Unsurprisingly the pattern of events which have unfolded since the outcome of national elections in Sierra Leone became known have followed a rather rancorous and familiar path. Last week’s re-election of President Ernest Bai Koroma has drawn the ire of leading figures from the country’s main opposition party who claim that the elections were flawed and rigged in favour of the incumbent. Koroma, who campaigned on the joint headers of fighting corruption and attracting investment to the country, will now serve a second term in office following his 2007 victory.
Koroma’s All People’s Congress were said to have garnered 58.7 percent of the popular vote thereby surpassing the 55 percent threshold required to claim a first round victory. The opposition party’s Julius Maada Bio of the Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) questioned the validity of elections which international observers have acknowledged as being free and fair. Bio averred that the credibility of the results had been undermined by “systemic and widespread irregularities, malpractices and injustices”.
The SLPP and Bio will meet difficulties in attempting to convince anyone but their own supporters that the elections were marred by irregularities. For one, international observers including a European Union observer mission stationed in the country during the elections have had no reasons, as far as is known, to question the polls’ credibility. The EU’s presence was supplemented by observer missions from the Commonwealth, the United Nations (UN) and the African Union (AU). Further, a recount of a cross-section of the votes cast and conducted by the country’s electoral commission following the aforementioned claims of voter irregularity revealed that only a handful of the sample had been ‘contaminated’ and that the numbers of ‘contaminated’ votes were insufficient in number and scale to necessitate the annulment of the election results.
If the results of this third democratic election stand, it would signal immense progress since the end of the country’s 11-year civil war between 1991 and 2002. That unsavoury period of the country’s existence saw Sierra Leone serve as venue against the background of the commission of grave breaches of human rights and war crimes. The conflict was famous for the use of ‘blood diamonds’ by rebel soldiers to acquire ammunition, the deplorable use of child soldiers and the scores of innocent civilians now living with amputated limbs, amputation being the rebel fighters’ favoured means of intimidation and punishment. Hopes however abound that the recent elections will serve as the impetus which the country needs in order to realise the potential which the wealth of natural resources it possesses could only fuel or propel. Encouragingly early indications reveal a country so haunted by its past that its people, regardless of ethnic or political affiliation, are intent on steering its path far away from the history it attempts to dissociate therefrom.
No comments:
Post a Comment