MONROVIA (Reuters) – Liberia’s President George Weah on Monday told parliament he would run for reelection this 12 months after a primary term marred with graft allegations and economic downturn.
Weah, 56, took office in 2018 within the West African country’s first peaceful change of power in seven a long time and is constitutionally eligible to run again within the Oct. 10 poll.
“I will probably be coming to you shortly to ask you to renew my term, a mandate that you just give me six years ago,” he said in parliament on Monday, vowing to pursue transformation, growth and peace.
Liberia remains to be recovering from a military coup in 1980 and a 14-year civil war that led to 2003.
Weah, a former international football star who rose to fame from a slum in Monrovia, clinched a landslide run-off victory within the last general election in 2017 on the back of support from young people and the poor.
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He promised to finish endemic corruption his predecessor, Nobel Peace Prize winner Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, was widely accused of failing to handle.
But he rapidly faced the identical criticisms. In 2018, a graft scandal through which Liberia lost $100 million in newly printed central bank notes sparked widespread allegations of misuse of public funds inside Weah’s administration.
The US last 12 months imposed sanctions on three Liberian government officials, including Weah’s chief of staff, for what it said was their ongoing involvement in public corruption.
Disillusionment has been compounded by economic decline in a rustic where a lot of the population lives in deep poverty.
Weah said in October 2020 that he would only seek to serve two terms, expressing concern on the time about protests in neighbouring Ivory Coast and Guinea over their presidents’ bids for a 3rd term.
(Reporting by Alphonso Toweh; Writing by Sofia Christensen; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)
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