So it turns out that the granny kicked the soccer player’s butt all over the football pitch and finally left it to lick its wounds (if a butt can lick its own wounds) at the back of the net.
Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf’s victory in the presidential elections in Liberia (if there can be a sense of victory in the smouldering ruins of a mineral-rich country gone spectacularly to the dogs with a little help from the West) raises and simultaneously discards all the key issues besetting the African continent. The crass ‘Footballer vs granny” headlines put paid to any possibility that the highly qualified and seriously committed Sirleaf should be taken seriously as Africa’s ‘first female president” — or, indeed, that Africa should ever be taken seriously at all, especially by its immaculately pampered and (excuse me) male chauvinist pig post-post-independence leaders.
The implication (among many others) is that Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma (if it is indeed to be) has been beaten to the punch in the race for that all-too-easy, pseudo-feminist mantle by an old dame from a West African banana republic that has long lost its bananas. South Africa, the continent’s arrogantly superior trendsetter in all things liberated, liberating and libertarian, has been licked in that critical race for the ‘Woman World Champion” presidential crown.
But that is the least of it. The race for Liberia’s presidency was never about a virile soccer player (Chelsea, AC Milan, World Cup, you name it) versus an old duck in thick glasses who should be more worried about what is happening in the grandchildren’s nursery than the testosterone-lined arena of international politics. Like Samuel Doe and Idi Amin before him, George Weah’s sole claim to the title was based on the common African’s love for the populist hero, especially one who looked good on the soccer pitch. Tarzan in a black jumpsuit. A Superman whose thighs are bigger than his brain, and the populace love him for it. It puts people like Noam Chomsky in their place (since they can’t be burned at the stake anymore).
But hey, is this an exclusively African phenomenon? The press loves to skew it that way, but answer me one thing: who is the governor of California? Who is the geezer who holds the power of life and death not just over an over-inflated budget, but over human flesh on death row? Should Arnold Schwarzenegger really have the final say on whether Tookie Williams, a reformed South Central Los Angeles gang leader descended from slave stock who has been showered with presidential honours for his work in turning disaffected youth around from the tiny death-row cell where he has sat for the past 24 years, be put to death for murders he might or might not have committed?
Not that one is comparing Weah’s politics to Schwarzenegger’s, necessarily. Weah is probably a very nice guy (take that to mean what you will about Terminator Arnie). Who knows what his politics are? But a football hero would be an all-too-easy answer to Africa’s ills (although I am not sure where I would stand if Mark ‘Feesh” Fish were to run in our presidential elections, as candidate for a revived Soccer Party, for example. He might well be a much-needed breath of fresh air in our stuffy, elitist, race-driven, monetarist environment). But that’s another story.
No, the race for the precarious presidency of Liberia was about restoring that country’s balance (if it ever had one) and healing its almost fathomless wounds — one could go so far as to say giving it an identity for the first time in history, given its origins as a random, cast-off colony for compulsorily liberated black American slaves for whom there was no space in the uptight, exclusive democracy of post-Civil War United States. Unpacking the chaos of the Liberian past and giving it some semblance of order and dignity in the mess that much of the West African region, and indeed much of the rest of the continent, has become (and from which we dare no longer hide).
So, Supergranny beat Superman. No matter that Supergranny has a string of degrees as long as your arm (a bad joke in amputated Liberia) from Harvard and other places, in economics and all sorts of other hifalutin’, un-African things, and that the cool, stylish and mellifluous George Weah probably has the equivalent of a standard-four pass. Johnson-Sirleaf is guilty of breaking the mould — just by being a serious person. And believe me, she ain’t no Condoleezza Rice. Her intentions are serious and honourable. I put my neck on the line in that regard, until proven wrong.
She has gone the further mile by guaranteeing the wimpish ‘We-Was-Robbed” Weah a job in her Cabinet as a gesture of reconciliation. What would his portfolio be, I wonder? I hope it is something subversive, like Minister of Sport, Culture, Science and Astrology, following the South African example set by Nelson Mandela. And he would have to deliver in every department.
It goes without saying that there is ample room for someone with Weah’s charisma and commitment to the African soil to play a part in its political renaissance. We need all hands to push the wheel that has long been mired in so much fog, bog and degradation. And maybe, as elsewhere, he could just bring that touch of populist charisma to the grey-suited, International Monetary Fund-bound turgidity that this formerly flamboyant continent’s politics has become, leaving Granny Johnson-Sirleaf to get on with the nasty task of dealing with George W Bush, Kofi Annan, Thabo Mbeki and the African Union. She knows all that inside out, after all, and in many ways is part of it herself.
Johnson-Sirleaf’s magnanimity in victory should be a great boost for the continent’s future. But with friends like she has in global politics and the yellow press, it is going to be plenty of unnecessary uphill. All the way.