Editor’s Note: Every Friday, WPR Associate Editor Robbie Corey-Boulet curates the top news and analysis from and about the African continent.
The inauguration of George Weah as Liberia’s next president is still more than two weeks away, but already the former soccer star is trying to mitigate one of the challenges that bedeviled his predecessor, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.
When Sirleaf took office in January 2006, she had to contend with what were, in retrospect, perhaps impossibly high expectations for what her administration could achieve. Emerging from more than 10 years of civil conflict that, by many estimates, killed hundreds of thousands of people, Liberians hoped the installation of a democratically elected government would lead to a dramatic improvement in their individual circumstances. The international community, meanwhile, seemed to expect the swearing-in of Africa’s first elected female head of state to be nothing less than transformative.