SIERRA LEONE
Presidential candidates neck and neck
Monday, September 10, 2007
Parties of the two candidates in Sierra's Leone's presidential race both claimed an early lead on Monday as the poor and war-scarred west African country awaited official results from Saturday's vote.
Monday, September 10, 2007
By AFP
Parties of the two candidates in Sierra's Leone's presidential race both claimed an early lead on Monday as the poor and war-scarred west African country awaited official results from Saturday's vote.
According to partial unofficial results from more than a third of polling stations, opposition candidate Ernest Koroma of the All People's Congress (APC) was ahead of his rival, outgoing Vice President Solomon Berewa of the ruling Sierra Leone People's Party (SLPP).
"The trend so far is that the APC candidate is leading with around 54.5 percent while the SLPP has 45.5 percent," Ransford Wright, co-ordinator of the Independent Network Radio (IRN) that groups 20 radio stations broadcasting the unofficial results, told AFP.
Official results from the run-off round of the presidential poll are expected to start coming in by the end of Monday at the very earliest.
Christiana Thorpe, the head of the National Electoral Commission told AFP that tallying was ongoing but could not say when exactly the poll organiser would release official results. A news conference is scheduled for the end of the day.
But officials of the two parties, despite trading accusations of intimidation and electoral fraud, were confident each of their candidates was heading for the country's top job.
"It's looking good. So far the results are showing a good opportunity for us, we are ahead of the SLPP," Alpha Kanu, APC spokesman told AFP.
Kanu, whose party has rejected the results from one southern Kailahun district where it was unable to field monitors due to alleged intimidation, said that even given these disputed figures, "we are still doing better than the SLPP."
However, Victor Reider, spokesman of the SLPP, said Berewa was doing well in many districts of the country, even making inroads in the opposition's northern strongholds.
"We have done fairly well and this has put us in the lead against the APC," Reider told AFP.
He dismissed the results broadcast by IRN channels so far as "biased" and concentrating on areas where the APC has scored well.
"From our own collation, we are ahead of the APC. We are confident that we shall win the election and we shall surely emerge the victors," he said.
Foreign observers, while lauding the voting day as largely calm and orderly, pointed to irregularities in the southern ruling party stronghold where the opposition is cryng foul.
"At one incident in Kailahun, every 32 seconds one voter was voting and there was over-balloting in polling stations in Pujehun, Kailahun and Moyamba, which were unrealistic," the European Union chief observer Marie-Anne Isler Beguin, told a press conference.
The EU has remained cautious in giving an overall assessment of the election.
"To say the voting process is credible, we will have to wait until the end," she said.
Some 2.6 million voters were registered to vote in only the second elections since the end of the country's brutal civil war six years ago and the first since some 17,500 UN peacekeepers were pulled out in 2005.
Many Sierra Leoneans said they voted for a new order in the world's second poorest nation, which ironically has huge diamond reserves and vast mineral wealth.
Commentators say the tribalism that has fuelled political conflict in the country appears slowly beginning to wane.
"I don't see much evidence of regionalism, there appears to be a slight tilt away from the trend we saw in the last elections, but it's a bit early," said Valnora Edwin, a political commentator with an advocacy group, Campaign for Good Governance.
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