Loud voices floated under the torn blue tarpaulin keeping the rain out of the West Point Intellectual Forum, a cafe in Liberia’s biggest slum. On wooden benches, over bean sandwiches and strong attaya tea, men of all political persuasions were arguing about what Ellen – as they call Africa’s first female president – had done for them and what they could expect from her successor.



“Ninety per cent of us are suffering, 10% are enjoying the national cake of Liberia,” said Isaac Tamba, a staunch George Weah supporter, his vuvuzela at the ready for the footballer turned presidential candidate’s last rally before Tuesday’s election. “She failed us. Education is a mess. She failed in [fighting] corruption. If one minister is accused of mismanagement, they’re just recycled to another ministry.”



Mafase Daweh disagreed. “I’m overwhelmed by what she has done in restoring the image of our country,” he said. “She’s developed a good network of roads, and infrastructure. And she’s decentralised the education system, so you don’t have to go all the way to Monrovia to go to university.”



Quietly, Jefferson Gaye said: “She brought peace. For 12 years she kept this country stable.”



As Ellen Johnson Sirleaf prepares to hand over power after her constitutionally mandated two terms, almost everyone credits her with maintaining peace and stability.



But now residents of West Point, which was brutally quarantined during the Ebola outbreak, and which is stuck out on a crumbling peninsula across the water from some of Monrovia’s grandest buildings, want more. They need electricity, jobs and proper housing, and many see Weah as the person who can hand it all to them.



“I am your best choice. Liberia will develop if George Weah becomes president,” said the former footballer, who is trying for a second time to add president to his long list of titles. Fans hung from the rafters for a glimpse of the national hero who in 1995, when Liberia was embroiled in a civil war that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, won the Ballon d’Or, one of football’s top individual honours.



The adoring crowd didn’t appear to care much what he said but carried on blowing their neon whistles shaped like little footballs and cheering whenever he paused for breath.



“Soccer is life. The rest is just details,” one supporter’s T-shirt read.



The EU, the US and a whole host of diplomats have praised what promises to be the first peaceful democratic transition of power in 73 years, though human rights organisations point out that much remains to be done to solve the problems of impunity for the country’s persistent rape problem, harsh libel laws, and lack of accountability for war crimes.

Flipping an embroidered fan on the podium next to Weah was his running mate, Jewel Howard-Taylor, the ex-wife of the warlord and former president Charles Taylor, currently serving a 50-year sentence in Durham prison in the UK.



“He killed my ma, he killed my pa but I’ll vote for him,” was an unofficial slogan for Taylor in the 1997 election.



Howard-Taylor has claimed she did not know about the recruitment and treatment of child soldiers under her husband’s rule, and said he used to laugh off any serious questions she asked him. But some Liberians remain nostalgic for Taylor, and invoking his name does not necessarily harm the prospects of his ex-wife, who since 2005 has been a senator for Bong County, a former Taylor heartland.



“Because of the arrest of former president Taylor, we were not allowed to fulfil the NPP’s [National Patriotic party] promises. We will put that agenda back on the table,” she told a rally recently, compounding the outrage many felt when it was revealed that Taylor had been meddling in Liberian politics by phone from his jail cell.



In the 1950s when its neighbours were criss-crossed with roads, Liberia had only one, running north to south. Despite being Africa’s oldest republic, it was crippled by a lack of infrastructure even before it was hit by war, and more recently it has weathered the Ebola outbreak and then an economic downturn caused by falling commodity prices.

Half of the government’s $1bn annual budget comes from international donors, much of it from the US government, but many Liberians feel their country should be less beholden to foreigners.



One of these is the incumbent vice-president, Joseph Boakai, whom Sirleaf mysteriously has not publicly backed to be her successor, despite him being up against her old rival Weah.

Seen as a steady pair of hands with no whiff of corruption about him, Boakai says he has no idea what he has done to lose the president’s support.

“I’ve been trying to find out why,” he said, acknowledging his disappointment. “She and I have worked together very well. I don’t think she’s told anybody that I’ve offended her personally. I’ve been very loyal, and the whole world knows it.



“Our party is united,” he added. “United without the president’s involvement.”



Trucks full of flag-waving supporters of Boakai, Weah, and the newest candidate, Alex Cummings, a former Coca-Cola executive, clogged Monrovia’s roads, and the atmosphere was one of celebration. Rather than hiding their drinks and battening down the hatches in preparation for riotous crowds, as they would have done in previous elections, traders in West Point had them out for sale.

But the numbers partying in the streets may not translate into actual votes on Tuesday, given the undercurrent of disillusionment. “I voted for Ellen. I thought she’d help my community directly,” said Anna Joe, a clothes merchant whose sales collapsed in the past six months, shortly after her sisters’ shacks, precariously perched on the edge of West Point, collapsed into the sea, leaving them homeless. “But I’m reluctant to vote for anyone again.”