Sierra Leoneans choosing leader

President’s health program popular; rival says job creation needed

Voters wait Saturday to cast their ballots in presidential, parliamentary and local elections outside a polling station in the Freetown, Sierra Leone, neighborhood of Kroo Bay.
Voters wait Saturday to cast their ballots in presidential, parliamentary and local elections outside a polling station in the Freetown, Sierra Leone, neighborhood of Kroo Bay.

— Sierra Leoneans chose Saturday between keeping an incumbent president who has expanded health care and paved roads or electing an opposition candidate to lead the war-scarred nation still recovering a decade later despite its mineral riches.

The election marked the third presidential vote since the West African nation’s 11-year conflict ended in 2002, a war during which rebels abused victims and conscripted child soldiers.

Voters said Saturday that they wanted to demonstrate just how far Sierra Leone has come over the past decade by holding a transparent and peaceful vote.

“We’ve been through a lot in the last 20 years. Now we’re trying to move forward,” said Mannah Kpukumu, 36, a civil servant waiting in a line that snaked near a giant cotton tree long before dawn. “We the young guys want employment and to be able to take care of our families.”

National election officials spread that message through posters affixed to tin shacks and traffic circles throughout the capital of Freetown: “The world is watching us. Let us don’t disappoint them.”

Election workers slept overnight at polling stations and some voters began lining up at 2 a.m. in the congested seaside capital, their chests pressed against the people in front of them. Those not yet old enough to vote moved through the crowds selling plastic bags of cold water stacked in buckets on their heads.

Sierra Leone’s chief elections officer Christiana Thorpe said there were reports of some technical problems in the country’s east, including vehicles breaking down while distributing voter materials.

However, she said that while some polling stations opened late, problems were swiftly solved.

Richard Howitt, chief observer for the European Union election observation mission, said there were bound to be flaws in the process but that early reports indicated a high turnout Saturday.

“What we see is a very happy atmosphere with people enthusiastic to vote,” he said.

President Ernest Bai Koroma later cast his vote before screaming fans chanting his name.

“We are also pleased that it has been a peaceful process up to this moment and we hope that it will continue,” he said afterward.

Leading opposition candidate and former military leader Julius Maada Bio said at his polling station that he remained “very confident I am going to defeat the president in this very first round.”

Koroma’s supporters pointed to strides made in the country’s health-care system through a program offering free medical aid. And they also said they see hope for Sierra Leone because of several offshore oil discoveries made in the past three years.

Koroma’s health-care program has proved enormously popular in a country that was hard hit by cholera earlier this year and has one of the highest rates of maternal mortality in the world.

However, doubts remain about the long-term feasibility of the health program. The opposition also said more needs to be done to promote job creation, and some frustrated voters said they were backing Bio instead.

“The economy is down and people are straining. Thousands of people are jobless,” said Alfred Coker, 27, as he waited outside a school to vote in downtown Freetown.

Most of the country’s nearly 6 million people live on less than $1.25 a day, according to World Bank statistics, and life remains especially difficult for the estimated 2,000 people who were seriously maimed during the war.

Tens of thousands died during the 1991-2002 conflict famously depicted in the film Blood Diamond.

Sierra Leone already has successfully held mostly peaceful votes since the end of the war. This time the country is bearing the sole responsibility for securing the vote, even though it is being organized with substantial foreign aid of some 46 percent of the election budget.

Koroma’s APC party is expected to draw strong support in the north and in the capital, though he also appears to be making some inroads in traditional opposition strongholds. He would need 55 percent of the vote to win outright and avert a runoff.

He faces eight challengers, including the leading opposition figure Bio, a retired brigadier-general from the Sierra Leone Peoples Party. Bio calls himself the “father of democracy” after his brief three-month tenure as head of state in 1996 before handing over power to a democratically elected civilian government.

Bio and his supporters maintain the president has failed to deliver on his 2007 election promises and does not deserve a second term.

Information for this article was contributed by Clarence Roy-Macaulay of The Associated Press.

Front Section, Pages 10 on 11/18/2012

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