Just a month ago, torrential rains and strong winds brought down the legendary Cotton Tree, a ceiba tree about 400 years old and 70 meters high, which stood tall in the middle of Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone.
It was a national tragedy: that tree, whose silhouette adorns bills and stamps, was the symbol of the nation since, in 1972, it welcomed under its branches the prayers of the founders of the city, former slaves in America.
In Sierra Leone, where the belief in spirits, black magic and supernatural beings is widespread among the population of all social and cultural backgrounds, the fall of the legendary tree was read by many as a bad omen for the re-election wishes of the president, Julius Maada Bio, who had placed an election banner next to the roots of the Cotton Tree.
Yesterday, spirits aside, 3.3 million Sierra Leoneans of flesh and blood were called to the polls to decide if bad omen or arithmetic logic has more force: Bio is the outstanding favorite to achieve a second term.
To avoid a second round, you must get at least 55% of the vote.
Although he will have a dozen rivals ahead of him, Bio only fears for his re-election before the opposition leader, Samura Kamara, with great support in the north. Despite this, Bio is convinced of victory and even more so with the pacts of recent months.
The current president, who defeated Kamara by a very narrow margin in the 2018 elections, has joined forces with the third in contention in the last electoral round, Kandeh Yumkella, who is notably popular in the north of the country, the Achilles heel de Bio, who has his big bag of voters in the southern half.
That division between north and south, straddling ethnic differences, is the backbone of the elections in Sierra Leone.
Historically, origin and ethnicity have been decisive in choosing the winner, since the Sierra Leone People’s Party (PPSL), currently in power, is the majority in southern Mende (in the last elections Bio achieved 87% of the southern votes) while the north is a stronghold of the Temne, faithful to the Congress of All Peoples (CTP), who voted en masse (78%) for Kamara five years ago.
Although it is foreseeable that in yesterday’s meeting the regional vote differences will be so uneven, in recent months Bio has made a great display of campaign visits to the northern regions to try to reduce the gap.
There will be another decisive issue: youth. As in most African elections, youth will once again be a differential factor, since 60% of Sierra Leoneans registered to vote are under 24 years of age.
And his patience due to the lack of employment is ending: last year, there were thirty deaths after the protests for the cost of living that filled the streets of the country.
Sierra Leonean writer Ishmael Beah integrated that discontent in his article that week in The Continent. “We voted for a new president but the candidates are difficult to distinguish. The current president simulates a farce of success even if the economy disintegrates and, meanwhile, the opposition promises to fix everything without a clear plan.
Among supporters of the main opposition party, the perception is that the government will do everything possible to stay in power and the elections will not be fair.
At the end of last year, the spokesman for the opposition CTP, Abdul Kargbo, even cast doubt on the new registration and verification of votes, saying that they “had been deliberately designed to create an uneven playing field to disenfranchise a certain section of the electorate at the expense of our party.”
Attempts to set fire to coexistence have no effect for now. A survey carried out in March by the Institute for a Reform Government pointed out that 75% of Sierra Leoneans consider the elections credible. The analysis also shows the change in a country that twenty years ago ended a civil war that between 1991 and 2002 caused 70,000 deaths and 2.6 million displaced persons.
Two decades later, insecurity is the ninth concern of society (chosen by 1.6% of those surveyed), while infrastructure, access to water and rising prices occupied the top three positions.
