A SIERRA Leonean diplomat has taken The Economist magazine to task for what he termed the publication’s ‘skewed citation of projections’ that President Julius Maada Bio ‘did not get the mandatory 55 per cent to avoid a run-off’ in the recent presidential election in Sierra Leone.
Lansana Gberie, the country’s permanent representative to the UN and other international organisations in Geneva, in his letter published by The Economist, said: ‘You claimed that President Julius Maada Bio’s re-election win in Sierra Leone with 56 per cent of the vote only just “squeaked him over the 55 per cent threshold to avoid a run-off”’.
‘That ignores the critical fact that he beat his nearest rival by a 15 per cent margin, which isn’t squeaking anything.
‘You also said that President Bio was “hurriedly sworn in within an hour”.
‘Swearing in our president immediately after the Electoral Commission declares him the winner may be hurried, but it is the standard procedure,’ added Gberie, who was in Sierra Leone for the election.
He went on to point out that in 2007, ‘when Ernest Bai Koroma was announced the winner in a far more disputed poll, he was sworn in immediately’.
He said that happened notwithstanding the fact that ‘the then chair of the Electoral Commission invalidated tens of thousands of votes from the stronghold of Mr Koroma’s opponent’.
Then, it was the governing Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) that was on the receiving end when Koroma, representing the opposition All People’s Congress (APC), triumphed.
Gberie said about The Economist’s coverage of the election: ‘Less frivolous is the skewed citation of projections made by the New Election Watch (NEW), which every critic of President Bio’s win has been using, that he won far more votes than all the candidates combined but did not get the mandatory 55 per cent to avoid a run-off.
‘NEW does not claim it has all the voting data; it merely wants the Electoral Commission to publish those data.
‘Needless to say, the Commission, not NEW, certifies the results of our elections.
‘Observers can criticise or make recommendations about the conduct of our polls, but they do not decide who wins it.
‘The Commission only counts actual votes cast, not votes that are projected by observers, however clever or farsighted they may be,’ Gberie added.
Bio, representing the governing SLPP, defeated his main opponent, Samura Kamara of the APC, in the election on June 24, giving him a second and final five-year term as president.
