May 10, 2021
By: Ilyaaa Baa
Electoral materials including ballot papers, polling and registration forms among others were burned at the National Electoral Commission’s offices in Kono and Tonkolili districts.
According to the Kono District Manager of NEC, Osman Joe Kamara, said the burning exercise was to form part of the commission’s preparations for a new electoral cycle. He said the absolute materials used for the 2018 elections congested their warehouses and they need the spaces to stock pile materials for the next electoral cycle, he confessed.
He said the burning is in line with legal framework done in the presence of political parties’ representatives, the Political Parties Registration Commission (PPRC), the Office National Security, the Sierra Leone Police as well as the media.
However, materials on controversial elections in constituencies such as 022 in Kono, 048 in Mile 91 and 056 in Bendugu, Tonkolili were not amongst those destroyed because their matters are still in court.
Deputy Director of NEC in Tonkolili Paul Joseph Banister informed this medium that there is legal implication of burning electoral materials when judgment is not yet to be pronounced in the court of law.
Not all the political parties were present during the symbolic destruction of those electoral materials and the Assistant Mediation Program Officer at the PPRC in Kono, Karifa Tarawallie seized the opportunity to call on political parties to be fully represented during the burning exercises across the country.
Some members of the public, especially petty traders in the markets have informed A-Z newspaper that they were not happy with the burning of those papers the reason being, according to them, they should have allowed them to use the absolute papers to wrap their product but the Commission insists that they don’t want the papers to fall on the wrong hands.