EIGHT candidates will challenge Sierra Leone President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah on Tuesday in the country’s first elections since the end of a brutal 10-year civil war.
Following are thumbnail sketches of the eight.
Alimamy Pallo Bangura is the interim secretary general of the Revolutionary United Front Party (RUFP), the party of the former RUF rebels who officially made peace with the government in January. The RUFP believes it has a good chance of winning seats in parliament.
Bangura, a soft-spoken academic, became an RUF member in 1993 under a military regime and was appointed to a national advisory council aimed at returning the country to multi-party democracy.
He continued to serve the regime and was appointed ambassador to Ethiopia and permanent representative to the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) in July 1993. A year later, he became Sierra Leone’s ambassador to the United Nations and remained in New York until June 1996.
He returned as foreign minister in a junta which was toppled in February 1998.
A negotiator in the 1999 peace accord between the government and the RUF, Bangura became energy minister in a unity government and served until May 2000, when a crisis erupted after rebels kidnapped UN peacekeepers and he was arrested.
Released in September 2001, he became general secretary of the RUF and was then designated presidential candidate as the former rebel leader Foday Sankoh, currently in prison on murder charges, was not allowed to contest. But Bangura’s candidacy was opposed by a significant portion of the RUF rank-and-file who argue that only Sankoh can be their true leader.
John Karefa-Smart, (87) candidate of the United National People’s Party (UNPP), was runner-up to Kabbah in the second round of the 1996 presidential election but his party has become deeply divided.
Karefa-Smart, a medical doctor, he became an MP before Sierra Leone gained independence from Britain in 1961. Between 1961 and 1964 he became a minister, holding key portfolios such as mining, defence, foreign affairs and was even acting prime minister.
Between 1965 and 1970 he was assistant director general of the World Health Organisation before working as consultant to several United Nations bodies and the World Bank.
Ernest Bai Koroma, (48) of the All People’s Congress (APC) is a former insurance honcho. The APC, in power from 1968-92, introduced single-party rule in 1978.
Born in the northern town of Makeni, an APC bastion before becoming a stronghold the RUF rebels, Koroma joined the party in 1974 as a student.
He taught briefly before rising to the post of managing director and chief executive officer of a local insurance firm. He was also a councillor in the Freetown local council.
Johnny-Paul Koroma of the Peace and Liberation Party (PLP) is a former officer of the Sierra Leone Army.
Nicknamed “JP”, Koroma was suspected of plotting a coup and imprisoned by Kabbah in 1997 but was freed during a putsch in April the same year by the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC).
The AFRC allied itself with the rebels but was toppled in February 1998 following bitter fighting with a west African regional military force which reinstated Kabbah.
After a July 1999 peace accord, “JP” increasingly distanced himself from the RUF, and in May 2000, when the rebels took some 500 UN peacekeepers hostage, Koroma clearly took sides with the government.
Zainab Bangura of the Movement for Progress is the sole woman candidate in the elections. A civil society activist and a former insurance official, she was the national coordinator of the Campaign for Good Governance and has protested against various military regimes which ruled the country after 1992.
Raymond Thompson of Citizens United for Peace and Progress (CUPP) is a lawyer who worked in the United States. His party is the result of a split in the UNPP.
Andrew Turay of the Young People’s Party (YPP) is a consultant agriculturist to the World Bank. He contested the presidential elections in 1996. – AFP