The 2023 presidential election result will not end like the presidential election did in 2018.
This is the contention of election observers present in Sierra Leone during the 24 June 2023 presidential elections from the international community.
The duo said the international community must guaranty that every vote is accounted for hence counted. They said Sierra Leoneans must never accept for the 2023 presidential elections to end up like it did in 2018.
The observers said they are not new to electoral disputes of the sort that has risen over the now discredited 2023 presidential election in Sierra Leone, for which they said they started tallying the rigging process from the massive sackings at Statistics Sierra Leone.
Going back into the 2018 presidential election, the female and male elections observers who said they also witnessed those elections, said according to their understanding the win by the challenging party, Sierra Leone Peoples Party – SLPP candidate, Julius Maada Bio, was a compromise for Dr Samura Mathew Wilson Kamara to accept Bio as the winner.
“The rumour was that Dr Samura Kamara was impressed upon to accept Mr Bio as the winner for the sake of maintaining the peace. That was the fourth presidential election cycle after APC had won the previous two in a row. The APC had an 11 year rule and it was determined that there should be time for a change at the top to maintain the peace and for the nation not to revert to the 1990s,” said the female international election observer.
Before the Ernest Bai Koroma era, the nation had been ably led by Ahmed Tejan Kabbah whose mandate and key electoral promise was to maintain and consolidate on the peace that was brokered to end the warring 1990s, which according to the observers, “Kabbah did under some very trying economic and socio-political climes”.
Still narrating the events that led to what they referred to as “the 2018 compromise”, after taking over from the Kabbah regime, former President Ernest Bai made some very impressive gains on the economic and infrastructural development fronts creating employment for many citizens regardless of political, tribal or regional allegiance.
The 11 year period under former President Bai Koroma remains the most economically successful period in the nation’s economic narrative. However, although such successes should have positioned the APC for another victory after the Ernest Bai Koroma era, the Ebola pandemic and the drops in the price of iron ore that led to the shutting down of mines and the loss of many jobs militated against the idea of another five years under the APC.
“For what it was worth there was time for another change as there was already people talking of no guaranty of peace if there was no change. The Auditor-General’s report into how the Ebola funds were expended also didn’t help. The opposition created an atmosphere of widespread discontent that set the stage for regime change,” said the male election observer.
The duo who said they have witnessed many presidential and general elections and referenda around the world under different observer missions said according to their understanding with contender or challenger Julius Maada Bio being a former coup and junta leader whose leadership tenure was followed by the brutal parts of the civil war demanding regime change and promising to make the country was ungovernable, there was a desperate move by the international community to ensure that Sierra Leone continued on the path of peace and national cohesion and development.
“This is where many people now believe that the United Kingdom through the office of the High Commissioner got involved in the much rumoured regime change in Sierra Leone. It is generally believed that Guy Warrington, the former UK High Commissioner, played a big role in this regime change and the main reason for his fall from grace,” the female observer pitched in.
The elections observers said the 2018 presidential victory for Julius Maada Bio of the SLPP was not without its doubts. However, five years down the line and after a very economically and socially disastrous first term defined by harsh economic, health and socio-political upheavals, the people of Sierra Leone overwhelmingly voted for change.
The international elections observers posited that they have observed that except for the 1996 elections, for which they alleged that there is documentary evidence that the election was stage-managed and manipulated by the then National Provisional Ruling Council (NPRC) junta leader Julius Maada Bio, “the SLPP has never neither won an acceptable presidential election, nor won a majority in parliament under normal voting circumstances”.
The male observer said international observers of global electoral disputes started seeing red flags from Sierra Leone that pointed to elections rigging with the massive sacking of nearly the entire staff at Statistics Sierra Leone.
“This was followed by the sacking and replacing of the heads and the appointment or the makeup of the commissions and other electoral management bodies. These are trends that raise eyebrows across the comity of all the elections observer groups, Civil Society Organizations and nongovernmental organisations. Therefore to pre-empt the occurrence of another questionable presidential election victory and to stop the APC from reclaiming power, after naming and appointing the heads of the elections management bodies whose naming were widely opposed by the opposition parties and advocacy groups, laws such as the Cyber Crime Law, the New Elections Law and the introduction of the Proportional Representation – PR system of elections long set the stage for the presidential result that the chief electoral commissioner and the electoral commission of Sierra Leone announced.”
“The international community should not allow for this impunity to continue. There must be a point where we MUST get to the bottom of the result that Mohamed K. Konneh announced. There is no way under heaven that what he announced can be called the people’s mandate. Now that the two political sides of the Tripartite Committee have done their side of the job, it is now up to us from the international community that act as referees to deliver on the justice side of this impasse to declare who really won on June 24, 2023. No matter how we get to this point we have to get there as Bio clearly didn’t win and couldn’t have won the 2023 presidential elections,” the international election observer noted.
She said that at the very end of the process all those who were involved in the rigging or manipulation of the elections result, which the observers equated to a treasonous crime against the people and state, “must face the court of law to give an account. This must happen if electoral sanity will be assured of in Sierra Leone”.
