The Illegal Tripartite Committee and the Dilemma of Diplomacy in Sierra Leone

In the previous two episodes of this series, we highlighted how the Sierra Leone elections of June 2023 did not follow the stipulated legal and constitutional procedures for the conduct of presidential, parliamentary, and local council elections. We specifically pointed out that Sierra Leone's Chief Electoral Commissioner, Mohamed Konneh did not wait for districts and regions to complete their vote counting and tallying process before announcing alleged winners of the June 2023 presidential, parliamentary, and local governmentelections. Thus, we laid out the legal and political implications of the SLPP and APC's power-sharing agreement that has unprecedentedly inaugurated a President, Members of Parliament, and Local Council representatives in Sierra Leone without a properly conducted election. In this episode, we further examine the continuous violation of Sierra Leone's 1991 Constitution and the Public Elections Act 2022 through the composition of an illegal SLPP/APC Tripartite Committee, now funded by international agencies, to "undertake an elections system review" even without the necessary legal authority to carry out such an exercise. We also underlined the fact that the international community's decision to fund the SLPP/APC's Tripartite Committee does not advance democracy and national cohesion in Sierra Leone. Rather, it is a decision that excludes the majority of political parties (more than 10 political parties) that participated and contested the June 2023 elections. In particular, we highlighted that the exclusionary approach in constituting the supposed "election review committee" is enough reasons why the United States, and other foreign governments, need to rethink their current approach to the political crisis in Sierra Leone if they are serious about supporting real democracy in Sierra Leone. This episode is part of the VOICE FROM EXILE commentary series of the Africanist Press.