Voters in Sierra Leone were yesterday called out to vote in the final round presidential elections following a campaign marked by verbal sparring, sporadic violence and a last-minute legal battle.
A wafer-thin margin separated the two frontrunners after the first round on March 7, adding to tensions in a country where political loyalties are often divided along ethnic lines and traumatic memories of civil war run deep.
Opposition challenger Julius Maada Bio of the Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) had a narrow edge over Samura Kamara of the ruling All Peoples’ Congress (APC), in a ballot with a turnout of more than 80 percent.
Photo: Reuters
“The race is too close to call,” Edmond Abu, director of the Native Consortium and Research Center, told reporters on Friday.
The key to victory lies with whoever wins Kono, a diamond-rich district in the east of the country, Abu said.
The runoff should have taken place on Tuesday, but was delayed so that the Sierra Leonean High Court could hear a complaint by the APC that some ballots had been tampered with.
The court on Monday lifted an injunction, but the Sierra Leonean National Electoral Commission said it needed four extra days for preparation because of lost time.
Bio, 53, is bidding to end a decade in power by the APC. He is a blunt-talking retired brigadier who took part in a 1992 coup and in 1996 briefly led a junta that helped pave the way for democratic elections.
In 2012, he lost the election to Sierra Leonean President Ernest Bai Koroma, of the APC, who is to step down after a decade in power.
Bio’s platform is focused on education and criticism of the government’s closeness to China, while Kamara is presenting himself as a continuity candidate who will develop Koroma’s programmes on health care and road construction. However, the campaign has been characterized by ugly verbal exchanges and occasional violence.
Bio has accused the APC of using police intimidation against his party and the electoral commission, and of sponsoring the court case to cling to power.
Police have reported a string of attacks on candidates and supporters on both sides since the first round, which saw Bio lead the field by a mere 15,000 votes.
Kamara has said he is “satisfied” with the court decision, and repeated calls for the vote to go ahead peacefully.
“The safety and security of Sierra Leone is in our hands. We should not allow an election to undermine our integrity,” he said.
The APC broadly relies on the Temne and Limba people in its northern strongholds, while the SLPP is more popular in the south with the Mende ethnic group.
Sierra Leone, rich in minerals, was a British colony from 1787 until 1961. Three decades later, it plunged into a civil war that lasted 11 years and claimed 120,000 lives.
Koroma’s decade-long tenure was marked by the 2014 to 2016 Ebola crisis, which killed almost 4,000 people, and a mudslide that last year struck the capital, Freetown, killing hundreds.
A total of 3.1 million people were entitled to cast their ballots. Voting was to run from 7am to 5pm, but the first results are expected to come in at the start of next week.
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