A lesson from Liberia
OBSCURED BY the voting in Iraq, there was an African election that in some ways was the envy of America.
Liberia, ravaged by a civil war that took an estimated 200,000 lives over 14 years, saw an estimated 74 percent of its 1.3 million registered voters elect a president. Hundreds of international observers and election monitors, including former President Jimmy Carter, proclaimed the election to be peaceful, open, and fair.
The turnout was way above the estimates of between 61 to 64 percent turnout for the 2004 US presidential election. Only 8 of the 50 states and the District of Columbia reached or surpassed 70 percent voter turnout in our election: Iowa, Maine, Minnesota, Montana, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oregon, and Wisconsin.
By American standards, Liberia had an amazing turnout by young voters. We thought it was a big deal here when the turnout of voters aged 18 to 29 increased by 9 percentage points to a 49 percent turnout in 2004. But the percentage still remains well below that of voters over 34, where the range is 64 to 73 percent.
In Liberia, 40 percent of the registered voters are under 28 and by all reports, they were the primary reason that George Weah, who escaped Monrovia's slums to be a millionaire soccer star, was the top vote getter. With his celebrity, Weah, 39, threatens to be to Liberia what former wrestler and Governor Jesse Ventura was to Minnesota and former and current actors and Governors Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger were and are to California. Weah won 28 percent of the vote in a 22-candidate race.
Weah has played his lack of a formal education and political experience to classic advantage among the young, many of whom shot at one another during the civil war and felt ignored by the elite descendants of the former US slaves who founded the nation in 1847. Liberia is rich in mineral resources but so ruined by corruption and war that the unemployment rate is 85 percent.
''With all their education and experience, they have governed this nation for hundreds of years," Weah has said. ''They have never done anything for the nation."
That is not all that should catch an American's eye. Weah faces a run-off in which his opponent would become Africa's first elected woman president. Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, 66, who holds a masters degree from Harvard in public administration, worked at the World Bank and the United Nations, was the runner-up to murderous President Charles Taylor in the last national election in 1997 and suffered both jail and exile for her dissenting voice against Liberian despots.
While the US debates whether Hillary Clinton or Condoleezza Rice is presidential material for 2008, Liberian women were celebratory as they propelled Johnson-Sirleaf to 20 percent of the vote. ''Men have done nothing for us. They just fool us," voter Mabel Tobee told The New York Times. One of the campaign pins for Johnson-Sirleaf says, ''Ellen, she's our man."
A man in Boston who says Ellen is his man is Isaac Bantu. He was a Nieman Fellow in journalism at Harvard and a former president for the Press Union of Liberia who was repeatedly jailed and had his life threatened for his work in the 1980s and early 1990s. Currently, he is an associate district court probation officer in Salem.
Johnson-Sirleaf is known as the ''Iron Lady" in Liberia and has faced criticism for being a member of the elite who once backed Charles Taylor. But Bantu said that when he was a student at the University of Liberia and she was the nation's finance minister, she quipped that she adopted him as her godson after their lively debates over politics. He is admittedly biased towards Johnson-Sirleaf's long pedigree in international affairs, compared to Weah, and is concerned that many of Weah's young male voters, abused for so long by warlords, may revert to form if there is not a president who does not know how to put the nation's infrastructure back together. With little electricity, most ballots were counted by candlelight.
''Once you get outside Monrovia, you cannot get from Point A to Point B," Bantu said. ''This is a place of no running water and the bridges and roads in the countryside are so destroyed you cannot travel from point A to point B. We need someone who is educated. We cannot have a president who will turn his office into a classroom." Bantu said that regardless of who wins, the peaceful election was a victory. But he warned, ''My friends tell me that there's still a lot of weapons hidden in the country. No matter who wins, the young folks should be de-traumatized."
Derrick Z. Jackson's e-mail address is jackson@globe.com. 
