Liberia awaits poll result
2005-10-12 10:05
Lauren Gelfand and Zoom Dosso
Monrovia - Liberia on Wednesday awaited the initial results of elections hailed by the international community for a post-war president from among a field of lawyers and warlords led by footballer George Weah and former World Bank economist Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.
Liberians had voted on Tuesday under sunny then rainy skies in what electoral observers and the United Nations mission in Liberia described as a step towards reconciliation in the war-ravaged west African country.
However, the observers noted some inconsistencies and complaints issued in each county, especially over the long delays that kept thousands of people at their polling places for up to 12 hours.
"Liberians voted for peace today," UN special envoy Alan Doss told reporters at a briefing at the headquarters of the National Electoral Commission, hours after the closure of more than 3 000 polling stations.
High turn-out
"At all polling places I visited, I was struck by the patience, the determination and the friendliness displayed by all Liberians as they set about exercising this most precious right and responsibility."
Tuesday's polls were an internationally supported effort to cap two years of transition after the end of Liberia's second civil war since 1989.
NEC chairwoman Frances Johnson Morris told reporters preliminary results were due on Wednesday with results to be certified for October 26. If any one candidate fails to earn an absolute majority, a run-off will take place November 8.
There was high turnout among the 1.35 million voters who registered to elect a president from a field of 22 candidates.
More than half of the electorate is under age 33, many of them fighters demobilised from three warring factions in the 1999 uprising against then president Charles Taylor.
But it was footballer Weah, not the spectre of Taylor, who ignited the interest in the campaign among the youth, his footballing prowess and unblemished reputation more important to many than his lack of formal education and political naiveté.
His top rival, former UN and World Bank economist Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, was counting on the women who make up just over half of the voting population to vault her into office.
Security was tight in the capital for the election, with camouflage-clad UN peacekeepers sharing crowd control duties with newly trained members of the Liberian national police force, under the whirling blades of UN helicopters overhead.
Hundreds of observers from west African neighbours and international bodies were also in place, helping to ensure that neither ink mark nor ballot went astray.
What to do with the more than 100 000 former combatants, often battling drug problems as a consequence of marijuana and amphetamine abuse forced by the hands of their commanders, is only one of the problems facing whomever becomes president.
With illiteracy estimated at 85% and a comparable unemployment rate, Liberia has almost no industry and few prospects for foreign investment without guarantees it will not revert to war or leave behind the institutional looting that is notorious even within the corruption-prone continent.