Sierra Leone's High Court has cancelled the election of 10 opposition MPs for alleged breaches of the electoral law during March 2018 legislative polls.

The judgement meant that nine MPs elected under the ticket of the main opposition All Peoples Congress were to be kicked out immediately and replaced by candidates of the ruling Sierra Leone People's Party who came second in the elections.

The decision reportedly helped the ruling SLPP regain a one-seat majority in the chamber (58 against 57 for the APC the opposition) prompting the disqualified MPs to barricade themselves in their offices as their supporters clashed with police in the capital Freetown.

“Police came to disperse these people, it became violent and they had to fire tear gas canisters into the parliamentary building,” recalls Amadu Lamrana Bah, Deputy News Editor at the Freetown-based African Young Voices media group.

Bah told RFI that more than one hundred people including former ministers and a sitting MP detained in connection with the violence had been released on bail and 38 of them charged.

As civil rights activists pressed calls for an independent inquiry into the political violence, the AYV editor says a fake blood controversy has gone viral on social media, after a malicious mind tried to discredit complaints filed by people injured by the police.

Manipulated judiciary?

The High Court’s verdict, delivered more than a year after the 2018 elections, has got stakeholders crying foul. Some observers see the ruling as outside the court’s mandate, as the latest evidence of continued manipulation of the judiciary by President Julius Maada Bio’s government.

The influential Cocorioco newspaper also criticises a scheme by President Bio’s government to “deliberately and systematically eliminate people from some of Sierra Leone’s tribes, from key positions in the civil service and government institutions”.

“Jobnocide”

The publication cites the recent sacking of members of the Human Rights Commission and their replacement with people from Bio’s Mende tribe as an example iof the so-called “jobnocide” taking place.

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