Sierra Leone's main opposition leader and presidential candidate, Dr. Samura Kamara, recently issued a call for the 2023 presidential and parliamentary elections to be rerun, citing numerous alleged irregularities that were flagged by local and international observers, as well as the principal opposition party, All People’s Congress (APC). This demand for an election rerun – and the effective dismissal of President Bio’s second term – comes amid an ongoing, arguably worsening crisis within the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), which has been severely fractured by a number of military coups that have demanded continental and global attention.
The energy being focused on the military’s undue involvement in West African politics, however, should divert meaningful attention away from the region’s alleged electoral coups — including in Sierra Leone last June. To put it plainly: Dr. Kamara's renewed call for an election rerun has reignited justified debates over President Bio's legitimacy and the nation's democratic standing – as well as its future stability.
Today, the country’s electoral commission (ECSL) continues to face credible accusations of a lack of transparency in both handling and announcing election outcomes. This has led, of course, to heightened political tensions in the country and significant international condemnation, tarnishing Sierra Leone's global image and hampering direct investment. For example, the fallout from the June 2023 election has severely strained Sierra Leone's relations with major international partners, prompting funding suspensions, including $480 million in the form of a compact fund from the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC).
In an effort to address these concerns, ECOWAS, the Commonwealth, and the United Nations collaborated in an effort to form a national unity coalition, which subsequently established a tripartite committee to investigate alleged election malpractices. Despite concluding its investigation and submitting an 80-page report to President Bio in June, the committee failed to compel the ECSL to disclose disaggregated vote data, as requested by the opposition’s Dr. Kamara and other election observers.
"Due to statistical inaccuracies reported by the ECSL, we demand an immediate rerun of the 2023 election and the resignation of key election officials," stated Dr. Kamara. He highlighted, in particular, discrepancies between the ECSL's results and the reconciliatory returning forms provided by the opposition and signed by election officials and observers. In so doing, Dr. Kamara emphasized the right of voters to electoral transparency, namely the freedom to know if their votes were counted and registered accurately.
Meanwhile, ECOWAS faces urgent challenges to its very existence, including the formation of a military union by the junta-led governments in Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso, which threatens regional cohesion, stability, and human security. The President of the ECOWAS Commission Omar Alieu Touray, said the Sahel countries’ withdrawal from ECOWAS risked further ‘political isolation,’ as well as the loss of millions of dollars in funding.
A stable and democratic Sierra Leone, therefore, is now more important than ever. It also raises questions about the recent approval and deployment of an ECOWAS stabilization force in Sierra Leone that is ostensibly meant to boost the country’s security sector amid the increased political tensions. It seems to reason that, instead of spending huge sums of resources to dispatch a regional security force, it might be more prudent to ensure free and fair elections in the first place – a principle that ECOWAS leadership had previously championed. The current state of affairs merely raises more questions about ECOWAS’ relevance today, which is now shielded by additional coup leaders trying — and succeeding — to defy its authority.
Alpha Kamara is a Sierra Leonean freelance journalist based in Washington D.C. Follow his blog, The Narratives, and here on Twitter: @AlphaKamara4
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