Counting of votes has been ongoing in Sierra Leone after voting ended on Wednesday following what observers say was a largely peaceful general election.
More than 3.1 million voters registered for the elections which took place across the country.
In all 16 candidates took part in the elections to become a successor to President Koroma who has been in power since 2007 and served his maximum two terms.
Partial tallies of vote results are expected within 48 hours and complete results within two weeks. A presidential runoff is likely, according to some experts, as the threshold to win outright in the first round is 55 percent.
Among the 16 candidates who contested for the top job were four key front runners. Samura Kamara of the All Peoples Congress (APC). He is Komora’s favorite to succeed him after handpicking him.
Julius Maada Bio of Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) is another front runner who briefly led a junta government in 1996. He is running for a second time after losing to Koroma in 2012.
Kandeh Yumkella of the National Grand Coalition (NGC) split from the SLPP to form his own party last year, offering an alternative to the two-party race in Sierra Leonean politics since independence from Britain in 1961.
Samuel Sam-Sumana of the Coalition for Change (C4C) is the other front runner who was sacked as vice-president by President Koroma in 2015 and has since formed his own political party.
The next leader of this West African nation has a major task of fixing the country’s economic crisis caused by a collapse in iron ore prices and an Ebola epidemic.
A civil war in the 1990s, fueled by conflict over diamonds was fought in part by child soldiers in which tens of thousands of people were killed, wrecking the West African country’s economy.
Source: Africafeeds.com
