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Liberian footballer a favorite for voters in presidential race

He is not known for his gifts of oration, his punctuality or his command of foreign policy issues. But football giant George Weah remains the people's favorite heading in to a second round vote to choose Liberia's first post-war elected president.

Of the more than one million votes cast on Oct. 11, Weah earned some 28.8 percent in what many observers, as well as detractors, of the multimillionaire high school drop-out saw as a protest vote against the entrenched political elite in the west African country.

He won outright majorities in six of Liberia's 15 counties and took second in seven others, and his phenomenal popularity also boosted the fortunes of those politicians allied with his Congress for Democratic Change (CDC) -- founded initially as a vehicle for his candidacy.

"His candidacy crossed ethnic lines and proved that people want peace," said Prince Johnson, a former warlord elected to represent Nimba county in the Senate who was Friday the latest to publicly endorse Weah for the second round.

"While we were killing each other, he was playing football and sent us money to encourage us to go to peace," said Johnson, notorious for ordering the torture and murder of president Samuel Doe -- Weah's political hero -- and watching the execution while sipping coolly from a can of beer.

"If all of us now can choose him, it proves that he will be a stabilizing factor, that war is over."

Such sentiments may play well in Liberia, but outside they only underscore fears that Weah is ill-equipped for the rigors of government and diplomacy, especially on behalf of a country in such dire need.

There is no running water in Liberia, nor electricity, no public hospitals, no decent roads, no schools and, most pressing, no jobs. Security, despite being assured by some 15,000 peacekeepers, is tenuous, and petty crime is rising in the populated quarters of the capital where most of Weah's young supporters live.

And while Weah himself is untouched by the scourge of corruption that has robbed Liberia of hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, the same cannot be said for some of the people closest to him.

Many around him are cronies of Charles Taylor, who quit the presidency in August 2003 to end the second of two civil wars to ravage Liberia since 1989. Those close ties to west Africa's "meddler number one" could make it tough for Weah to push for Taylor's extradition to Sierra Leone to face charges of war crimes.

"It's opportunists and sycophants around him in an incredibly disorganized operation," one humanitarian activist said. "If he cannot run his group of friends, cannot organize the people who support him the most, how is he going to run the country?"

But even among his detractors, few doubt that Weah will win in a landslide come Nov. 8, facing off against political veteran Ellen Johnson Sirleaf in her second attempt to make history as Africa's first female president.

He has made overtures to the international community that are encouraging, including a vow that he will cut short his mandate to four years instead of six and urging that the UN mission remain in Liberia throughout his term.

He has also strongly endorsed a tough anti-corruption plan that provides a system of checks and balances on government revenue and spending that has been made a key condition of any future aid to Liberia.

But in a country with a bleak future, Weah represents a glimmer of hope for the masses, seen in the crowds that gather wherever he goes.

"Politics in Liberia have become so monetized, but for George it was different," said Winston Tubman, nephew of the veteran president William Tubman, who earned 9.2 percent in the October 11 polls and is likely to also support Weah in the second round.

"For him, tens of thousands of people walked for miles to hear his message, bought their own T-shirts, waited out in the sun for hours. For my supporters, well, I had to send buses."
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