Sierra Leone’s president was just “reelected” in an election tainted by fraud. There was open violence at some polling stations, and there were reports of stuffed ballot boxes, and many people too young to vote casting ballots in pro-government areas.
Sierra Leone’s election commission says President Julius Maada Bio won country’s tense presidential election, a result disputed by the main opposition party.
Chief Electoral Commissioner Mohamed Kenewui Konneh declared today that Bio was re-elected with 56.17 percent of Saturday’s vote. His top challenger Samura Kamara, of the All People’s Congress (APC), was described as coming in second with 41.16 percent.
But most voters may actually have voted for Kamara. Both parties this week claimed to have won. Kamara said he was on an “irreversible path to an overwhelming victory.”
Security forces reportedly opened fire on Sunday at a celebration at Kamara’s party headquarters, though police denied having fired live bullets.
Vote tallying had already been disputed by the APC, which cited a suspicious lack of details from the electoral commission about where votes were coming from. It cited a lack of information about which polling stations or districts the ballots were coming from. It declared it “will not accept these fake and cooked up results”.
Later, it alleged “over-voting” in pro-government areas and said it “continues to reject” the “fabricated results” and “reaffirms our victory”.
European Union observers said, at a press conference yesterday, that a lack of transparency and secrecy by the electoral authority had led to mistrust in the electoral process.
The election observers said they witnessed violence at seven polling stations during voting hours and at three others during the closing and counting stages.
The June 24 vote was the fifth since the end of Sierra Leone’s civil war in 2002 and was held amid high unemployment and inflation, and increasingly violent political rhetoric.
Bio, a former coup leader in the 1990s, has sought to expand access to education, but faced rising frustration over economic hardship.
Rising prices spurred unusually violent protests last year, and the APC had been banking on the rising cost of living to defeat the government. Much of Sierra Leone’s population is unemployed and most of it lives in deep poverty.
Bio has faced increasing opposition because of debilitating economic conditions that Kamara pledged to improve.
Nearly 60 percent of Sierra Leone’s seven million people are dirt poor, with youth unemployment being one of the highest in West Africa. It was fairly prosperous at independence in 1961, but was terribly mismanaged and plundered by longtime dictator Siaka Stevens, who was in league with organized crime and employed drug-addicted secret police to terrorize and kill possible opponents. As a result, it is now one of Africa’s poorest and least developed countries.
Election campaigns in Africa are often fraudulent or pervaded by violence, even in stable countries like Senegal that routinely hold elections and have some degree of economic development. In Guinea, which borders Sierra Leone, Alpha Conde became the first democratically elected president in 2010. This did not make him a democrat. He used fraud and violence to win the 2013 legislative elections. He then used a constitutional referendum to get rid of term limits and then ran for election a third time, which he won using fraud (such as underage voting, ballot box stuffing, and violence at polling places). He gained a reputation for endemic corruption and repeated human rights abuses, as well as rampant vote fraud in the 2015 election where he was “reelected.” He clung to power until the military overthrew him in 2021. In December 2022, the U.S. imposed sanctions on Conde.
In May 2022, Guinea’s attorney general had initiated legal proceedings against Conde and 26 of his cronies for various crimes, including political violence. The alleged crimes range from complicity in murder and assault to destruction of property. According to the U.S. Embassy in Guinea, Conde’s security forces engaged in violence against opposition supporters and “the government arbitrarily arrested and detained opposition members” in 2020.
