Liberia buzzed with election fever on Sunday as Nobel laureates, President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and women’s activist Leymah Gbowee took to the streets in a boost for the incumbent’s re-election bid.
Throbbing music, chanting and dancing supporters leaning out of car windows and dressed in party colours weaved their way through the traffic-clogged streets of the small seaside capital, while United Nations (UN) and riot police kept close watch.
Gbowee, who is credited with leading women to defy feared warlords and push men toward peace during one of Africa’s bloodiest wars, in which some 250 000 died between 1989 and 2003, threw her support behind Sirleaf’s campaign.
“I always say to people my work is advocating women’s involvement in politics. If I support anyone other than a woman it would be hypocrisy,” Gbowee told Agence France-Presse and French international radio.
The joint Nobel Peace Prize winner received a rousing airport welcome from her fellow women’s rights activists who greeted her in their white t-shirts when she arrived in her home country on Sunday morning.
They later gathered on a dusty soccer field where they would pray for peace during the civil war where Sirleaf came to greet the women and thank them after addressing supporters holding a rally at a stadium in the capital.
Turnout was a lot lower than the final opposition Congress for Democratic Change (CDC) rally on Friday where some 200 000 people brought the capital to a standstill for Winston Tubman and his crowd-pulling running mate, the football star George Weah.
Nobel criticism
The opposition has strongly criticised the awarding of the prestigious Nobel Prize to Sirleaf so close to election day. While a darling of the international community, the president faces a tougher crowd at home.
The grandmother is hailed for social development, the fight for women’s rights and steps to reconstruct a nation destroyed by war but extreme poverty, 80% unemployment and rampant corruption persist at home.
“You cannot rebuild a broken country in six years,” Sirleaf, wearing a green hat and Unity Party scarf, told AFP on the sidelines of the rally.
“This country was totally destroyed. Dysfunctional institutions, destroyed infrastructure, no laws. So it took us time to rebuild and we have made a lot of progress. That is why we get the recognition from the international community and from the majority of the Liberian people.
“Many of their lives have changed, not everyone, we still have a few things to do and that is why we want to make sure we are re-elected.”
Despite ushering in much-needed foreign investment and getting billions of dollars in debt-relief, Sirleaf is criticised for failing to implement the recommendations of a South African-style Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) report naming her on a list of people who should be banned from public office for 30 years for backing warlord-turned-president Charles Taylor.
“What the president could have done is try to unite the country, heal the wounds and make apologies for, show remorse for, what went on …” her rival Tubman told AFP in an interview in his garden in Monrovia on Saturday.
Keeping an eye out
Tubman attributes the country’s stability and peace to “the international presence and the huge and very costly UN force that is still here”.
Liberia relies heavily on an 8 000-strong UN peacekeeping mission (UNMIL). Its own army is still not operational and a UN-trained national police force largely unable to secure the country outside of Monrovia.
The presidential and legislative elections on Tuesday are being closely watched as a test for Liberia’s eight-year peace, after a war fought by drugged child soldiers, and notorious for widespread rape and ethnic violence.
UN and regional security forces are on high alert for potential instability after recent post-poll conflict in neighbouring Ivory Coast saw armed fighters flooding into the country, hiding in the dense rainforest on the border.
Some 1.8 million Liberians have registered to vote on Tuesday.
A total of 16 candidates are in the running, and in parliament, 15 senatorial seats and 81 legislative seats are up for grabs.