Results delayed in vote to replace Liberia’s Sirleaf

– Parties blame NEC –

Political parties voiced concern at the problems.

“Some people will stand in the queue for hours just to be told at the end that you have to go to the other line. Some people could not stand that, and we are very concerned,” said Moore Allen, a spokesman for the Unity Party (UP), which is backing Vice President Boakai.

“It is NEC responsibility to show voters the way in a manner that they will not make mistakes,” echoed Ansu Sunny, a spokesman for Weah’s Coalition for Democratic Change (CDC), though said they did not believe the problem was of a huge magnitude.

In the 2005 and 2011 presidential elections, Weah’s CDC party and Sirleaf’s Unity Party went into the run-off round of voting.

The vote is seen as a crucial test of Liberia’s stability.

Sirleaf, Africa’s first female elected head of state, is stepping down after a maximum two six-year terms in which she steered the country away from the trauma of civil war, but, say critics, failed to tackle its poverty.

– ‘More resources’ –

Joe Pemagbi, an electoral observer for the Open Society Initiative for West Africa, said dialogue between the parties in the period before a possible second round was key to avoiding conflict.

“A lot more resources need to be put into civic and voter education, because that’s key to how people respond to some of these challenges,” including frustration over being unable to cast ballots, Pemagbi said.

“People should be pushing for peaceful dialogue and inter-party dialogue,” he added, saying it “is extremely important at this point in time”.

The US State Department hailed the vote as “an important step toward achieving Liberia’s first peaceful transfer of power from one democratically-elected head of state to another in decades”.

Back-to-back civil wars, the 2014-16 Ebola crisis and slumped commodity prices have left Liberia among the world’s poorest nations, while corruption remains entrenched.