Liberians attending peace talks in Ghana on Thursday appointed a relatively unknown businessman, Gyude Bryant, to lead the country’s next interim government which will take power in October.
General Abdulsalami Abubakar of Nigeria, the chief mediator in the west African-brokered peace talks, said Bryant would be the chairperson of the interim government which will remain in power until 2006.
Bryant, who is from the Liberia Action Party, was picked from a list of three candidates proposed by 18 political parties and other civil groups attending the Accra talks.
He is a leading member of the Episcopal church in Liberia but was considered to be weakest of the three contenders for the top job.
The other two candidates for were Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, a veteran opposition figure and a former United Nations official, and Rudolph Sherman from the True Whig Party which ruled Liberia non-stop for over a century, from 1871 to 1980.
A source at the talks said the decision had most people stumped.
”Bryant is a real dark horse. This is totally unexpected.”
A Liberian journalist speaking from Monrovia reacted in a similar fashion.
”I am surprised. Everybody said that Ellen would be the right person at this time because of her connection with the United Nations and the international community.
”At this time when the UN is thinking of sending in a peacekeeping force under Chapter VII of the (UN) charter, it would been helpful to have someone like her,” he said.
The journalist cited the case of neighbouring Sierra Leone, where former UN official Ahmad Tejan Kabbah presided over a government as the world’s biggest UN peacekeeping force deployed to bring back peace after a brutal civil war.
The decade-long war in Sierra Leone was formally declared over only early last year and Kabbah was re-elected with a thumping majority.
The final decision on Liberia’s next leader was taken by the country’s two rebel groups and the caretaker administration of President Moses Blah, Charles Taylor’s former deputy who succeeded the warlord turned president on August 11 when the latter resigned and quit the country.
The new interim government is to remain in power until January 2006. Elections are scheduled to be held in late 2005, according to a sweeping peace deal signed on Monday to end Liberia’s brutal four-year civil war. – Sapa-AFP