BY MARILYN KING (232news.com)
The West African Network for Peacebuilding (WANEP) and their partners, National Commission for Democracy, (NCD) and the Inter-Religious Council of Sierra Leone (IRCSL), officially opened the Elections Situation Room (ESR) at Raddison Blu Hotel in Freetown.
This preliminary declaration provides a summary of the observations of electoral process and actions taken by eminent persons in the decision room from pre to the post-election period.
The Founder and Global President of the 50 50 group, Dr. Nemata Majeks Walker, said WANEP and their partners deployed 350 monitors in 168 prioritized hotspots to gather data, utilizing structured checklists across the 16 districts in the 5 regions of the country.
She said ESR is part of a broader project titled Reactivating the National Elections Response and its insider Mediators is responding to threats during June 24th electioneering process in Sierra Leone implemented by WANEP.
She said the project which is supported by UNDP is also designed to mitigate elections violence in West Africa through the National Early Warning Systems (NEWS).
She stated that the goal of the ESR is to monitor, report, analyze and facilitate responses to incidents which may threaten the peaceful conduct on the 24th June, 2023 multi-tier elections.
She continued that it is made up of four operational sections, namely, Data Gathering, Analysis, Decision, and communication. She said in the Central ESR, 25 young people were engaged to collate the data using ArcGIS Survey 123 tool for data collection.
She said the data gathered were analyzed by 7 analysts and the results were subsequently submitted to the nine eminent persons for decision-making.
She furthered that the Central ESR Decision Room hosted 9 Eminent persons drawn from the Inter-Religious Council of Sierra Leone, National Commission for Democracy, WANEP, 50/50 group, Fourah Bay College, and women in the Media, Sierra Leone (WIMSAL).
She said as part of it’s preparations for the June 24th, 2023 multitier elections, the ECSL compiled a new voters Register, the final register consisted of 3,374,258 Sierra Leoneans comprising 1,759,529 females (52%) and 1,616,729 males (48%).
She said ECSL accredited 13 candidates for the presidential election, comprising 1 female and 12 males. She noted that the parliamentary election was conducted through the proportional Representation System in line with the revised 2022 Public Elections Act.
She said the elections were conducted in all 11,832 polling stations in 3,630 polling centers nationwide. She emphasized that the June 24th polls were expected to open at 7: am across the country.
However, out of 1,917 disaggregated reports (voting process, closing of polls, post -elections and incidents) received from their monitors 356 reports on the opening of polls indicated that 56.18% of polling stations opened at 7 am while 43.82% did not open at the mandated time, in spite of the delays, most of the laid out electoral procedures were adhered to by ECSL officials, such as display of empty ballot boxes in front of voters and party agents.
The National Network Coordinator of WANEP, Dr Isata Mahoi, stated that every election they will set up the WANEP election situation room and it happens in every country in West Africa where WANEP stays.
She also said they trained the Insider Mediators because they are the ones responding to violence in the community, and they are engaging communities, through radio discussions, through community engagement, town hall meetings to reduce the tensions that is happening in the community that lead to the problems inside the electioneering process.
She said they are doing their continuous engagement, and they have been in the media for several years, she concluded that WANEP has been in existence since 1998.
The Executive Director of WANEP, Dr. Eze Chukwuemeka, said WANEP is a regional non-governmental organization and a civil society that works with partnership in African Union on issues of peace and security, and also the official partner of ECOWAS.
He stated that in all elections in West Africa, what they are trying to do is to have long time monitoring process through which they monitor the activities leading up to the elections identify key threats to peaceful conducts of the elections and also identify Insider Mediators.
He said in Sierra Leone they have developed a checklist, which they monitored throughout the election cycle and through which reports are made to their data gathered in the situation room, and they will have delivered the data through the analysts, and the analysts are from different background.
