The leader and presidential frontrunner of the ruling Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP), President Julius Maada Bio last Friday 17 March 2023 delivered an inciting statement calling on members and supporters of his party to protect their own votes as the security cannot protect it for them.
President Bio’s statement to a large extent has tendencies of provoking elections violence on polling day, having declared the legitimate state security forces incapable of protecting electorate votes and entire electoral process.
His call on people of the South and East appears to be urging them to take the laws of the land into their own hands wherein the security forces are declared incapable by the head of government.
President Bio has also laid bare facts that the APC 2018 presidential candidate, Dr Samura Mathew Wilson Kamara, was unfairly treated considering the untimely and jittery call on the electorate to protect their own votes. It also exposed N’faa Alie of wrongly misplacing votes cast in 2018 polls, which is why President Bio seems worried with fears that the table might turn against his interest.
Since assumption of office on 4 April 2018, President Bio wasted his term of office on politically-motivated cases, blaming the past regime, chasing political opponents of the main opposition All People’s Congress (APC) and workers of the last administration. He is certainly looking very much worried wherever he goes, reflecting on his poor performance in the elections in 2018.
He seems to have cast huge hopes in the people of the South and East of the country, whom his regime also subjects to their fair share of poverty in the past years caused by imposed high cost of living.
Speaking during a meeting at Mano Dasse, Moyamba district, Southern Sierra Leone, the SLPP presidential candidate expressed fears and complete loss of trust and confidence in state security forces, saying that personnel of Sierra Leone Police and those of the Republic of Sierra Leone Armed Forces are not enough to protect electorate votes come June 24.
“It is your duty to protect your own people. However, we have police and the military they are not enough to be everywhere simultaneously to provide security for votes on that day. We don’t even have up to ten thousand soldiers and we cannot even be able to deploy them all to protect votes on elections day, not to talk about the police, they too cannot be everywhere to protect votes,” worriedly disclosed by Julius Maada Bio, the governing SLPP party presidential candidate for the June 24 multitier elections.
President Bio’s already and widely criticised defeatist statement emerged barely three months to the June 24 polls, in the wake of heightened pre-elections monitoring and top-gear preparations by multi-national elections observers’ missions storming Sierra Leone ahead of the June 24 elections.
The SLPP presidential candidate made the remarks when Sierra Leoneans the world over consider the June 24 multitier elections as a regime change electoral contest, amidst hullabaloos for socio-economic, fiscal-financial and democratic governance reforms due to abject poverty and poor livelihoods of the masses largely caused by high cost of living.
