By Mabinty M. Kamara
Report by the Institute of Governance Reform (IGR) has indicated a high level of preparedness for the 2023 general elections by the country’s Election Management Bodies (EMBs) including the security sector despite the continual effect of the COVID-19 pandemic in all spheres of national affairs in Sierra Leone.
“Overall, election management bodies say the COVID-19 will have little to no effect on the 2023 elections ; the elections will go on as planned and they have made nearly 70% progress in meeting the 50 indicators assessed by this scorecard,” the report reads in part.
It added “overall Sierra Leone is 67% ready to go ahead with the 2023 elections. Expert assessment were a little lower (61%) than inter-institutional scores (73%) and self-assessment (70%).”
However, according to the report, women participation in politics remain low ahead of 2023, a situation that may affect their representation in elective positions. It noted that EMBs scored relatively high (70%) in their efforts to ensure that electioneering programmes reached disadvantage groups, the monitoring of other processes to ascertain their openness to women group was less positive
“Party nominations and campaign processes were not very well monitored (6.5%) by CSOs groups whilst system tracking participation including that of women was relatively weak at nearly (60%). Worse still was electoral process in place to encourage women’s political representations. The existence of nomination fees as well as the absence of any rules or law to guarantee a minimum threshold for women’s participation leads to just under 30% scores,” it reads.
To overcome this challenge, the Ministry of Gender and Children Affairs has developed a gender empowerment bill aimed at boosting women representation in elective positions through reserved seat mechanisms. The bill has gone through cabinet and is ready to be tabled before the house of parliament.
Speaking at the launch of the report on Thursday 22nd July 2023, the Executive Director of the IGR, Andrew Lavalie said the report titled ‘mitigating the COVID effect on the 2023 elections’ was funded by Irish Aid and is part of a broader advocacy to ensure that elections are held on time and that COVID-19 does not disrupt the electoral calendar and to understand the effect of COVID on electioneering processes and how they can better mitigate those effects.
“Let’s say the situation of COVID becomes so bad and the government decides to say I cannot even afford an election that will be a problem. So instead of waiting for that to happen, we decided to in this piece of work understand what is happening and how do we prevent this from happening, given what is happening in other countries,” he said.
The scorecard indicators according to the report, were drawn from two sources, EU observation Mission’s recommendations relating to integrity, ,participation, lawfulness (Rule of Law)impartiality and fairness, independence, professionalism, transparency, timeliness and regularity, acceptance and security and from the key indicators that the EMBs think should be in place to make 2023 election timely and credible.
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