On 27 June, three days after Sierra Leoneans went to the polls, the Electoral Commission of Sierra Leone (ECSL) declared incumbent Julius Bio of Sierra Leone’s People’s Party (SLPP) as the winner of the presidential election. The announcement was keenly watched by observers and citizens in one of West Africa’s smallest democracies, but one with a history of ethnoreligious division and increasingly volatile politics.
Mr Bio’s victory in the first round, by securing higher than the 55 per cent needed to avoid a second round (56.1 per cent), has been disputed by other election observers and reports. A parallel voter tabulation (PVT) run by National Election Watch (NEW), a domestic observation group made up of civil society organisations in the country, estimated that Mr Bio actually scored 53 per cent and less than the required numbers to avert a run-off. International missions were also concerned about the collation process. In a joint statement, the American, British, Irish, German, French and European Union missions to Sierra Leone said that they ‘share the concerns of national and international observation missions about the lack of transparency in the tabulation process’.
Expectedly, the opposition has rejected the results while crucially calling for peace as they litigate the outcome through the judiciary. Ultimately, the declared results only add to established issues surrounding the conduct of the polls. While most reports indicated that the elections were relatively smooth and peaceful, there were pockets of unrest and incidents in the capital, Freetown, and in enough areas to alert the many external observer delegations that had descended on the country ahead of the tight election. Observers deployed by National Election Watch (NEW), a civil society coalition in Sierra Leone, reported that while the South (96 per cent), North (94 per cent), North-West (94 per cent) and Eastern (93 per cent) regions opened polls on time, there was a significant challenge in the Western Area with only 59 per cent observed opening polls by 8 a.m. as prescribed. Freetown in particular experienced several logistical challenges, with many opposition party officials accusing the ECSL of selectively targeting an APC stronghold. Post-election actions, including police officials firing teargas into a crowd of mostly opposition supporters, have done little to calm nerves ahead of the tense election tally period.
