By Winnie Kamau
It is almost one week since the People of Sierra Leone went to the Polls on 7th March 2018. Due to the logistical challenges, the National Election Commission (NEC) has been facing including poor road network, lack of electricity in some places the results have been trickling in a snail-speed.
— National Electoral Commission of Sierra Leone (@NECsalone) March 11, 2018
NEC so far has tallied 75% of the Votes cast in the country against 16 Presidential contenders. With a difference of almost 15,000 votes garnered by the leading candidate from the opposition, Sierra Leone’s People Party (SLPP) Julius Maada Bio with 848,348 closely followed by All People’s Congress (APC) Mathew Samura Kamara with 833,519.
Pundits say with the current standing, the Opposition SLPP with 43.3% while the ruling party stands at 42.6% none of the parties will achieve the constitutional requirement of 55% of the results in order to evade the runoff. But it is yet to be seen if the remaining 25% results set to be announced by NEC will have a significant change.
The ruling party APC from the current election results is commanding 45% of the seats in parliament followed closely by SLPP at 40%. It will be interesting to see if the ruling party APC will speak to the rest of the parties for a coalition formation in preparation for the runoff.
The number of registered voters are pitted as 3,178,663 voters who were voting in 11,200 Polling stations. Out of the 16 Presidential Candidates, two of them are women.
NEC chairman Mohammed Conteh in a recent Press briefing reassured the People of Sierra Leone and the world that they were committed to releasing credible results “We will be releasing results that are credible and accurate. A lot of us here have been in elections a long time. We faced the war, we know exactly what this means.”
According to NEC there has been a recount of results from 16 Districts which were done in the presence of agents and observers at the NEC District Offices. It is worth noting that NEC has outdone itself by providing the Elections Data in machine-readable formats in PDF and Excel files which one can easily download and reuse.
