Crowded Campaign Rallies a Clear Signs of a One-Term Weah Presidency

Posted September 22, 2023
by Tewroh-Wehtoe Sungbeh

The Liberian presidential race is on and getting hotter, if not already hot.

The crowd is intensely larger by the day or week with the various camps claiming to pull in the largest, a way to play to the psyche of the other side to be ready for an October 10 surprise victory over President George Manneh Weah.

Can it happen?

Yes, it can.

And yes, Weah can be defeated!

George Manneh Weah can be soundly defeated if the crowd at these campaign rallies is serious about booting Weah out and not just turning out in record numbers (as some detractors opined) to engage in ‘stomach politics,’ believing that these people have already made up their minds to only vote for President George Manneh Weah, who obviously to some is a larger than life figure.

George Manneh Weah can be defeated if the presidential candidates can show that they are hungry to win by having a resounding message about jobs creation, trade and economic development and investments, and a robust presence, and ramping up their political grievances to the Liberian people that George Manneh Weah is more of a showman and not the leader who won the presidency out of an unlikely chance occurrence in 2017.

Most Liberian political observers see these dutiful campaign event gatherers sarcastically as dabbling into ‘stomach politics,’ a painful nod to the record number of poor, unemployed, politically uneducated, gullible, and hungry Liberians who risked it all to appear in the rain and hot sun at those presidential campaign rallies to show their ‘support’ for their presidential candidate.

The politics of a smaller crowd versus a much larger crowd is a conversation starter and something that the various camps like to brag about even though they have been accused of paying and busing these people presumably on empty or near-empty stomachs to attend their rallies which speaks louder of the crisis that could tilt an election in a country where hunger, poverty, and unemployment are a noticeable daily occurrence.

Whichever side wins other than George Manneh Weah, hopefully, will put the nation back on track, put the Liberian people first, and will not use the wicked and unaccountable playbook of the past, a playbook that manipulated, controlled, and exploited the gullibility of the Liberian people to be beggars in their own country.

However, former Vice President Joseph N, Boakai is believed to have pulled in the greenest and largest crowd on Sunday, October 17, sending a loud message to the incumbent and his other rivals that he may be ‘old’ and ‘sick’ as his critics have continuously said but is sure to put up a fight for the presidency this time.

This is not the first rodeo for Boakai, the slow, tired, but sure and ambitious septuagenarian, whose advanced age and rumored health problems have been his Achilles heels and a talking point for critics who want him out of the presidential race for these and other reasons related to his past as Vice President to former President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf whom he served dutifully for 12 years.

As poverty, record unemployment, runaway corruption, unaccountability, the obvious lack of oversight, and incompetence ballooned in the Weah administration in six years, there is an argument to be made that Liberians are fed up, and the huge crowd size at the various campaign events – paid or bused - showed that the Liberian people are ready for another president other than George Manneh Weah.

Making up the numbers are young people, (youths), the same young people, mostly unemployed and uneducated, who voted in record numbers in the 2017 presidential election that shockingly elected the morbidly corrupt and inept incumbent George Manneh Weah President of Liberia, are determined and now spread around and across the country to elect a new president.

George Manneh Weah does not have a monopoly on the youth votes, adult votes, and all the votes this time around, and there is always hope that Liberians will turn out in droves to vote him out come October 10.

The time is ripe to send Mr. Weah packing to wherever he so desires to go.

Those large campaign crowd could spell relief by booting George Manneh Weah out of the Executive Mansion on October 10, 2023!!

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