Sierra Leone’s main opposition parties will campaign jointly against Vice-President Solomon Berewa in a presidential run-off after taking control of the West African country’s Parliament, a party chief said on Friday.
The move puts All People’s Congress (APC) leader Ernest Bai Koroma in position to succeed outgoing President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah, amid calls for change and faster reconstruction after a 1991 to 2002 civil war.
Veteran politician Charles Margai, who defected from Kabbah’s Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) when it chose Berewa as candidate, said he would throw his People’s Movement for Democratic Change (PMDC) behind Koroma on a joint campaign tour.
Koroma won 44,3% of votes in the August 11 presidential election, short of the 55% needed to avoid a run-off, according to provisional results announced late on Thursday.
Berewa won 38,3 % and Margai 13,9%.
PMDC endorsement will likely hand the northerner Koroma extra support in the southern part of the country — Margai’s home and also the traditional heartland of SLPP support.
The SLPP performed best in the south, failing to win a single parliamentary seat in the western region around the capital, Freetown, and only a few in the north, handing a parliamentary majority to Koroma’s APC with 59 of the 112 seats.
‘End tribalism’
”Let us put all tribalism, sectionalism, regionalism behind us. My desire to unify this nation was one of the factors that urged me to appeal to the membership of the PMDC to lend support to the APC. Never again will the north/south-eastern divide raise its ugly head in Sierra Leone,” Margai told reporters on Friday.
Margai said his own party’s constitution barred him from taking up any post in an APC government, but said the PMDC would campaign jointly with the Koroma’s APC to defeat Berewa.
”I’m sure he has seen the writing on the wall … He knows defeat is imminent. The people of Sierra Leone have spoken that they want change,” Margai said.
Koroma’s spokesperson urged Berewa late on Thursday to concede and save the impoverished country the expense of a second round.
But Berewa’s camp rejected the call, insisting it would fight the run-off, which should take place within two weeks of the final results announcement, due on Saturday.
”We will absolutely win the presidential second round run-off,” SLPP spokesperson Victor Reider said.
”We feel great today. We think that the credit should go to a government that is law-abiding, that has been able to engender a democratic process such that the opposition has won the Parliament. That is to our credit,” Reider said.
”What we have done in the last five years the APC failed to do in 24 years,” he said.
The APC ruled the former British colony for more than two decades before the war, which was sparked in part by widespread official corruption and funded by diamonds which rebels mined and sold to buy guns via neighbouring Liberia. — Reuters