So his afraid of George weah George , Weah won the presidential election in Liberia last week. Everyone has been sending him congratulatory messages, including President Muhammadu Bhuari. I congratulate Weah too, but I worry about the people of Liberia because of him. Of course, he doesn’t carry guns as former Liberian leaders, Samuel Doe and Charles Taylor, did. But, he’s a president his countrymen and political leaders across West Africa should be wary of.

Liberia’s history is intimidating. This isn’t just because the nation has experienced gruesome wars, even though that’s enough to make a journalist remember a few things about the hazards of the trade. For instance, I was a new arrival in the newsroom of The Guardian newspaper in Lagos in the 1990s, a decade when the pain of the killings of two Nigerian journalists in the Liberian Civil war was still fresh. Krees Imobibie was of The Guardian, and Tayo Awotunsin belonged to the Daily Champions. I could feel the sense of loss in the air at The Guardian over the sad occurrence, just as I witnessed the frenzy that the introduction of colour pictures in Nigerian dailies for the first time was generating both in the industry and in The Guardian’s newsroom. Some of these developments made me ask questions, (where I sat with my Political Desk editor, Mr. Akpo Esajere), of the newspaper’s executive officers that sometimes came into the newsroom to interact such as Mr Femi Kusa who, as the Executive Director (Publication)/Editor-in-Chief, actually signed the earliest letter that introduced me as a foot soldier in the news hunting business (a letter that I still keep with much care).

I state that Liberia’s history is intimidating. I mean this in the sense that it has always been there as a nation, like a living great-great-grandfather. It’s one of only two sovereign countries in the world created by US and ex-Caribbean slaves, the other being Sierra Leone, established by Great Britain. In 1847, Liberia proclaimed its independence from the American Colonisation Society. Now, it’s 170 years old. I must have been about 13 years old when I read a book of about 120 pages on the history of Liberia, especially the performance of its past presidents. Liberia’s constitutional development was also one out of the five English-speaking West African countries that I had had to study in my late teens as an ‘A’ Level (HSC) student of “Government” at Ibadan Grammar School, Ibadan; not to mention other references to Liberia as a student of Political Science. From this knowledge, I came away with the distinct impression that Liberia was one nation that should have done wonderfully well for itself. Today, however, it’s one of the poorest nations on earth. Liberia had all the time to be healthy, but its bad leaders made it unwell. The people are confident in him as he was once a footballer so they trust him to know the full description of leadership.