16th March, 2018
The Sierra Leone’s National Electoral Commission (NEC) has released campaign calendar and guidelines for the presidential run-off election scheduled for March 27.
NEC has announced a run-off in the country’s presidential election as no candidate scored the mandatory 55 per cent votes in the March 7 election which witnessed 84 per cent turn out.
The opposition candidate, Julius Maada Bio of Sierra Leone’s Peoples Party (SLPP) led the final result with 1,097, 482 votes, making 43.3 per cent of the 2, 537,122 valid votes cast in the polls.
Samura Kamara of ruling All Peoples Congress (APC) came a close second with 1,082, 748 votes, representing 42.7 per cent of the total votes cast.
A statement issued by NEC in Freetown and made available to the News Agency of Nigeria in Abuja, noted that the two political parties and their candidates could campaign across the 16 Administrative districts of the country from March 15 to March 25.
According to the released guidelines each of the two parties would be granted exclusive permit on specific days in designated Districts to avoid clashes.
The Commission is also expected to retrain polling officials and ready the electoral machinery for hitch-free voting.
The winner of the run off will replace out-going President Ernest Bai Koroma of the APC who has completed his constitutionally allowed two terms of five years each.
READ: Sierra Leone Elections: Maada Bio, Kamara for run-off March 27
The APC and the SLPP have dominated political power of Sierra Leone since independence from Britain in 1961.
Meanwhile, a statement issued by the Mr Paul Ejime, the spokesman for the ECOWAS Mission in Sierra Leone said that the mission was on ground to monitor the process.
“The Core Team of ECOWAS Long-Term Observers, including Secretariat staff of the ECOWAS Network of Electoral Commissions (ECONEC), is on ground monitoring the electoral processes.
“The ECOWAS Observation Mission is supported by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), European Union and the Danish International Development Agency (DANIDA).
Meanwhile, from the 24 parliamentary results released Thursday by NEC, the APC has 13 seats, SLPP 10, and the Coalition for Change (C4C) one seat.
The country has 144-seat unicameral parliament, made up of 132 contested seats and 12 complemented seats for Paramount Chiefs.