George Weah, who is president of Liberia and used to be a famous football player around the world, said on Monday that he will run for re-election later this year.
The revelation comes in the midst of growing criticism of Weah, who is accused of being disconnected from the people who are experiencing rising costs and food shortages.
Weah declared in his annual State of the Nation address, “My fellow people, I will be coming to you shortly to ask you to renew (…) for a second time the mandate that you gave me six years ago.”
The West African nation’s election is set for October 10.
Weah won an election in October 2017 and took office in 2018.
Critics were outraged when the 56-year-old left Liberia for more than a month in late 2017.
At the end of October, he travelled abroad for a series of political events in several nations, as well as to watch his footballer son play for the United States in the World Cup in Qatar.
The president was last seen in his country, where residents have been struggling with rising costs and shortages of essential necessities, on December 18.
Several hundred Liberians had peacefully protested the day before at the call of the opposition to protest both Weah’s ineptitude and his disregard for the condition of common Liberians.
One of Weah’s main campaign pledges had been to fight corruption, but in September, after the US accused three of his close supporters of wrongdoing, he accepted their resignations.
The guys were initially removed from their positions by Washington after it sanctioned them due to claims involving multi-million dollar contracts and at least $1.5 million in improperly diverted public cash.
Graft is still pervasive, and Liberia is ranked 136th out of 180 nations in Transparency International’s corruption perceptions index for 2021.
Former US slaves established Liberia as a colony in 1822, and it became the continent’s first republic 25 years later.
It is still healing from two civil wars that each claimed 250,000 lives.
