10 October 2017 - Election edition

Liberia prepares to find successor to Africa's first female president ( Source: The Guardian)
Liberia’s Women Warn Male Presidential Candidates: Keep the Peace (Source: NY Times)
Liberia votes to replace Africa's 1st female leader (Source: Associated Press)
Liberia heads to the polls to elect a new president (Source: Al Jazeera)
We are ready for elections, there is no room for cheating - Liberia EC ( Euro News)

ELECTION EDITION | INTERNATIONAL NEWS ON LIBERIA

Liberia prepares to find successor to Africa's first female president ( Source: The Guardian)

At midnight on Sunday, as Liberia prepared to vote for the successor to Africa’s first female president, a rebel warlord arrived at his Monrovia residence, where a pair of menacing cement lions greeted him.

Prince Johnson, the former rebel leader who ordered the murder of President Samuel Doe in 1990 – and filmed himself drinking beer as he watched Doe’s ear being chopped off – had just wrapped up his presidential campaign in his countryside strongholds in north-east Nimba.

In the last poll in 2011, he played kingmaker, pledging his support to President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf when the election went to a run-off.

This time, however, he feels he could win it. “I don’t see why I should be kingmaker and not king,” he said, holding court at his battered desk on a verandah, wearing a dapper pink and green suit and a red tasseled hat, as cocks crew in the surrounding yard.

Not all the protagonists of Liberia’s bloody civil war are still around – the most notorious of them, Charles Taylor, is at HM Prison Frankland in County Durham, UK. But some are, capitalising on their activities during the war or denying them – or both.

History and tradition play their part in this election, even though 20% of voters are between 18 and 24, and are too young to remember the war. In a poll that will almost certainly go to a run-off, political alliances and endorsements will make all the difference – and these are often determined by the past.

One of the side-effects of this is that, despite Sirleaf’s 12 years in power, all but one of the 20 presidential candidates are male.

“Men have ruled for 158 of this country’s 170 years,” said that one candidate, MacDella Cooper. “The country has got accustomed to male leadership.”

Among the other candidates, Johnson claims that the former Liberian football star George Weah offered him an alliance.

“George Weah came to me ... and said ‘I’ll give you $1m, I want you to be my running mate.’ I said: ‘George, you are a small boy. I’ve been around here long.’

“George Weah has nothing to offer – George Weah knows about football. Can he manage the country’s resources? No. This country needs a tough disciplinary man, a tough man who will use the law to the letter to bring change.”

Instead, Weah teamed up with Taylor’s ex-wife, Jewel Howard-Taylor, while Johnson refused to promise his backing either to him or to the incumbent vice-president, Joseph Boakai, preferring to shore up his base in Nimba.

“Prince Johnson makes the people of Nimba believe that this country can still go back to war and he will be the one to save them if it does,” said the political analyst Ibrahim Al-bakri Nyei.

But all sides are using these tactics, he said.

“Disaffected by government policies, people continue to believe the economic situation under Charles Taylor was not as bad as it is now. Jewel Howard-Taylor taps into the frustration of people, making them believe Charles Taylor was a liberator.”

Johnson does not see his past as a problem.

“Liberians are naturally forgiving people,” he said. “You see, the civil war originally took place between the tribe of Samuel Doe and my tribe, but we all have reconciled. They have no reason not to forgive. They have every reason to forgive – because they started the problem.”

As they have done since the war, women camped out by the side of one of Monrovia’s busiest roads on Monday, praying for peace.

Further on, police practiced their riot operations in case the election turns violent, diverting honking traffic.

Listening to OK FM in their cars and buses, Liberians sang along with the lilting lyrics of a song popular just after the war ended. “If you know the answer, say yes. Yes. War is not the answer, say no. No.”

Liberia’s Women Warn Male Presidential Candidates: Keep the Peace (Source: NY Times)

MONROVIA, Liberia — On the eve of a presidential election that will almost certainly return male rule to Liberia after 12 years, women delivered a warning.

By the hundreds they came on Monday, streaming through the mud and gathering on a grassy field in the Airfield Junction neighborhood, across the street from the residence of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the first democratically elected female president in Africa, the most patriarchal of places. They wore white T-shirts and danced in front of a big sign.

“Don’t Touch Our Peace,” it said.

In a rare move on a continent where strongmen leaders cling to power for decades, Mrs. Sirleaf is stepping down at the end of her constitutionally mandated term and the women are giving the country back to the men. Only one woman is at the top of a ticket in Tuesday’s election, and she is not expected to win.

But across Monrovia, there is a palpable unease about whether the new president can build on one certain accomplishment of Mrs. Sirleaf: keeping the country out of war.

“We’re giving the country back to them, and we don’t know what they’re going to do with it,” said Ansahta Garnett, a women’s activist who joined other women rallying for peace on Monday. The message on her shirt added emphasis: “Remember our past.”

There is no question that Mrs. Sirleaf is running on reserves when it comes to her political capital after 12 years, during which government corruption has continued unabated, the health system has remained in shambles and unemployment among young men remains high.

But she has brought back electricity and running water throughout much of the country, built the roads that have enabled Liberians to travel freely from their villages to the cities, and allowed a level of freedom to criticize her leadership that is seldom seen in other African countries.

Most critically, she has kept the peace.

This country, founded by freed American slaves, has never done anything by half measures.

Not disease: The 2014 Ebola epidemic killed 5,000 people in Liberia, more than anywhere else, entering the urban, densely populated capital of Monrovia and laying waste to the country’s health system.

Not war: The Liberian civil war, begun in 1989, lasted 14 years, killed more than 200,000 people across four countries and introduced the world to child soldiers, a “Butt Naked Brigade” and fighters clad in Halloween fright masks and white wedding gowns.

And certainly not redemption: When the war finally ended, the pendulum swung so far that it imploded centuries of male domination on the African continent. In 2005, Liberian women, fed up with the widespread rape and indiscriminate killing that was a calling cards of the civil war, staged a democratic coup, using means both fair and foul to put in place Mrs. Sirleaf as president.

Now, near the end of her tenure, the women say ominous signs are cropping up. Last week, the male-dominated Liberian Senate moved to amend the rape law that was passed after the civil war, which had made rape a non-bailable offense.

If the new Senate amendment is passed by the House of Representatives, which is also male-dominated, men accused of rape will be able to get out of jail on bail.

“It’s almost like they’re going to reverse everything we’ve done,” Ms. Garnett said, referring to the rape amendment.

The issue is deeply felt here, since some estimates put the number of women who have been raped in Liberia at around 70 percent, a legacy of the civil war and a military coup that preceded it. Even before she was elected president, in 2005, Mrs. Sirleaf and a few female lawyers, seeking to stigmatize rape of underage girls, had asked the legislature to prescribe sentences for rapists. The farthest the legislators would go was seven years.

Still, the women took that as a step forward, and since then there have been more prosecutions for rape — something that almost never happened before. But that has also prompted complaints from many men that the country’s slow judicial system meant they were sitting in jail for months before their cases came up.

There are 20 candidates vying to replace Mrs. Sirleaf. The male contenders include Joseph Boakai, her estranged vice president; George Weah, a former soccer player; Charles Brumskine, a lawyer; and Alexander Cummings, a former Coca-Cola executive.

Then there are Prince Johnson, a former warlord who videotaped himself ordering his forces to cut off the ears of the former president Samuel Doe while Mr. Johnson sipped a beer; Benoni Urey, a former ally of Charles Taylor, the former Liberian president who is serving a 50-year sentence in a British prison after being convicted of war crimes; and George Dweh, another former warlord with six children, named Georgetta, George, George, Georgina, George Jr. and Georgecee.

Election rules dictate that if no candidate receives 50 percent of the vote plus one, the top two will go to a runoff, to be held in November.

Some of the male contenders have tried to reach out to their would-be female constituency. Mr. Cummings, the former Coca-Cola executive, said last week that if he were elected and the House passed the new rape law, he would veto it.

He has given scholarship money to the organization representing the women who work in market stalls and largely run the Liberian economy, and has portrayed himself as cleareyed on which sex does the actual work in Liberia and which one is goofing off or fighting.

“I’m a man, so I can say this,” Mr. Cummings told a market women’s group last Thursday. “If you give a woman a dollar, she will spend it well. If you give some of us a dollar, we will spend it on girlfriend business.”

Mr. Weah, the former soccer player at the top of the Congress for Democratic Change ticket, chose a woman for his running mate. But that woman, Jewel Howard Taylor, is the ex-wife of Mr. Taylor, the main instigator of the 14-year civil war, and she has vowed to put his old “agenda back on the table.”

Julius Dolo, the communications director for the Women’s Situation Room, which was established in 2011 to resolve disputes over presidential election results, said on Monday that the organization had gone to Mr. Weah’s party headquarters asking party leaders to pledge to accept the election results without resorting to violence and were refused.

One of the biggest stumbling blocks for women this year is that they are split over who should be president. Back in 2005, when Mrs. Sirleaf, a Harvard-educated global bureaucrat, was on the ballot, the women of Liberia united behind her.

Market women left their stalls to travel across the country, urging other market women to register and vote. Women even resorted to a slew of underhanded tactics.

They stole their sons’ voter ID cards to stop them from voting for Mr. Weah, who was running against Mrs. Sirleaf. They went to bars in the Monrovia suburbs and sweet-talked young men into giving up their voter ID cards in exchange for cold bottles of Club Beer.

Bernice Freeman, another women’s activist, took advantage of helpful poll workers who were allowing pregnant women and nursing mothers to cut to the front of poll lines, and passed the same baby to a succession of female voters at one polling station. Others, she advised to “act pregnant.”

These days, Ms. Freeman remains a thorn in the side of the men. Just a couple of weeks ago, when news reached her that a local man was threatening his wife with a knife, she appeared on the couple’s doorstep with other female activists, took away the man’s knife and marched him to the local police precinct.

He was not arrested, the activists recounted.

She and other female activists have been distributing copies of the documentary “Pray the Devil Back to Hell” across Liberia as a reminder to men that if they act up again and take the country back to war, the women who harassed, demonstrated and organized for peace — and then got Mrs. Sirleaf elected president — will galvanize again.

On Sunday night, Ms. Freeman spent the night on a plastic mattress in the field across from the president’s house. The next morning, she was up and dancing with around 1,500 other women.

On a makeshift stage, a mostly girl band, the Liberia Crusaders for Peace, was singing “Liberia will rise again.” Two women wearing sashes that said “Miss Tourism Liberia 2017” were dancing with the other women, in a circle, raising white handkerchiefs meant to represent peace.

The lead singer, Janet Cole, delivered a warning, her voice ringing clear above the music so she could be heard by the stream of cars that slowed down on Tubman Boulevard to watch the women.

“Remember,” she said, “when elephant and baboon fight, only the ground can suffer.”

Liberia votes to replace Africa's 1st female leader (Source: Associated Press)

Associated Press | MONROVIA, Liberia – Liberians have gathered in masses to elect a new president and legislature, an election that for the first time in more than 70 years will see one democratically elected government hand power to another.

As Africa's first female president prepares to step aside, voters called for peaceful and fair elections on Tuesday.

Twenty presidential candidates are vying for a majority in the first round of elections, while nearly 1,000 candidates from 26 parties fight for 73 seats in the House of Representatives.

Many of the more than 2.1 million voters are calling for a president who will improve the economy and access to electricity.

Liberia's health system was decimated by Ebola, a challenge for Nobel Prize-winning President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who also led Liberia's transition from a 14-year civil war.

Liberia heads to the polls to elect a new president ( Source: Al Jazeera)

Liberians are voting on Tuesday to elect a new president and legislators in a poll that will see the country's first transfer of power from one democratically elected leader to another in more than 70 years.

President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the continent's first female president, is leaving power after serving 12 years in office - the maximum allowed under the West African country's constitution.

Polls opened at 8:00am (0800 GMT) and will close at 06:00pm (1800 GMT). Twenty candidates, including the current vice president, former world footballer of the year and a model, are running for the country's top seat - with 2.2 million voters registered in the small country of 4.6 million people.

Al Jazeera's Ahmed Idris reporting from the Liberian capital, Monrovia said voting has started smoothly.

"People have been queuing up since 5:30am. They are very eager to cast their votes. A lot of passion and interest is being paid to this election," Idris said.

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Closure of UNMIL

10 October 2017 - Election edition