July 5, 2023
By Kabs Kanu
Jubilation and celebrations over their so-called elections victory have quickly died down in the Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) camp. After going around rudely grinding pot covers, beating perceived opponents and destroying their sources of livelihood, the myriad of supporters and thugs of the SLPP have gone silent.
Even the Southeastern region – the SLPP strongholds -are strangely quiet just a week after President Maada Bio had the Elections Commission of Sierra Leone declare him winner of the Sierra Leone Presidential Elections while the ballots were still being counted and many districts had not yet transmitted their results.
The outrage from the populace, the international elections observers and international stakeholders has been so humongous that the SLPP could not continue rejoicing. Though their president was declared winner by ECSL and given a second term mandate without a runoff as they all had believed, they have become tormented by the fact that they might not get away easily with the most spectacular and most outrageous elections rigging in Sierra Leone and beyond.
The National Elections Watch (NEW) remained insistent that the ECSL riged the elections in favour of President Bio. International elections observers, including the Carter Centre, the European Union and international stakeholders like the U.S especially have been on the offensive complaining that the elections lacked transparency during the process of tallying votes and continue to demand that the ECSL release unaggregated figures from the polling stations to demonstrate how they arrived at the decision that President Bio won the elections.
Instead of the jubilation and celebrations so typical of the SLPP, what we are seeing are sullen faces all over and desperate efforts on social media to play down the seriousness of the unequivocal stand by the international community as well as manufacturing fake letters from African countries congratulating President Bio for his “victory.”
Yesterday, President Bio summoned a meeting with the tainted civil society groups that had long surrendered their neutrality and are lapdogs of the SLPP government and he charged them to help his government condemn the international elections observers and international stakeholders who he is now openly accusing of interfering in Sierra Leone’s internal affairs and trying to bring confusion in the country.
Though rabid SLPP supporters are not saying it, they have stopped jubilating and celebrating because they are not optimistic that the Bio government will be allowed to get away with stealing the people’s mandate. Fears abound within that given the intensity of their anger, Sierra Leoneans might stage serious protests that might cripple the government, and the fuming international community might impose sanctions on the country and travel bans on Bio government officials that might destroy the economy and the government.
Sierra Leoneans who understand the SLPP well know that this is not the kind of muted and low-level celebration typical of the party. If they had been happy, they would have sent the whole country seething with jubilation to celebrate their so-called called victory. Something is not right. The silence in SLPP strongholds is ear deafening.
