Sierra Leone's Electoral Coup and the Hotel Agreement

The Sierra Leone elections of June 2023 ended without a properly published election result. International and local observers who monitored the process agreed that the elections were non-transparent, and were equally fraught with numerous irregularities. Since June 2023, local and international appeals for the publication of the election results at the polling station level by the Electoral Commission of Sierra Leone (ECSL) have been completely ignored by the election management body. But in spite of the numerous questions surrounding the credibility of the elections, politicians from the country's two oldest political parties --- Sierra Leone Peoples Party (SLPP) and All Peoples Congress (APC) --- went ahead to agree on a power-sharing arrangement in October 2023. The power-sharing arrangement allowed SLPP and APC politicians to continue occupying positions in cabinet, parliament, and the local government institutions across the country without the proper publication of a verified and certified election result. This SLPP/APC power sharing arrangement, supported by a few international organizations and foreign diplomats, is now being wrongly promoted as an "Agreement for National Unity" despite its failure to address the genuinely democratic questions around the June 2023 elections. In this episode, Chernoh Alpha Bah provides an analysis of these developments, pointing out the illegality of the SLPP/APC power-sharing arrangement, and the unconstitutional nature and implications of the October 2023 hotel agreement. This episode is part of the VOICE FROM EXILE commentary series of the Africanist Press.