Ellen Johnson Sirleaf has won Liberia's presidential vote, becoming Africa's first elected woman head of state and embarking on a six-year mission to lift the war-torn country towards prosperity and reconciliation.
"I thank the Liberian people for performing their legal duty and I am happy to be the next president of Liberia," Sirleaf, dressed in a burgundy robe and headscarf, told reporters after a ceremony Wednesday certifying the November 8 results at the Centennial Pavillion in downtown Monrovia.
The Harvard-educated banker, 67, earned 59.4 percent of votes cast to best football hero George Weah in a run-off aimed to help Liberia turn the page on decades of lawlessness and corruption after back-to-back civil wars since 1989.
"Consequently, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf is hereby declared the winner of the run-off election," National Elections Commission chairwoman Frances Johnson Morris said.
She will be inaugurated January 16, as will the new bicameral legislature for Africa's oldest independent republic, settled in 1847 by freed American slaves.
"This is a historic moment not only for Liberia but for the continent as a whole," said UN special envoy Alan Doss, attending the ceremony that was ringed with tight UN and national security.
Weah has alleged massive vote fraud in the November 8 polls, and has launched a complaint process with the NEC that his party, the Congress for Democratic Change, has vowed to take to the Supreme Court.
The elections were declared peaceful and credible by a host of international observers, and pressure has been mounting on Weah - even from among his supporters, including two former warlords who endorsed his candidacy - to concede in the interests of peace.
Niger President Mamadou Tandja, current head of the 15-member Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), added his voice on Monday to the African chorus praising the elections and urging the dispute be resolved quickly and peacefully.
French President Jacques Chirac was among the first of Sirleaf's new international counterparts to extend his congratulations, releasing a public message that hailed the "new page in Liberia's political history" written with her election.
"I know that with you at the wheel, (Liberia) will be steered back along the road of national reconciliation, institutional consolidation and prosperity."
Sirleaf now faces the task of rebuilding a country shorn of infrastructure, with sky-high unemployment and threatened by the continued cross-border recruitment of young fighters to feed west Africa's enduring conflicts.
A former finance minister who was twice jailed for treason during the 1980s regime of military dictator Samuel Doe, Sirleaf has vowed to serve just one term in office, couching her government as a transitional one to be backed up by the 15,000-strong UN peacekeeping mission on the ground since October 2003.
While convening meetings to plan her transition, Sirleaf has kept a low profile since early results gave her an unbeatable lead, mindful of the three days of street demonstrations launched by Weah's mostly young supporters to protest the polls.
But on Wednesday, the jubilation bottled up within her Unity Party bubbled into the streets outside party headquarters, ahead of a planned victory party Friday at Antoinette Tubman stadium.
Even before the morning ceremony was over, several hundred people dressed in Ellen t-shirts and waving Ellen signs were dancing in the street, singing along to campaign jingles piped over loudspeakers.
"I am so happy and rejoicing right now," said Edwin Garlor, Ellen stickers pasted on both cheeks and forehead.
"We want stability, free education and also reconciliation, and I believe that Mrs Sirleaf has the best interests of the Liberian people in mind."
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