Speaking to Forum at Tower Hill last week, Members of Parliament belonging to the ruling Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) have said if the main opposition All People’s Congress (APC) is serious about its elections victory in the June 24, 2023 presidential elections, then “APC for go court!”
The MPs of the Sixth Parliament said twelve years ago in 2012, after certain districts’ votes weren’t included in the tallying of the votes in the presidential race between the incumbent President Ernest Bai Koroma of the APC and the then challenger Julius Maada Bio of the SLPP, which they claimed robbed the challenger of victory, the then chief electoral commissioner Christina Thorpe had famously told Mr Bio and the SLPP that if they weren’t satisfied with the announced result, they should go to the police for redress.
The MPs said Mr Bio graciously accepted defeat at those polls to avoid bloodshed across the country. They told Forum that in those days due to fear that the members of the police force used to instil in the populace, not limited to their penchant for violence against opposition members, Mr Bio saw it as a futile exercise to seek redress. In order to avoid running street battles between APC and SLPP supporters across the country with the police on the side of the ruling party government as usual, Bio, they said, conceded defeat.
Today, the MPs said we are seeing a reverse of what happened in 2012 with the MPs belonging to the ruling SLPP calling on the APC party and executive to go to the judiciary to seek redress.
“If the APC are serious about addressing and challenging the results of the 24 June 2023 presidential elections then they will have to face the judiciary for that. They will have to go to court. Their hope that the Tripartite Committee was going to address their concerns to the point where President Bio is expected to step down is juvenile. We as a society have laws to address any and all of our extant problems; we don’t need a committee to tell us how to do handle electoral disputes. But the APC have been avoiding the court system which for me says they are not willing to challenge the elections result. If they are serious they will go to court,” said an SLPP MP of the Sixth Parliament.
The ruling partisans said the fact of the matter is that the APC has been misleading their supporters that the Tripartite Committee was going to come and change the narrative by either declaring who won the elections or calling for fresh elections. This was the APC supporters’ expectations of the committee’s work. That was one of the biggest mistakes the APC made, they added.
“The Tripartite Committee was not established to change anything about the past elections. This is what the APC is failing to tell their supporters. The committee was not meant to announce elections results based on their findings. The committee is here to help us move from this retributive electoral justice where the entire electoral commission and the other elections management bodies are seen as working in the interest of the incumbent regime. We all want free and fair and credible elections at the end of the day. We should not be running to court every time there is an election to settle claims. But we must trust in our court system to resolve issues such as electoral disputes as stated in our constitution,” said another SLPP MP.
Pitching in a member of the opposition, APC, of the House said it would be futile for the APC to seek redress in the court system citing that the system is biased and has shown itself to being that since the main opposition started taking cases to the court system against the SLPP regime going as far back as 2018.
“We had the situation of the 10 MPs the SLPP illegally removed form parliament. Their cases up to now have not been scheduled for hearing. Imagine this is since 2018. Coming closer to now, soon as the electoral commissioner started refusing publishing the disaggregated polling data per station, two lawyers, Augustine Marrah and Charles Margai, took the ECSL to court. What happened to their cases? They were both thrown out by the judiciary. The APC has a legitimate fear approaching the court to address issues of national importance that could destabilise the state,” said the MP belonging to the main opposition.
He went on that the APC started on the wrong trajectory in its advocacy to seeing that the June 23, 2023 presidential elections result issue is resolved in their interest. He said the APC’s biggest mistake was coming back into the House and the councils which gave legitimacy to the Maada Bio led regime.
“If we had continued staying out of the running of the government and experience the kind of embarrassing systems failure it portends then the regime would have seen the logic in imploring Konneh to release the results as demanded. But now that we have come back into governance we have given the SLPP regime legitimacy. Even after the Tripartite Committee hands out the report I don’t see how it is going to change President Bio’s second term ambition. The APC have once again lost another presidential election under the leadership of Dr Samura Kamara. The dialogue and the communiqué and the committee are not going to change what has already happened. The damage is done. No matter what the committee recommends we will still have to go to court to get it legally adhered to. This is where the problem lies. Our system of retributive justice is clearly at play with them (the SLPP MPs) calling on the APC to go to court knowing full well that there is no justice in the courts for the opposition,” the APC MP concluded.
