MONROVIA
Liberia
Liberia’s presidential election Wednesday appeared headed for a run-off, with the top candidates neck and neck and the votes nearly fully counted.
President George Weah, who is seeking a second term, had 43.8% of the
vote with his main challenger Joseph Boakai at 43.4%, according to the National
Elections Commission. A candidate needs more than 50% of the vote to win.
Once the votes from this round
are finalized, the run-off will take place within 15 days.
The Oct. 10 election is the
tightest in the nearly two decades since the end of the country’s civil war
that killed some 250,000 people.
The final tally will have to wait until
the end of the week, when re-voting is expected in two places in Nimba county
because ballot boxes were stolen, said the commission. Nimba is an opposition
stronghold but the outcome will not significantly alter the results or push
anyone across the finish line, analysts said.
Weah,
57, a former international soccer star, came to power six years ago in the
first democratic transfer of power in the West African nation since the end of the country’s
back-to-back civil wars between 1989 and 2003.
Weah won that election amid
high hopes brought about by his promise to fight poverty and generate
infrastructure development in Africa’s oldest republic. His goal, he had said
in 2017, was to push Liberia from a low-income country to a middle-income one.
But Weah has been accused of
not living up to key campaign promises that he would fight corruption and ensure
justice for victims of the country’s civil wars.
This is the second time he has
faced Boakai, whom he defeated by more than a 20% margin in the 2017 election.
Boakai, who served as vice
president under Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Africa’s first democratically elected
female leader, campaigned on a promise to rescue Liberia from what he called
Weah’s failed leadership, dubbing himself and his running mate “Rescue 1” and
“Rescue 2.”
Many election watchers thought
there would be a stronger third party candidate to spread the vote but that
wasn’t the case, said Ibrahim Al-bakri Nyei, political analyst and director at
the Ducor Institute for Social and Economic Research.
“There’s no clear winner. It
shows the president is strong in some areas, but it also shows there is high
public discontent with the government given the huge support for the
opposition,” he said.
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