APC Orders Parliamentary & Local Council Boycott

Citing unethical and partisan behaviour, unguarded public statements and open hostility against elections observers, the main opposition All People’s Congress (APC) has, in its press release of February 25, 2026, called for the withdrawal of the appointment by President Julius Maada Bio of the controversial Edmond Sylvester Alpha as Chief Electoral Commissioner.

“The APC has already formally raised serious concerns regarding Mr. Alpha’s credibility, post-election conduct, public posture toward observers, and the broader perception of continuity with a disputed electoral past,” the statement said.

The APC contends that Alpha’s appointment was “a direct assault” on the internationally brokered Agreement of National Unity (ANU), the Tripartite Recommendations thereof, and the government’s own legislative process relating to its Constitutional Reform Bill 2025, which appears to be in limbo after its First Reading.

“…this proposed appointment constitutes a direct assault on the Agreement for National Unity, a deliberate circumvention of the binding Tripartite reform process, and a dangerous attempt to re-entrench the very electoral status quo that the nation,  with the support of the international community, agreed must change”, the APC stated.

Here is why the APC is opposed to the President’s appointment.

Under Edmund Alpha’s watch as Regional Commissioner North in 2021, the result of a by-election for Ward 155 in Koinadugu District, was reportedly forged by a staffer in the Commission’s ICT department. The APC maintained that the said ICT staff fraudulently made an entry into the Commission’s results system that was inconsistent with the particulars on the duly signed Results Reconciliation Form (“RRF”). The forged entry of 149 instead of 049 votes was said to be in favour of the Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) candidate KALIE THORONKA.

The APC contention, corroborated by observers, was that rather than entering 049 as recorded in the RRF, the rogue elections staff ‘geniusly’ and intentionally deleted the zero (0) and replaced it with the number one (1) in front of the figure 49, which gave undue victory to the said otherwise defeated SLPP candidate. Inspite of the APC’s protest and the evidence provided, Edmund Alpha still went ahead to declare the SLPP candidate duly elected. No disciplinary action was taken against the offending officer nor against Alpha himself.

With that checkered record and its opprobrious antecedent culture of impunity, Alpha appears to have nurtured a near maniacal penchant for wrongdoing. Following his appointment as a placeholder Chief Electoral Commissioner at the end of the tenure of the widely discredited Mohamed Konneh, Alpha was captured on camera bragging of his long uncharitable and impugned service at the electoral commission. In that scandalous video, he asserted that as far as he was concerned, the 2028 elections would not be different from the dastardly local and internationally discredited 2023 elections.

As readers would recall, those elections culminated in elections results which were roundly described as “statistically improbable” – the incredulity of that outcome threatened Sierra Leone’s hard-earned peace and stability, and led to the ANU the Tripartite Recommendations.

Beyond this, Alpha has demonstrated further indiscretions in the form of open hostilities against elections observers, even in his tenuous placeholder position. Under his orders, representatives of the National Elections Watch (NEW), the most prominent local observer group, have reportedly been walked out of Elections Management Meetings at the offices of the Electoral Commission for Sierra Leone. Their crime being that they corroborated the position of international observers that there was no clear winner of the June 2023 Presidential Polls. NEW and the wider international elections observer community contended that the elections ought to have proceeded to a run off. Owing to that principled positions by NEW, Alpha has shown early signs of non- cooperation with them and a tendency to being a biased referee.

Therefore, Alpha’s questionable character, flippancy, and his bad taste postures underpin a disturbing reality that is not reassuring for both the much touted electoral reform efforts, and the credibility of any elections conducted under his stewardship.

As the APC puts it, “…proceeding with the appointment of a Chief Electoral Commissioner through the same process that contributed to the current electoral mistrust risks undermining confidence in the credibility of future elections and weakening ongoing confidence-building efforts,”

While it reiterates its “commitment to peaceful, lawful and principled action in defence of constitutional governance, electoral integrity, and the sovereign will of the people of Sierra Leone,” the APC however warned that should the appointment not be withdrawn within forty-eight (48) hours of this notice, it would recall all its elected officials from Parliament, Local Councils, and all other structures of governance across the country.

Meanwhile, as this article is being posted, the SLPP Members of Parliament are in the process of interviewing the embattled Edmund Alpha.

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