President Julius Maada Bio and Samura Kamara.
PHOTO: AFP
- Losing presidential candidate Samura Kamara says he won’t challenge the election outcome because of a partisan judiciary.
- The international community and election observers noted errors in the tabulation of votes.
- President Julius Maada Bio was sworn in last week and has the economy as his biggest challenge.
Sierra Leone’s losing presidential candidate Samura Kamara won’t go to court to dispute the election results because he doesn’t have faith in the judiciary.
Kamara lost for the second time to President Julius Maada Bio of the Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP).
In last week’s poll, Kamara received 41.16% of the vote, while Bio narrowly passed the set majority of 55% with 56.17% of the vote.
But election observers raised concerns that there were “significant logistical problems [that] hampered voting on election day in certain areas” and a “lack of transparency in the tabulation process”.
Lansana Dumbuya, the secretary-general of Kamara’s party the All Peoples Congress (APC), said in a statement, “We are not going to court, we don’t trust the judiciary.”
He said the APC had had a series of “bad experiences relating to the lack of impartiality and competence of the Sierra Leone judiciary to provide redress for violations of electoral laws, processes, and mandates”.
During the 2018 elections, when APC lost as the ruling party to SLPP, it filed complaints before the courts that were never addressed, Dumbuya said.
Kamara has been on trial since December last year and went into the race facing a charge of embezzlement involving R51.2 million.
It is the state’s case that he misappropriated the funds meant for a consulate renovation project in New York during his time as ambassador.
Meanwhile, Bio is moving ahead with his duties as president after he was sworn in on 27 June.
According to the World Bank, Bio will oversee a country whose macroeconomic management remains ineffective.
Fiscal pressures have gradually increased, the debt burden has increased, and inflation has risen, owing to global supply shocks, currency rate depreciation, and a deterioration in trade conditions, in addition to internal imbalances.
The rise in living costs, along with sluggish development and a deterioration in macroeconomic fundamentals, threatens to deepen poverty in an environment with insufficient social safety nets.
The forecast for the economy is intertwined with both external and domestic events, the World Bank brief says.
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