Former footballer George Weah is set to become Liberia’s president following Tuesday’s run-off election.<\/p>\n
The National Elections Commission said that with 98.1% of ballots counted, Mr Weah had won 61.5% of the vote.<\/p>\n
Opponent Joseph Boakai is far behind with 38.5%.<\/p>\n
He will succeed Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Africa’s first elected female president. She defeated Mr Weah in the presidential election run-off in 2005, after the end of a brutal civil war.<\/p>\n
Mr Weah, 51, won the first round in October with 38.4% of the vote, compared with the 28.8% of Mr Boakai, 73. His failure to secure an outright majority forced a run-off.<\/p>\n
Mr Weah played for a string of football clubs, including AC Milan and Paris St-Germain, and is the only African footballer to have won Fifa World Player of the Year and the coveted Ballon D’Or, in 1995.<\/p>\n
He entered politics after his retirement in 2002 and is currently a senator in Liberia’s parliament.<\/p>\n
–<\/p>\n
Source: BBC<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Former footballer George Weah is set to become Liberia’s president following Tuesday’s run-off election. The National Elections Commission said that with 98.1% of ballots counted, Mr Weah had won 61.5% of the vote. Opponent Joseph Boakai is far behind with 38.5%. He will succeed Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Africa’s first elected female president. She defeated Mr […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":387135,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[107,11],"tags":[726,597],"class_list":["post-387134","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-international","category-top-stories","tag-george-weah","tag-liberia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/387134","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=387134"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/387134\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/387135"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=387134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=387134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=387134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}