Sierra Leone: After The Plague

SIERRA LEONE

After the Plague

A few years ago, Sierra Leone was in the headlines as a terrifying outbreak of the Ebola virus struck the tiny West African country.

Today, as Sierra Leoneans await the results of their March 7 presidential election, it’s worth taking stock of how the country has fared since defeating the virus, which claimed almost 4,000 lives.

Voters choosing between the two candidates from the mainstream parties that have dominated local politics since independence from Britain in 1961 – Samura Kamara of the All People’s Congress party and Julius Maada Bio of the Sierra Leone People’s Party – were largely disappointed with their choices.

“There are certain things that aren’t going right,” Adama Deen, 38, told Bloomberg while standing in line to vote in the capital of Freetown. “We need change.”

One statistic exemplified why Deen is unsatisfied.

Two years after the end of an epidemic that exposed the fragility of the country’s public health system, Sierra Leone has only 200 doctors serving seven million people, the BBC reported.

The country doesn’t have the funds to train or import more.

A global downturn in commodity prices, particularly of iron ore, has been a major drag on Sierra Leone’s economic growth. In the past two years, the economy grew by around 6 percent, according to the African Development Bank. But it contracted by more than 20 percent in 2015. Before Ebola, it was growing by double digits in the wake of the end of an 11-year civil war in 2002, the East African, a Kenyan newspaper, wrote.

Election results are expected this week.

With 75 percent of the results declared, on Sunday the National Electoral Commission (NEC) said Bio of the main opposition SLPP had taken the lead for the first time with 43.3 percent of the vote. But Kamara, the ruling APC candidate, was still close behind at 42.6 percent, reported Africanews.com.

A total of 16 candidates were running. Normally, either Kamara’s or Bio’s party would win a majority. But this year, things were different.

A third party called the National Grand Coalition is expected to draw significant support, meaning a runoff might be necessary if nobody receives 55 percent of the votes. With 75 percent of the results in, the NGC had won 6.9 percent of the votes, and the Coalition for Change had won 3.4 percent.

Because the two main parties each might need to court the NGC to defeat the other, they may have to bend their platforms to appeal to more people than their narrow bands of supporters, wrote Luisa Enria, a lecturer at the University of Bath, and Jamie Hitchen, a London-based Africa expert, in African Arguments.

It’s heartening to see that even after so much death and despite so many challenges, Sierra Leoneans can evolve and reimagine their future.