The Electoral Commission of Sierra Leone (ECSL) has announced its plans to adopt the proportional representation voting system, the president has decreed.
The main opposition, All People’s Congress (APC) party has kicked against it, and it is considering a legal challenge, according to representative Sidi Yahya Tunis, who called the president’s decision “ill-advised”.
In 1996, when multiparty democracy was reintroduced and with the civil war raging at the time, the country conducted its parliamentary elections under a proportional representation system.
Parliamentarians got elected based on the percentage of the popular vote secured by their parties nationwide, so long they got more than 5%.
In 2008, Sierra Leone introduced single-member constituencies with MPs elected on a -first-past-the-post basis.
Making the announcement on Friday, the electoral commissioner Mohamed Konneh said the decision to go back to the earlier PR system followed a presidential directive in line with the country’s constitution.
He said because the country’s constituency boundaries had expired and could not be re-drawn within the constitutionally stated period ahead of the next election “the boundary delimitation exercise which had commenced is halted with immediate effect”.