Speaking to diaspora supporters in Pennsylvania, former president and soccer legend, George Weah cast
his return as a fight to save Liberia’s democracy — and revisited a governing record that
remains sharply contested at home.
Former Liberian President George Weah announced he will run again for the presidency in 2029, using a keynote speech at the Congress for Democratic Change’s U.S. convention in Springfield, Pennsylvania, to launch the campaign. Weah, who won the presidency in 2017 and lost re-election to Joseph Boakai in 2023, accused the current government of undermining Liberia’s courts, legislature and rule of law, while calling for a broad coalition to back his return.
By Rodney D. Sieh, rodney.sieh@frontpageafricaonline.com
SPRINGFIELD, Pa. — George Weah stood before hundreds of Liberian expatriates in a Pennsylvania convention hall and did what he had spent months signaling he would do: he asked them, again, to put him on a ballot.
“I will be a candidate for the presidency of the Republic of Liberia in 2029, with the support, the blessing, and the mandate of the Congress for Democratic Change,” Weah told the crowd, closing a keynote address that mixed grief, nostalgia and a blistering critique of the government that unseated him.
The announcement, delivered at the Congress for Democratic Change’s CDC-USA National Convention, formally opens a campaign that will unfold over the next three years and sets up a rematch of sorts with President Joseph Boakai, the man who defeated Weah in the 2023 election.
A Homecoming, of Sorts, in Pennsylvania
The convention, hosted by the Pennsylvania chapter of CDC-USA, brought together chairpersons and members from CDC chapters across the United States, along with National Vice Chairman Williametta Saydee-Tarr and other party officials. Weah opened not with politics but with mourning, asking the hall to observe a moment of silence for the late gospel artist Minister Miracle Kettor and other partisans who have died since the party’s last gathering.
He passed along greetings from his wife, Clar-Marie Weah, Liberia’s former first lady, who was unable to attend, and thanked the diaspora chapter for sustaining the party through what he called some of its hardest years — not just with organizing, but with money. Weah credited Liberians abroad with keeping the country’s economy afloat through remittances sent home “often at great personal cost,” language aimed squarely at an audience that has long formed one of the CDC’s most reliable bases of support and fundraising.
The Case Against the Boakai Government
Much of Weah’s address was devoted to dismantling the record of the man who beat him. He accused the Boakai administration of presiding over an economy where “families are struggling to eat” and businesses are “collapsing under the weight of a bad economy and high taxes,” and said executive interference in Liberia’s other branches of government had reached a level unmatched in the country’s post-war history.
Weah pointed to a list of specific grievances: the removal of a House speaker in what he called a violation of due process, the expulsion of lawmakers from the legislature, and court rulings he said were “ignored and discarded” by the government. He also alleged, without citing evidence, that the administration’s integrity had been “compromised by a cartel of drug traffickers.” Liberian government officials did not immediately have an opportunity to respond to the specific allegations.
“This is a government at open war with the rule of law, and it must not be allowed to stand,” Weah said, calling the current legislature a “rubber stamp” for the executive branch.
From the Pitch to the Presidential Palace
The speech leaned heavily on the story Weah has told for a decade: a boy from Monrovia’s Clara Town slum who became the only African ever named FIFA World Player of the Year and Ballon d’Or winner, then turned that fame into a political movement. He founded the Congress for Democratic Change in 2005 and, after two earlier failed presidential bids, won the office in 2017 in a landslide runoff, campaigning as an outsider who would upend a political establishment he described as governing only for elites.
His single term was defined by that same “Blue Revolution” branding: free tuition at the University of Liberia, a raft of road and infrastructure projects, and a government stocked with fellow former athletes and entertainers. But it was also dogged by persistent corruption allegations — including a still-unresolved controversy over billions of Liberian dollars in newly printed banknotes that went missing after arriving in the country — alongside high inflation, a depreciating currency and criticism that the promised economic transformation never reached most Liberians.
A Bruising Defeat, and a Vow to Return
Those grievances helped fuel Weah’s narrow loss to Boakai in the 2023 runoff, a defeat he accepted publicly and which was widely praised, at the time, as a peaceful transfer of power in a country still rebuilding its democratic institutions after back-to-back civil wars. This latest speech marked one of Weah’s most direct signals yet that he considers that defeat the start of an interruption, not an ending.
“I need not tell you that those hard-won gains are now being reversed by the Boakai administration,” he told the convention, arguing that the government he built — whatever its own flaws — had at least protected free expression and peaceful coexistence in ways the current one has not.
Grief, Gratitude and a Call for Unity
Weah used part of the address to acknowledge friction within CDC-USA itself, whose convention was called in part to elect new leadership after internal disputes among the chapter’s membership. He described the disagreements as a normal feature of a genuine democratic organization rather than a weakness, and asked partisans to stay “united in purpose” even where they differ on method.
He also struck a conciliatory note toward Liberians who backed Boakai in 2023, saying the CDC does not “condemn our brothers and sisters for believing promises that were never meant to be kept,” and called for a coalition ahead of 2029 that he said should be “bigger, stronger, and better” than the one that carried him into office in 2017.
The Road to 2029
Weah closed by telling the room he was speaking not as a political leader but “as your brother, as your servant,” and declared the 2026 CDC-USA convention officially open under his authority as the party’s political leader.
The 2029 election is still more than three years away, and Weah, now in his late fifties, will face questions about his own record in office as much as Boakai’s. But the announcement removes any ambiguity about his intentions: for the second time since leaving the presidency, Liberia’s former head of state is running to get it back.
