Opposition candidate Julius Maada Bio has won a narrow victory in a run-off election to become Sierra Leone’s next president, according to official results by the country’s electoral body.

The National Electoral Commission announced at 10:00pm local time that Maada Bio of the Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) won 51.8 percent of a total of over 2.5 million ballots cast in the March 31 vote, beating out the ruling All People’s Congress candidate Samura Kamara, who garnered 48.1 percent.

Kamara, a former foreign affairs minister, and Maada Bio, who briefly ruled Sierra Leone as head of a military junta in 1996, were vying to replace outgoing President Ernest Bai Koroma, who cannot seek re-election due to term limits.

I feel happy about the results. I am here because my president Julius Maada Bio has won the election in this country.

Maada Bio is to be sworn in as president tonight at a yet to be disclosed venue.

“The new president will be sworn in tonight,” Chief Justice Abdulai Hamid Charm told Reuters.

SLPP supporters began celebrating in the streets of the capital Freetown on Wednesday evening in anticipation of the official announcement of results.

“I feel happy about the results. I am here because my president Julius Maada Bio has won the election in this country,” said Adolfus Kargbo, among a group of SLPP supporters chanting Maada Bio’s name.

Who is Maada Bio?

Julius Maada Bio, 53, has tasted the presidency before having served a military Head of State for about three months. He led the National Provisional Ruling Council (NPRC) military junta government that lasted from January 16 to March 29 1996.

He has also tasted how it feels to be on the ballot paper, he was the Sierra Leone Peoples Party’s candidate for the last elections. He lost to outgoing Ernest Bai Koroma.

As a military ruler, he toppled his boss in the NPRC junta Captain Valentine Strasser in January 1996 but handed over to democratically elected Ahmed Tejan Kabbah of the SLPPafter the 1996 presidential elections.

He later retired from active service that year and moved to the United States to further his studies. He earned a Masters Degree in International Affairs from the American University in Washington DC.

He was born on May 12, 1964 and graduated from military academy in October 1987 aged 23. He has played part in peacekeeping ops by the United Nations famously in Liberia. He played a role in the 1992 coup and led the 1996 one before handing over after elections.

He returned from the U.S. to join the SLPP in 2005. Contested to lead the party but lost the bid. He was picked as party’s presidential candidate in 2012 polls and garnered 37% of votes to place second.

He is a Roman Ctholic married to Fatima Bio a practicing Muslim and a Gambian national. They got married in an interfaith ceremony in London in 2013. The couple have a child but Maada Bio has three other children from a previous marriage. The vice presidential candidate of the SLPP is Jalloh Mohamed Juldeh.

The largely peaceful election process has come as a relief for the country of 7 million people, who endured a civil war in the 1990s and whose economy was dragged down by an Ebola epidemic in 2014-15 and a global slump in commodity prices in 2015.

Source: Africa News

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has been re-elected with 97 percent of votes, the same proportion that the former military commander secured four years ago for his first term but with a lower turnout, official results showed on Monday.

Turnout was 41 percent, despite efforts to get as many Egyptians as possible to polling stations during last week’s vote. Sisi had been virtually guaranteed a landslide win, confirmed by early tallies as voting ended on Wednesday.

The election featured only one other candidate – himself an ardent Sisi supporter – after all serious opposition contenders halted their campaigns in January. The main challenger was arrested and his campaign manager beaten up, while other presidential hopefuls pulled out, citing intimidation.

“Every credible opponent was either threatened, harassed, prosecuted or detained,” said FRANCE 24 correspondent Sharif Abdel Kouddous.

The election commission said the vote was free and fair as it gave the results in a televised announcement on Monday.

Sisi won a total of 21.8 million votes compared with 656,534 for his opponent, Moussa Mostafa Moussa, whose tally was less than the 1.8 million spoiled ballots.

The lower turnout is a potential setback for Sisi, who suggested before the vote that he saw it as a referendum on his presidency rather than a genuine contest. Turnout in the 2014 vote that won him his first term was 47 percent.

“This came despite a very fierce campaign by officials to boost turnout,” said Kouddous. “You had officials using a mixture of cajoling and threatening and bullying to get people to the polls. In some provinces, you had police officers going door to door, instructing people to go to the polls. You had boxes of subsidised food with things like cooking oil and sugar being offered in poor areas for people to vote.”

Some voters said they were offered incentives to cast their ballots including money and food, local and international media reported, but did not say who had made the offers.

Officials said that if any such incidents took place they were not state-sponsored and extremely limited.

State media had portrayed failure to vote as a betrayal of Egypt.

“This wasn’t about voter attitudes or voter choices,” Kouddous said. “This was about the optics of their participation. It was really about political domination and … a fierce repression of civilian politics.”

Criticism

Critics say former general Sisi’s popularity has been eroded amid tough economic reforms, which have left most Egyptians worse off, and also an unprecedented crackdown on dissent.

His supporters say those measures are needed to stabilise the country, which faces a stubborn Islamic State group insurgency in the northern Sinai Peninsula and which was rocked by unrest after a 2011 uprising that ousted veteran leader Hosni Mubarak.

Sisi led the 2013 military overthrow of Egypt’s first freely elected president, Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, after protests against Morsi. Sisi swept to victory in an election a year later with 97 percent of the vote.

The United Nations expressed concern over the crackdown on dissent, including media, which took place before last week’s vote.

Sisi’s main Western and regional allies have been mostly silent over alleged human rights abuses in Egypt.

During voting last week, the US embassy in Cairo said on Twitter it was “impressed by the enthusiasm and patriotism of Egyptian voters”.

Russia congratulated Sisi on his election win ahead of the official results, and regional ally King Salman of Saudi Arabia called Sisi on Monday to express support, saying his victory came as a result of strong efforts to combat terrorism.

(FRANCE 24 with REUTERS)

Botswana’s new president, Mokgweetsi Masisi, used his inauguration speech on Sunday to vow to tackle youth unemployment in one of Africa’s most stable countries.

As the vice president, Masisi took over automatically, and he is likely to secure a further five-year term in elections in October 2019 when the ruling Botswana Democratic Party (BDP) is expected to hold on to power.

Botswana prides itself on good governance and rule of law, and the carefully managed handover of power comes a full 18 months ahead of parliamentary elections in 2019.

Masisi, the former vice president, takes over a country widely seen as an African success story that has made good use of its lucrative income from diamond, beef and tourism.

It is rated as the least corrupt country in Africa by Transparency International.

But it has also struggled with rising unemployment rate of about 18 percent and an HIV epidemic.

“It is because of the peace and tranquillity that our leaders have sustained for so long that Batswana (people) have continued to enjoy relative prosperity,” Masisi said after taking his oath.

“One of my top priorities as the president of this country will be to address the problem of unemployment especially amongst the young people.”

He also pledged to improve treatment and prevention of HIV in a country with a 22 percent infection rate among adults.

Continuity politics

President Masisi, 55, is a close ally of Khama and a BDP veteran.

He is a US-educated former teacher, UNICEF official and education minister, whose father was also a cabinet minister.

“Despite its small size, Botswana continues to play an important role in the promotion of global issues such as respect for human rights, democracy, good governance (and) the rule of law,” Masisi said.

Khama, 65, completed a months-long national farewell tour last week, bidding goodbye to the country’s population of 2.2 million.

He earned a record for straight talking, often criticising leaders including US President Donald Trump and   unlike many in the region   neighbouring Zimbabwe’s then-president Robert Mugabe as well as Democratic Republic of Congo President Joseph Kabila.

Khama led the BDP to landslide victories in two elections, although the party won less than 50 percent of the vote for the first time in 2014.

“Internationally, Khama positioned himself as a moral leader,” Matteo Vidiri, a BMI Research analyst, told AFP.

“(But) a slowing economy and increasing public discontent has damaged the narrative of Botswana’s ‘special character’, of a country being able to escape the ‘resource curse’.”

Four opposition parties have said they could unite for the 2019 election to try to unseat the BDP, which has held power since independence from Britain in 1966.

At a farewell event in his home village, Khama was showered with gifts including a 4×4 truck, 143 cows, hundreds of chickens, more than 415,000 pula ($44,000, 35,000 euro) and a fully-equipped luxury caravan.

His father, Seretse Khama, served from 1966 to 1980 as Botswana’s first president.

(AFP)

Sierra Leone’s electoral staff prepared polling stations in Freetown early on Saturday morning as voters queued for a presidential run-off which was delayed by claims of electoral fraud.

“I am here to vote for the process. I am here, again, so I can have a credible election and credible results that is why I am here to come and vote,” said Idris Kamara, a voter in Freetown, as electoral staff put up polling station signs and prepared the ballot boxes.

The run-off is between the main opposition leader Julius Madaa Bio of the Sierra Leone Peoples Party (SLPP) and Samura Kamara of the ruling All Peoples Congress (APC) party.

Bio led with 43.3 percent in the first round of the vote with runner-up Kamara taking 42.7 percent.

(Source: Reuters)

The policy of burning commercial bikes in villages and banning same in towns and enclave communities is clearly a very primitive and hopeless approach to restore peace and security. For one thing, it provokes anger and a thirst for vengeance in young people in restive areas in Southern Cameroons. By stopping the circulation commercial bikes and setting dozens of such bikes ablaze, the government has put out of business, tens of thousands of young people, many of them university graduates who depend on motor bikes popularly known as “Bend Skin” or “Okadas” as their only means of livelihood. Their families and dependants cannot have good meals and will not be able to pay various bills because their only providers have been artificially incapacitated.

While Divisional Officers (DO), Senior Divisional Officers (SDO) and regional governors west of the Mongo had repeatedly banned motorbikes and ordered night time curfews, the problems they have attempted to solve have not gone away. Rather, their actions have unfortunately created more difficulties and untold hardship for the populations. These actions have also gone a long way in radicalizing even the most moderate minds and pushed young people to invent other ways of hurting the government they so much detest. While, the population and critics have been vocal against the slash and burn strategy of the authorities, the new minister of territorial administration, Paul Atanga Nji, has not made things any better for the restive populations and communities. His first stamp as minister of interior on his own people was the banning of bikes in the main commercial towns of Kumba, Muyuka and other localities in the South West Region.

How insensitive could the new MINAT boss be? How could he place a complete ban on such a huge population and expect the sprawling and volatile city of Kumba to respect the rather punitive order? How could the minister go so low as to ignore the governors, SDO and DOs to ban bikes? What then is the role of the local administrators? His decision has been counterproductive in Kumba and this is having a huge impact on his reputation and authority. Could he risk a mass protest and the chain effect it could have if the “K” Town Boys descend on the streets to protest against any eventual enforcement of the ban? Paul Atanga’s style is reminiscent of the vicious and pitiless reign of terror that Cameroonians knew under Forchive, the then secret police boss of Bamoun extraction (under Amadou Ahijo and Paul Biya, ) who Cameroonians hate to remember. Forchive’s extremely repressive tactics of caging dissidents is a monolithic hang over which Paul Atanga Nji appears unable to shake off. By compelling governors and other administrators to feed him with security reports twice a day, it smacks of a police state of the past whereby innocent citizens were victimized, just to satisfy the bosses and prove that they were working hard to weed out enemies of the state or terrorists and preserve the security of the state.

BOOMERANG

Apart from the disgrace inflicted on MINAT by the daring Kumba bike riders, the overwhelming use of force to control movements has given birth to yet another extreme weapon against the government. A campaign to stop state-owned vehicles from plying the roads of Southern Cameroons is now being fanned. This is a first volley the Southern Cameroons pro-restoration campaigners have fired against the Atanga Nji rule. French language daily, Le Messager, vividly captured it well when it said that the Atanga Nji Paul formula could be greatly problematic.

Look back into East Cameroun history and you can easily see how francophone, especially in the Bamileke and Bassa areas, suffered the same atrocities that some Southern Cameroonian villages are currently experiencing. At the time, French soldiers led a bloody campaign against UPC nationalists who were branded as Terrorists or Marquisards. Villages were razed and heads were chopped off and displayed at road junctions to scare people and deter them from joining the revolution against the brutal French rule. Apparently, those ruling this country have forgotten their Cameroon history lessons and are bent on pursuing their “slash and burn” policy to the end. We say it is wrong. It is a wrong strategy to start eating up your own children. The ego of those in power cannot be too big to let go peace and justice. Dialogue, genuine dialogue is the right way to go. Various relevant organizations have echoed this as the right formula to restore lasting peace in the country. They include the UN, Commonwealth, AU, Amnesty International, International Crisis Group etc. But despite this crucial advice, President Paul Biya has remained faithful to his initial position that there will be no discussion on the form of the state. Those championing the crusade for good governance and autonomous rule for Southern Cameroons have been branded as terrorists. They are being hunted down, chased into exile and moderates are being pushed into extremism by the high handedness of administrative and military officials.

It has not been long since President Paul Biya declared war in his country. In effect, this is war on his people. The war is claiming lives and draining the country’s resources, and the end is not in sight. How the government intends to win such a war without the support if the population is what history is waiting to record as the world’s first. The same world history has shown repeatedly that after all the fighting, hatred, killings and excesses would have taken place, the warring parties will inevitably end up at the negotiating table. So why not just go to the negotiating table now and talk instead of the crazy decisions that are being taken on a daily basis?

By Sesekou Ashu Isong

Zimbabwe’s first presidential and parliamentary elections since the end of former strongman Robert Mugabe’s long rule will take place in July, President Emmerson Mnangagwa said on Saturday.

The polls will be the first major test of the new leader, who took power in November after a de facto military coup forced the 94-year-old Mugabe to resign.

They will also be the first without Mugabe’s name on the ballot since independence from Britain in 1980.

“As a nation, party and government, we are looking forward to very peaceful, transparent and harmonized elections in July this year,” Mnangagwa told reporters after a meeting with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa on Saturday night.

Mnangagwa, 75, said the elections would be free of the violence that gripped previous polls and which was one of the reasons for strained relations between Zimbabwe and the West.

“I have already invited all political parties in Zimbabwe to a roundtable where we all commit ourselves to non-violence,” he added.

Mnanaggwa will have to announce a date in an official notice. He has said he would invite Western observers, who had been banned under Mugabe’s rule.

The state-owned weekly Sunday Mail said a European Union pre-election team was expected in Harare on Monday.

The EU head of mission in Zimbabwe, Phillipe Van Damme, told the paper it would meet the president, political party leaders, and the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission.

Mugabe, in his first comments since he stepped down, said last week that Mnangagwa’s rule was “illegitimate” and a “disgrace”.

(Source: Reuters)

Ethiopia’s ruling coalition is due to meet soon to choose its next leader. That person will automatically become the prime minister. They will be taking on the role at a time of bitter internal wrangles and violent protests.

Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn announced on 15 February that he would resign as both the chairperson of Ethiopia’s ruling coalition EPRDF and as prime minister – a position he had held since 2012.

So that leaves the 180-strong EPRDF council to choose the next prime minister.

The top seven contenders for prime minister are Abiy Ahmed, Debretsion Gebremichael, Lema Mergessa, Workneh Gebeyehu, Demeke Mekonnen, Debretsion G Michael and Siraj Fegessa.

Culled from the BBC

March 27, 2018 has been set as a runoff date to elect Sierra Leone’s next president. The National Electoral Commission (NEC) announced on March 13 that former foreign affairs minister, Samura Kamara will face Julius Maada Bio, a former military head of state.

Culled from Africa News

Kenya’s President Uhuru Kenyatta called opposition leader Raila Odinga “his brother” on Friday and promised “we will begin a process of bringing our people together” after last year’s contentious elections.

Odinga told national television “it is time to resolve our differences,” as the two politicians made their first public appearance together since the Oct. 26 repeat presidential election last year.

Kenyatta was sworn in for a second term in November after an extended election season which saw the Supreme Court nullify an August presidential poll, ordering a re-run in October, which Odinga boycotted.

Months of campaigning and sporadic clashes between government and opposition supporters affected growth in Kenya, one of East Africa’s biggest economies.

In January, Odinga took a symbolic presidential oath in a Nairobi park in a direct challenge to Kenyatta.

The two men have defied calls from Kenyan civil society, religious leaders and Western diplomats to hold talks to overcome deep divisions opened up by the disputed elections.

Culled from Africa News

This week’s Cabinet reshuffle in Cameroon appears unlikely to herald change in the government’s approach to the crisis in the anglophone regions. The crisis began nearly a year-and-a-half ago and has grown more violent. Stabilizing the anglophone regions is seen as a priority ahead of nationwide elections later this year.

There are two notable firsts in the new Cabinet of President Paul Biya.

Nalova Lyonga from Cameroon’s English-speaking southwest region becomes the minister of secondary education. Paul Atanga Nji from the English-speaking northwest region assumes the job of minister of territorial administration.

Neither of those posts has ever been held by a member of the country’s anglophone minority.

The government remains under the charge of Prime Minister Philomen Yang, who also hails from the English-speaking northwest.

Some see the new appointments as an effort to curb tensions in the English-speaking regions. However, teachers involved in the 2016 strike that kicked off the crisis say they are unconvinced.

“The anglophone populace say they are asking for a system of governance that will allow them run their own things apart, separate from what they see, from the general super-structure of anglophones and francophones, and we have talked a lot about dialogue,” said Valentine Tame, a leader of the Teachers Association of Cameroon. “We have talked a lot about forgiving people, talk together and see how things can go ahead.”

Cameroon has two official languages — English and French. Strikers say the anglophone minority has been marginalized. Demands range from reforms to school curriculum to a return to federalism.

Over the past year, amid deadly unrest and waves of arrests, armed separatist groups have emerged demanding all-out independence for the two English-speaking regions. The government says at least 30 and police have been killed.

President Biya has announced some reforms — for example, official documents are now more available in both languages. However, the president has ruled out any dialogue on the form of the state.

Local analysts told VOA they do not expect the new Cabinet to mark a change in the government’s approach.

Nji, the new minister of territorial administration, has been a close aide to Biya for some time. Soon after the strike began in 2016 in his home region, the northwest, Njj told state TV that there was no such thing as problems specific to anglophones in Cameroon, a position he tells VOA he maintains.

“President Paul Biya, as I have always said it, whenever he has to take any important decision, anglophones have always been in the center of those decisions,” he said. “President Paul Biya has proven beyond all reasonable doubts that he has total confidence in English-speaking Cameroonians.”

The Cabinet appointments this month followed reports of fresh arrests in the English-speaking regions, which remain under a curfew.

Culled from the VOA