Harvard wins in Liberia

The November 8 runoff for President in Liberia will apparently pit Ellen Johnson Sirleaf against Winston Tubman.  Nobel Prize winner Sirleaf won the first round handily, with over 40% of the votes (based on a preliminary and partial count).   Election day was peaceful and the electoral mechanism seems to have performed reasonably well.  The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) observer mission said “on the whole, the elections of October 11, 2011 were conducted under acceptable conditions of freedom of voters and transparency of the process.”  Maybe not the highest praise, but good for a country in dire economic conditions and still recovering from several ferocious civil wars.

This is a credit to the Harvard-educated (Kennedy School MPA) Sirleaf, who is certainly now the odds on favorite.   But her opponent is not to be minimized.  Also Harvard-educated (law school), he heads a ticket that includes as candidate for vice president George Weah, Liberia’s star footballer.  Weah beat Sirleaf in the first round of the last presidential election but lost to her in the second. Tubman and Weah criticize Sirleaf for failing to revive the economy, tolerating corruption and once backing Charles Taylor, the former president who is on trial for war crimes.  She says they would disrupt the great progress Liberia has made.

The votes of the third-place finisher, Prince Johnson, will influence the outcome.  Johnson, whose iconic moment was presiding over the torture and murder of former President Doe, is now a born again Christian.  I wouldn’t want to know the price of getting him to throw his support to one or the other of the candidates.

But whoever wins, the story is likely to be a relatively good one, provided the second round occurs in the same fairly benign atmosphere that prevailed in the first.  It will do Sirleaf no good to win if the election is not clean and peaceful.  In any event, Liberians seem anxious to continue what Sirleaf has started, which is one of the best post-war evolutions of the past twenty years.  Some will complain that many of the drivers of conflict are still in place, as are many perpetrators of violence.  But there is something to be said for people who want to look forward, and even more to be said for those who genuinely want to root out the violence and cronyism that has plagued Liberia for far too long.

So the news is pretty good, which means you won’t read a lot about it in the American press, which is leaving Liberia to AP.  But my hat is off to the UN peacekeepers and civilians of all stripes who have worked hard in recent years to normalize Liberia, which is a tough, poor and deprived country.  So much goes wrong in this world, we should take notice when things come out right.