Leaked Video About President George Manneh Weah, the 2023 Presidential Election, and Alleged Mercenary Activities May Be A Prelude Of What’s To Come

Posted September 18, 2022

By Tewroh-Wehtoe Sungbeh

The three-minute video is out.

It is taking Facebook and Liberian chatrooms by storm, and Liberians, as usual, are talking about it.

Some are already on record claiming it to be ‘fake news,’ while others have decided to see it for what it is – fake or real as a prelude to an unmanageable future electoral event that could spell disaster for the country.

The video is about President George Manneh Weah, electoral violence, cheating, and the hiring of foreign mercenaries and locals henchmen including Zoe Pennoh and Kai Farley, to tip the 2023 presidential election by any means to the incumbent whom most Liberians believe shouldn’t be reelected to another term.

The video alleges that Al-Quaeda, Boko Haram, and terrorists from Jamaica, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, and the Middle East, are being funded by President George Weah with the missing $8 billion new money printed in 2022.

How can the storyline continue without the mention of the unsavory and ruthless Jefferson Koiyee, and the disgraced Nathaniel McGill not making a cameo appearance at such a crucial time for their president?

Liberians understandably, and for good reasons, are divided over this supposedly faked video knowing the decades-old heinous history of mercenary activities inspired by then-rebel leader Charles Taylor and his band of rebels who descended on Liberia from the Ivory Coast through Nimba County, only for President Samuel Kanyon Doe to incite a tribal conflict between the Dann, Mah, and Krahn peoples of both Nimba and Grand Gedeh Counties to remain in power, a deeply sad reminder of electoral politics and the awesome power of the Liberian presidency.

It is profoundly unfortunate to know that if it isn’t about the concerns and fears about mercenary activities and these kooks taking the presidency by any means, it is another scandalous story in George Manneh Weah’s Liberia, awful stories that will not go away.

Liberians are aware of the 1985 presidential election that saw President Samuel Kanyon Doe’s election defeat, the hijacking of the election by Doe’s toady, Emmett Harmon, the burning of the ballots, and the eventual imprisonment of political rivals Jackson F. Doe, Gabriel Kpolleh, and others.

Samuel Kanyon Doe would go on to declare himself president by ignoring the overwhelming will of the Liberian people only to go on a spree of ethnic cleansing, massive corruption, and human rights abuse that haunted his presidency.
The election of 2005 between George Manneh Weah and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf introduced the Liberian electorates to the secret “letter” and NEC’s Chairman James Fromoyan, whose actions some believed influenced the election.

The video which includes a cast allegedly made up of foreign mercenaries and notable local political henchmen as the main characters is deep and excessive, and with its twists and turns could have been a made-for-TV drama series or a blockbuster movie bent on bringing up close the nagging tragedies of electoral politics in a country that has over the decades seen its share of rigged elections and senseless deaths.

Adding another local twist and nostalgia to it is the presumed training grounds, Zwedru, Grand Gedeh County, and the dilapidated eerie mansion of the deposed former president Samuel Kanyon Doe.

To get the viewer’s attention, however, the caption of the video noted:

“Important Warning To All Liberians.”

“The international community has uncovered a very dangerous plot by George Weah to win the next election by rigging it in order to remain in power and will do it by any means necessary,” the opening narration goes.

According to the video, President Weah is believed to have recruited mercenaries from Burkina Faso and Al-Queada, as it was during the Taylor war of ‘liberation,’ to rig the 2023 presidential election, setting up Zwedru, Grand Gedeh County as the training base for secret meetings.

The voice you hear is a no-name commentator who appears to be a professional broadcast journalist whose accent obviously is not Liberian.

Unless the broadcast was done for safety and security reasons, there is no station name, venue, or date to show authenticity and keep the listeners in awe as they listen to this fascinating piece of information that is as riveting and piercing to the spine as any ‘news’ of its kind can be.

Unless you are one of those individuals who think Liberians speak the way the guy who did not give his name speaks, you are free to believe that the white guy in the video speaks with a Liberian accent and is a Liberian citizen.

Anyway, the white guy in the video couldn’t have been a Liberian citizen because the racist Liberian constitution prohibits non-Negroid from becoming Liberian citizens.

So, that argument is for another day and time.

This is the time to revamp and strengthen institutions in the country.

Strengthen law enforcement, strengthen the national security apparatuses, get rid of the National Elections Commission, and get the National Elections Commission out of the powerful and manipulative hands of the Liberian president.

Because it makes no sense for an incumbent President of Liberia who is on the ballot to head a commission whose partisan members some of whom he appoints run this powerful body.

Have civil groups of politically neutral and respected statesmen and women, university students, clergy, and business leaders run the revamped elections commission.

Any talk of yet another mercenary activity and a civil war geared toward rigging the 2023 presidential election is no joking matter and should be condemned by all freedom-loving and peace-loving Liberians.

While the video is seen as ‘fake,’ it is a prelude (believe it or not) to what’s to come, and it poses a potent psychological challenge to the Liberian people who have no appetite for a mercenary activity that opens the door for another senseless, selfish, and egotistical civil war that takes their lives back another thousand years into darkness.