Mrs Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf has been declared the winner of Liberia's presidential poll, making her Africa's first elected female HEAD OF STATE. (The president exercises executive power and is elected for a six-year term, for a maximum of two terms.)
Voters in Liberia, Africa's oldest state, went to the polls on 8 November to vote in the second round of the country's first presidential elections since the end of the 14-year civil war.
Following the first round last month, the two candidates competing for the vote were former international footballer George Weah and Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, a former finance minister who has worked for the World Bank.
Mrs Johnson-Sirleaf (a seasoned politician, a former finance minister who has worked for the World Bank and the United Nations.) took 59.4% of the vote in elections earlier this month, compared to 40.6% for former football star George Weah.
(Mr George Weah was born in a poor suburb of the capital, Monrovia, but became a star at European clubs such as Chelsea and AC Milan.)
Mr Weah alleged the run-off vote was rigged, but international observers say the poll was largely free and fair.
UN peacekeepers have been deployed in the centre of the capital, Monrovia and traffic barred from the area. The polls were the first since Liberia emerged from 15 years of civil war.
The announcement of Ms Johnson-Sirleaf's win is a symbolically crucial day for Liberia.
According to Ms Johnson-Sirleaf, a former World Bank economist and veteran politician, it is also a day that will serve as an inspiration for women across Africa.
Her supporters from the Unity Party said they were planning low-key victory celebrations to avoid confrontation with Mr Weah's backers.
Mr Weah's supporters, who include many fighters demobilised after the civil war, have taken to the streets several times this month to protest over alleged voting fraud.
Top officials from Mr Weah's party have said they will take their case to the Supreme Court if an electoral commission investigation finds no evidence of fraud.
The election was organized and its security guaranteed by a UN peacekeeping force.
Observers declared the vote "peaceful and transparent".
A senior diplomat following the election closely said he thought there had been some irregularities, but that these would not influence the final outcome.
But the head of the Economic Community of West African State (Ecowas) observer mission, E M Debrah, said the preliminary conclusion was that the election had been "generally peaceful, free, fair and transparent".
Many of Liberia's 100,000 ex-combatants from all factions in the war backed Mr Weah in the election.
The problems facing Liberia's incoming president do not include a lack of resources.
A relatively small country with a population of just three million, Liberia has the potential to be a middle income country. Its land is criss-crossed by rivers watering fertile soil that supports rubber, palm oil and tropical fruit plantations.
It has some of the richest timber resources anywhere in Africa; mountains bearing some of the world's highest quality iron ore; and significant deposits of diamonds and gold.
But Liberia's resources have never been rationally exploited.
Shortly after the country became Africa's first modern republic in 1848, when it was settled by freed slaves from the United States, huge plantations were marked out by the black settlers and foreign investors.
Paying little attention to the needs of the indigenous population, these farms and plantations made a few people very rich but dispossessed many more.
Widespread resentment built up between the black colonialists, who had formed a sort of elite oligarchy in the capital, and their impoverished indigenous black cousins in the rural areas.
That resentment exploded in 1980 when a young army Master Sergeant, an indigenous Liberian, Samuel Doe, seized power in a bloody coup d'etat.
The country has been suffering the consequences ever since. Liberia descended into a cycle of coup and counter coup, war and repression.
The new government will replace an interim government, led by local businessman Charles Gyude Bryant, that has run the country since former President Charles Taylor was forced to step down and leave the country two years ago.
Mrs Johnson-Sirleaf will now have to reverse almost three decades of decline, mismanagement and civil war, which has left Liberians poorer than almost anyone else on the planet. Public utilities ceased to function in the 1990s; most people have no running water, electricity, sanitation, decent education or health care.
The government is running on a budget of just $80m.
Corruption is on the lips of everyone. The new government will need to tackle graft and cronyism. Fortunately, it will find itself bound by the Governance and Economic Management Assistance Programme (Gemap), which was endorsed by the outgoing transitional government. The aim is to make public finance more open; international experts are to monitor the government's fiscal performance for the next three years.
What happens in Liberia affects its neighbours. Since civil war started in 1989, it has exported mayhem and refugees, with devastating results in Sierra Leone, Guinea and Côte d'Ivoire. Liberia has also been a haven for all manner of hustlers, gangsters and terrorists.
Background
Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, 66, was Liberia's finance minister in the late 1970s. Her Unity Party came a distant second to Charles Taylor's National Patriotic Party in the 1997 election.
Mrs Sirleaf served as Director for Africa at the United Nations Development Programme.
The "Iron Lady", as her supporters fondly call her, served as head of the Governance Reform Commission set up as part of the deal to end Liberia's civil war in 2003.
She resigned that post to contest the presidency, criticising the transitional government's inability to fight corruption.
Mrs Sirleaf's presidential bid is still haunted by remarks she made in a radio interview in the early days of Charles Taylor's rebellion.
She said that if Taylor demolished the presidency to get Samuel Doe out of power, they would all help to rebuild it.
Mrs Sirleaf, a divorcee whose ex-husband died a few years ago, is the mother of four sons. She wants to become president in order "to bring motherly sensitivity and emotion to the presidency" as a way of healing the wounds of war.
She says she is keen on declaring war against corruption.
Liberia is Africa's oldest republic, but it became better known in the 1990s for its long-running, ruinous civil war and its role in a rebellion in neighbouring Sierra Leone.
Although founded by freed American and Caribbean slaves, Liberia is mostly made up of indigenous Africans, with the slaves' descendants comprising 5% of the population.
The West African nation was relatively calm until 1980 when William Tolbert was overthrown by Sergeant Samuel Doe after food price riots.
The coup marked the end of dominance by the minority Americo-Liberians, who had ruled since independence, but heralded a period of instability.
By the late 1980s, arbitrary rule and economic collapse culminated in civil war when Charles Taylor's National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) militia overran much of the countryside, entering the capital in 1990. Mr Doe was executed.
Fighting intensified as the rebels splintered and battled each other, the Liberian army and West African peacekeepers. In 1995 a peace agreement was signed, leading to the election of Mr Taylor as president.
The respite was brief, with anti-government fighting breaking out in the north in 1999. Mr Taylor accused Guinea of supporting the rebellion. Meanwhile Ghana, Nigeria and others accused Mr Taylor of backing rebels in Sierra Leone.
Matters came to a head in 2003 when Mr Taylor - under international pressure to quit and hemmed in by rebels - stepped down and went into exile in Nigeria. A transitional government was sworn in later that year to steer the country towards elections.
Around 250,000 people were killed in Liberia's civil war and many thousands more fled the fighting. The conflict left the country in economic ruin and overrun with weapons. The capital remains without mains electricity and running water. Corruption is rife and unemployment and illiteracy are endemic.
The UN maintains some 15,000 soldiers in Liberia.
