The opposition party APC “totally” rejects some figures that it describes as “false and cooked”
June 27 (EUROPA PRESS) –
The president of Sierra Leone, Julius Maada Bio, has made an appeal to “keep the peace” after the announcement of the partial results of the presidential elections on Saturday, in which he would have won, while the main opposition party He has said that the data published by the electoral commission are “false and cooked”.
Bio has given a speech to the nation after the announcement of the first official results in which he stressed that “Sierra Leoneans from all over the nation went to the polls on June 24 to carry out their democratic election for national and local positions”, before to stress that the electoral commission “is the only constitutional body with the power to manage, tabulate and announce electoral results”.
“We must wait for the announcement of the final results,” said the president, who has called on citizens to “maintain peace and continue to respect public order laws.” “We all have a role in keeping the peace during and after the announcement of the results of these elections,” he said, according to a statement published by the Sierra Leonean Presidency through its website.
Thus, the president has asserted that “citizens should not incite violence or be associated with violent acts.” “We must avoid all provocative and vengeful actions. Let us individually and collectively maintain and promote peace in our communities and among the social and political groups to which we are affiliated,” he defended.
“I ask the Police and security forces to restraintly apply public order laws and to protect all their citizens impartially. The constitutional rights of all citizens are equally important and must be fully respected at all times and circumstance”, he stressed.
Bio has shown its “unconditional commitment” to “an inclusive, peaceful, fair and transparent electoral process.” “Ultimately, all citizens have an inherent interest in the peace and stability of this nation. We built our democracy on the remnants of war,” she recalled.
“We must all be determined to never return to that dark chapter in the history of our country. Let us continue consolidating our democracy, respecting our Constitution and maintaining peace”, stressed the Sierra Leone president, who reiterated to close his speech his call to “wait for the final results from the electoral commission”.
The results announced by the electoral commission would place Bio, of the ruling Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP), ahead of his main rival, Samura Kamara, of the All People’s Congress (APC). Bio would have collected just over a million votes, out of the nearly 794,000 for the opposition candidate.
To be declared the winner, one of the candidates for the Presidency must obtain at least 55 percent of the total votes. In case this situation does not occur, there will be a second round between the two most voted, as happened in 2018 between Bio and Kamara.
“TOTAL REJECTION” OF THE OPPOSITION APC
For its part, the APC has published a statement in which it stresses that it “takes note” of the results announced by the president of the electoral commission, Mohamed Konneh, although it has denounced that its observers “have not had access to participate nor have it has allowed them to verify and certify results prior to announcement, contrary to due process and best practices.”
“Furthermore, despite our several attempts to contact the electoral commission about the various electoral processes, the electoral commission did not communicate to us the manner of announcing the results or give the PAC an opportunity to verify them before the announcement,” said the Kamara’s party, according to a document collected by the newspaper ‘The Sierra Leone Telegraph’.
Along these lines, he has denounced that the party “has not received any detailed data on the so-called results at 60 percent of the count.” “We do not have information about specific polling stations, centers and districts from which they came,” he explained, for which he spoke of “serious infractions, abuses of the democratic process and an unprecedented lack of inclusiveness, transparency and accountability”.
“We cannot accept these results in any way. We totally reject the announcement by the president of the electoral commission of these cooked figures. We ask him to avoid announcing more results until all of them have been mutually and satisfactorily verified,” he stressed. the APC, which has promised to “make every effort within the law to stop this.”
“We call on our partners to play their part in collective action to prevent this broad daylight robbery of the popular will and prevent the increasingly likely disorder besetting our nation by electoral commission collusion to overthrow democracy through the falsification of data”, has settled.
On the other hand, the parties of Bio and Kamara also appear as the main favorites for the parliamentary elections, in which 135 seats are in dispute that will be chosen based on a controversial system of proportional representation, with a distribution by region — 32 for the east, 26 for the north, 21 for the northwest, 30 for the south and 26 for the west–.
This Saturday’s vote and, especially, the repercussions that it may have at a political and economic level, will mark the short-term future of the African country, which aspires to consolidate the democratic advances obtained in the two decades that have passed since the end of the war, financed to a large extent by the so-called ‘blood diamonds’ and which left around 120,000 dead.
