Tripartite Committee: A Triangle of Deception and Disinformation

In October 2023, international organizations and foreign diplomats stationed in Sierra Leone organized a meeting in Freetown to negotiate a political settlement to the electoral crisis without first investigating the disputed elections and the accompanying human rights violations. Held at the Bintumani Hotel in Freetown, the meeting developed an agreement that authorized politicians of the All Peoples Congress (APC) and Sierra Leone Peoples Party (SLPP) to take over the institutions of government without the publication and verification of the disputed elections result. Resolution 3 of the "Hotel Agreement" created a "Tripartite Committee" that only included foreign diplomats, and SLPP and APC politicians, to supposedly "undertake an elections system review" even without the necessary legal authority to carry out such an exercise. In this episode, we highlight how the "Tripartite Committee" represents the joint effort of local politicians and international organizations to consolidate the SLPP and APC’s political hegemony in Sierra Leone, and also safeguard the politics of rotational governance that characterizes the country's political history since 1961.   This episode uses the composition of the "Tripartite Committee" to demonstrate how foreign diplomats and SLPP/APC politicians have excluded the majority of Sierra Leone’s political parties and civil society voices in their joint efforts to consolidate and protect the two-party hegemony at the expense of real democracy in the country. This episode is part of the VOICE FROM EXILE commentary series of the Africanist Press.