Information service of the Pontifical Mission Societies since 1927
Freetown (Agenzia Fides)- Tomorrow 8 September Sierra Leone will hold second round presidential elections. In the first round on 11 August opposition candidate Ernest Bai Koroma obtained 44% of the votes and outgoing vice president Solomon Berewa came second with 38%. Neither candidates obtained the necessary absolute majority to win in the first round and in this second round, a simple majority will be sufficient for a victory. Koroma's All People’s Congress Party, won 59 of the 112 seats in Parliament against the 43 seats obtained by the Sierra Leone People's Party led by Berewa.
Outgoing president Ahmed Tejan Kabbah, having completed two mandates cannot run in the elections because a third presidential mandate is not foreseen by the Constitution. These elections are the second since civil war ended in 2002. In that year elections were held under the supervision of the UN peacekeeping force which left the country in 2005.
Fides asked Saverian Missionary Fr. Gerardo Caglioni, for many years a missionary in the country to comment the situation in Sierra Leone.
“Since the end of the civil war in 2002 undoubtedly there has been progress and improvements. But with these elections the country says it is tired of empty promises and the usual familiar personages and is asking, as in the previous elections, a change of administration. So the party in power has favoured only the more developed south east, is totally rejected by the rest of the country: the north and a greater part of the people living in the peninsula of Freetown. The people in these areas reject the Sierra Leone People’s Party’s, but it faces the choice of returning to the past and bringing back into power the All People’s Congress Party, the party in power in the 1990s before the civil war. However in order to form an executive this party will probably have to make alliances.
Sierra Leone's future will depend on the alliances the two leading candidates make with those who failed to obtain enough votes to stay in the race, and there is a risk, according to local observers, that the president may belong to one party and the parliament to another.
One thing is certain, despite their traditional patience, the people of Sierra Leone are tired of promises, they want a new country where promises are kept: work for young people, quality education (books, libraries, grants, teachers and especially guaranteed salaries for teachers), infrastructures in the field of the communications (roads, telephones, Internet, radio and television...), electricity (this is the only country in the world which has no electricity and this depends simply on the whim of certain political leaders; an Italian company has been building a dam for the past 35 years and non one knows when it will produce electricity). But the issue most at heart and which was also central in the electoral campaign, is the eradication of corruption present at every level in the administration which still feels the effects of the tribal system. The democratic and tribal (monarchical) systems cannot exist together!
The people are wondering what happens to the countries riches, diamonds, bauxite and other minerals of which Sierra Leone is rich, with the sectors of fishing, timber and other products. Who reaps the benefits? Why are the people either too rich or too poor? It would seem that nothing was learned from the civil war which lasted eleven years and that things continue in the same manner if not worse”. (L.M.) (Agenzia Fides 7/9/2007 righe 48 parole 637)
