Liberia: Personality Politics

Liberia

Personality Politics

Liberians take to the polls Tuesday in a historic election that marks the first time in 73 years that a democratically elected leader in this West African nation will peacefully relinquish power to another elected president.

President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the African continent’s first elected female leader, swept to power on a platform of reconstruction and reform in 2005 after 14 years of civil war that devastated the nation’s infrastructure and claimed 250,000 lives.

Sirleaf, a Nobel Prize winner, will step down this year in observance of the nation’s two-mandate limit on presidential power, a move she said signals the “irreversible course that Liberia has embarked upon to sustain its peace and consolidate its young democracy.”

Her poetic waxing notwithstanding, a motley crew of presidential candidates and dire systemic issues in this nation founded by freed American slaves some 200 years ago could present serious detours in that irreversible course.

There are 20 candidates vying for the Liberian presidency – including a soccer superstar, a former Coca-Cola executive, a former warlord once videotaped torturing a former president while drinking a beer, and a super model.

And those are just the frontrunners.

Despite such diverse biographies occupying the political field, many lament that no single candidate has presented concrete reforms for rehabilitating an economy ravaged most recently by 2014’s Ebola crisis and plagued by graft, AllAfrica.com opined.

And no one – from Sirleaf to her predecessor – has moved to implement reconciliation, an action needed for the country to move past its brutal civil war.

That’s led to indecision among Liberians as to where to cast their vote. Many are relying on personalities and platitudes to make their decision, a development ushered along by candidates’ lavish campaign parties that offer cold hard cash as parting gifts for patrons, the New York Times reported.

Still, there is reason to celebrate: When Sirleaf took power 12 years ago, Liberia was a country in ruins with little electricity or transportation infrastructure, kept afloat by international aid, Bloomberg reports.

Despite setbacks during the Ebola crisis, the country has secured $4.6 billion in debt relief and increased government revenue seven-fold over the past decade.

But friction between political candidates means that there’s a chance that the results will be contested, presenting a catalyst for violence. EU observers said they’ve seen “good will” from all parties that they’ll conduct elections according to international standards, but still fear democratic slips, FrontPage Africa Online reports.

That’s not hard to imagine considering that the ex-wife of former-President Charles Taylor, currently serving a 50-year sentence for war crimes, is a vice-presidential candidate who’s said she wants to put her husband’s agenda “back on the table,” the New York Times notes.

With such a cast of characters, Tuesday’s poll will likely amount to a first-round, with a runoff election between the top two candidates to take place in November.

That peaceful transition is a milestone in and of itself, Freedom House opined. But personality politics alone won’t smooth out the trying path ahead.