Could Joseph Boakai do a Biden in Liberia’s run-off election?
At 78, Boakai is the veteran bridesmaid of Liberian politics; like his American counterpart, he runs against a populist megastar with a comical grasp of governance. Will the run-off settle it for the old man?
Pit-stop before the run-off: Joseph Nyuma Boakai Sr at a campaign rally. Photo: Joseph Boakai social media
If Joseph Boakai wins Liberia’s high-stakes presidential run-off on 14 November, he will be taking a page out of US President Joe Biden’s playbook.
This outcome is very probable given the two elder statesmen’s uncanny similarities.
Their first names (Joseph) and initials (JB) are identical. With November birthdays separated by two years and ten days, both men have been married since the 1970s and raised four children.
Boasting decades-long careers in government, Boakai, 78, and Biden, 80, served for two overlapping terms as vice presidents to political titans before launching presidential bids of their own. While Boakai governed for twelve years in the shadow of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Liberia’s (and Africa’s) first elected woman head of state, Biden assumed a similar role for eight years as second-in-command to Barack Obama, America’s first black president.
Having both adopted mainstream political platforms that centre middle- and working-class needs and desires, leading opposition candidate Boakai and so-called ‘leader of the free world’ Biden are products of nations whose fates remain entangled by histories of slavery, abolition, migration and colonisation. As Africa’s first independent republic, Liberia was founded in the mid-19th century by free blacks fleeing racial discrimination and economic servitude in the United States. A ‘special relationship’ is said to exist between the two countries, yet Liberia’s socio-economic transformation has always been subordinated to America’s strategic interests.
Although Boakai and Biden come from very different contexts, they represent mirror protagonists in a factual tale about the dangers of clueless megastars, such as current footballer-turned-Liberian-president George Weah and former TV mogul-turned-commander-in-chief of the United States Donald Trump, who have no business in elected office. The two elder statesmen epitomise the steady hand of experience amidst a populist tidal wave sweeping across much of the so-called Global South and North.
Yet, they are far from perfect. Neither Boakai nor Biden has indicated any ideological devotion to revolutionary reform.
When asked in a 2017 presidential debate about why he failed to curb Sirleaf’s excesses, Boakai elicited rebuke for admitting that he was a ‘parked race car’ lacking authority for 12 years. Although the former vice president appears to have no conspicuous skeletons in his closet, he does keep controversial bedfellows. This time around, Boakai countered anxiety about his health by selecting Jeremiah Koung, a younger running mate and recently elected senator from Nimba County, Liberia’s second most populous sub-political division. However, Koung’s alliance with infamous warlord-turned-legislator Prince Yormie Johnson has raised concerns about the ticket’s genuine commitment to war-era criminal accountability.
Biden’s choice of vice president – Kamala Harris, former senator of electoral-college-rich California – and his 2019 vow to end America’s ‘forever wars’ have equally come under scrutiny. Despite his many foreign policy mishaps, such as withdrawing US troops prematurely from Afghanistan and bolstering Israel’s disproportionate, genocidal violence against Palestinian civilians in Gaza, Biden has returned a modicum of respectability to the US presidency by defending multilateralism. Following Weah’s six-year irrelevance in international deliberations, it is expected that Boakai will similarly endeavour to restore Liberia’s prominence in regional bodies such as the African Union, Economic Community of West African States and Mano River Union.
Having lost to Weah in Liberia’s third post-war presidential run-off in 2017, Boakai embodied the first casualty of his country’s populist turn. Yet, unlike opposition candidates in West Africa who have been largely unsuccessful at defeating incumbents, the former vice president garnered enough votes to upset Weah’s attempts at re-election this October. In spite of the Liberian president’s glaring violation of campaign finance regulations, reported by both domestic and international observers, he failed to successfully marshal the power and purse of the presidency to secure a first round landslide.
This is as much a testament to the ruling party’s polarising rhetoric – in which anyone critical of Weah is branded an ‘enemy of the state’ – as it is indicative of the electorate’s legitimate desire for (regime) change.
Running neck-and-neck, neither Boakai nor Weah secured the 50% +1 required for outright victory thereby justifying a run-off in mid-November, according to official results announced by Liberia’s National Elections Commission (NEC). However, concerns have been raised about apparent anomalies in vote tallying, forcing the NEC to shield itself from allegations that it manipulated results in Weah’s favour.
These claims are far from baseless. The electoral referee has, time and again, demonstrated a lack of neutrality and credibility, prompting some opposition parties to request a forensic audit of the first-round presidential ballot papers.
Politically immature, Weah’s ruling Coalition for Democratic Change (CDC) inspires very little confidence in its ability to govern. The party is notorious for throwing tantrums when it does not get its way. For example, CDC loyalists disrupted and delayed the tallying process in opposition strongholds after the first round of voting last month by attacking precincts in these areas.
Weah’s tolerance for criminality and corruption as well as his flagrant disregard for the rule of law are reminiscent of Trump’s slash-and-burn approach to national leadership. As obvious foils to Boakai’s and Biden’s political orthodoxy, Weah and Trump exemplify anti-establishment politicians who manipulate the cult of celebrity to wreak electoral havoc.
Yet, while America’s checks and balances stopped Trump from running completely amok—landing him in court for ostensibly conspiring to overturn the 2020 presidential results, amongst other infractions—similar institutional arrangements do not exist in practice in Liberia where the supremacy of the presidency is all-consuming.
If Weah and Trump succeed in their re-election efforts, it will be more of the same shenanigans. It is no surprise, then, that Boakai has vowed to ‘rescue’ Liberia from Weah’s abysmal performance by focussing on the socio-economic issues that are of utmost importance to voters – poverty, unemployment, inflation, infrastructure, rule of law, peace and security, basic social services, etc.
Ahead of what is expected to be a contentious run-off, he has actively sought support from opposition candidates with overtures to join a Unity Party Alliance against the ruling CDC. It is clear that any opposition candidate who feigns neutrality will be indirectly backing Weah’s re-election.
As my previous research has indicated, the Liberian electorate consistently votes for candidates they presume will deliver public goods rather than politicians who merely serve their own interests. With 11 out of 15 incumbent senators ousted and a slew of representatives loyal to the ruling party ejected in October’s legislative races, what seems to be the only constant in Liberia’s post-war politics is a visceral rejection of the status quo.
If Boakai reduces Weah to a one-term president this month, he will be replicating what Biden did to Trump exactly three years ago.
As a Liberian, I have my own personal opinions on this subject which don’t matter. The stakes for the future of our country are too high to be left to the whims and caprices of so called politicians. Enough is enough. Some of these so called politicians got where they are, because they were bribed with the office, under oath, not to prosecute some villains of the Ellen Johnson Sirleaf tenure, who had illegally printed millions of Liberian dollars for themselves. We in the diaspora are watching. Beautiful article. We’re awaiting the the outcome of the rerun.
“Every election is nothing more than the advanced auction of stolen goods”.
80 years ago, an American civic social commentator H.L. Mencken created this pithy phrase— “every election is nothing more than the advanced auction of stolen goods” which I believe has civic civil social prescriptive ordinality in the partisan political rhetoric occurring in Liberia prior to Election Day November 14/23 in aspirational hope desire that the Liberian civic electoral process transactional might inspire collective Liberian civic social publics.
History of past Liberian elections suggests strong to the contrary alas in a sense element most marginal— “meet the new boss, same as the old boss, won’t get fooled again”—line in a song by the rock group the “Who”.
Why is Liberian political social economic publics lacking in Political Leadership transformative explicit in public service?
Liberia is at present engaged in a civic civil social electoral conversational process concluding with electing a President to be the voice of the citizen in decision making at the centre of power.
The 2 Candidates seeking public office in the ideal normative sense of prescriptive governance ought only to be seeking public office in order to serve all the good citizens of Liberia instead serving assisting the elite economic social oligarchy which will continue and perpetuate the status quo ensuring that civic social change for the ordinary Liberian citizen is marginal to naught at best.
Liberia is a country most richly blessed in natural resources including the most essential requisite— human capital which has created and generated for the Liberian economic political elites significant social capital in wealth.
Liberia is blessed with citizen peoples, who often display exuberant social entrepreneurial ambition.
This election is roiled in fear specific to uncertainty in security publics grounded in future economic growth resulting in personal private civic social anxiety how Liberian civil society is unravelling.
This November 2023 Presidential run-off Election gives ample profound credence to this pithy aphorism by H.L. Mencken who writing in the Baltimore Sun in 1936 suggests most strong “every election is nothing more than the advanced auction of stolen goods…….in other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods”. Mencken was both alarmed and profoundly disquieted as to the lack of engaged inquisitive civic citizen participation in the civic electoral governance process which is predicated on an engaged articulate citizen who is not afraid nor adverse to hold the government to strict account.
Mencken was even more concerned as to the increasing growth in blunt force power of the incumbent government to overwhelm the citizen with election promises and election bromides which in reality will signal no change in how government functions in serving the citizen.
This is not merely an indigenous Liberian African civic electoral issue of absolute concern— instead a civic electoral matter of manifest urgency to all Nation States who are engaged in governance conversations between the peoples governed and those who govern in service to the peoples.
Monte McMurchy
Former Senior Election Advisor– UNMIL 2005 – 2006
Former Country Director Civil Affairs–USAID 2007 – 2008