Sierra Leone was, by mid-December, increasingly in the grip of a slow-moving but violent coup d’état by President Julius Maada Bio as he attempted to create a one-party state following the shambles of the failed presidential election on June 24.
When it became increasingly probable that the election would not return him for a second term in office, Mr. Bio, supported by his Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) team—including much of the Sierra Leone Armed Forces (SLAF)—began suppressing his opposition and intimidating National Electoral Commissioner Mohamed Kenewui Konneh to ratify Mr. Bio’s victory in the first round of the election, despite patent manipulation in handling the voting data.
There were reports last month that Mr. Konneh had been killed by Mr. Bio’s military or police units, but that has not been confirmed; neither has Mr. Konneh been seen since.
It is possible—even probable—that Mr. Bio’s slipshod attempts to merely manipulate an electoral victory degenerated into public protests and outrage and, absent any international support, he felt that he had no option then but to suppress all opposition and criticism. He arrested hundreds of locally high-profile people suspected of opposing him, and, as demands were unabating for their release from prison, Mr. Bio was “forced” to take yet another step.
He took this step in the knowledge, reportedly, that most of his opponents had been killed in prison, and they could not be released or even brought to trial. So the next step was to fake a coup attempt against him and his government. This staged event occurred on Nov. 25–26, when, reportedly, an armed group—allegedly comprised of former Army personnel and others—stormed the Pademba Road Prison in Freetown, the capital, and all prisoners were released.
Thus, the government could say that all the high-profile political prisoners had escaped and the government could no longer find them, when the reality was that they had been killed. But the Bio government insisted that this had been a coup attempt and admitted that some SLAF armories had been attacked. What was significant, however, was that the so-called coup leaders could have taken the broadcasting station to announce that a government takeover was in place, but they did not.
By mid-December, the coup seemed to have disappeared, but the counter-coup crackdown had not. It had all the hallmarks of the pseudo-coup organized by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in 2016, which enabled the Turkish president to systematically purge the Armed Forces and public ranks of major political opponents.
The Sierra Leone coup leaders have not been identified. So the event, much of the Sierra Leonean public believes, had the distinct hallmark of a staged event to allow the Bio government to declare a national emergency, suppress all opposition, and cover the earlier extra-judicial murders of political opponents. On Dec. 11, the minister for Information and Civic Education, Chernor Bah, announced the continuation of curfew hours throughout the country.
Meanwhile, on Dec. 9, it was revealed that a group of thieves had broken into the Electoral Commission of Sierra Leone on Sept. 12 in the Western Area of Freetown, and had stolen computer equipment and other materials. In other words, all the records of the June 24 election were taken. It was clear then that Mr. Bio did not trust Mr. Konneh. And then, reports emerged in late November that Mr. Konneh had been killed. If he has not been killed, then he is clearly in fear for his life.
On Dec. 8, former Sierra Leone President Ernest Bai Koroma (2007–18) was detained by the Police Criminal Investigation Department (CID) for questioning, and then allowed to return home that night under house arrest (but without charge), and then collected again the next day by a 40-vehicle convoy of police vehicles for renewed questioning at CID headquarters. The questioning was in relation to an alleged abuse of office while Mr. Koroma (All People’s Congress) was in office with regard to the award of a contract. Significantly, Mr. Koroma was ordered to pay $135,000 to the government within seven days, even though the matter was still being investigated and not yet adjudicated.
But that was just the start of it. On Dec. 13, the CID charged him and 79 other people with complicity in the “coup attempt” of Nov. 25–26, and his daughter, Dankay Koroma, was also charged with the same alleged crime. Significantly, Mr. Koroma had called for calm when the violence broke out around the Pademba Road incident. Still, the Bio government said that his former security guards were among the people involved in the “coup attempt.”
Around the same time, the suspicious death of a 60-year-old Canadian journalist, Stephen Douglas Lett (who wrote under the byline of Stephen Douglas), in Sierra Leone came to light. He had gone out of his home at night to investigate what appeared to be a lull in gunshots in Freetown on the night of Nov. 25–26. His body was found near a police station where he had been interviewing witnesses to the Pademba Road Prison “breakout,” which had seen some 2,000 inmates walking away from the prison.
International observers have failed thus far to ratify Mr. Bio’s reelection, and Sierra Leone remains largely isolated, with international flights significantly reduced into the country and with an early December delegation of officials from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and Nigeria returning emptyhanded from their visit to Freetown.
Even so, Mr. Bio’s maladroit handling of the initial electoral coup and his subsequent staging of a false-flag pseudo-coup has not brought international attention other than isolation. His domestic opponents have been systematically tracked down and killed or captured, including those in the Armed Forces, and there has been no international outcry. As well, the attacks have taken on an ethnic character, given that the Bio government is distinctly Mende in nature. One Freetown observer noted, “This is another Rwanda [genocide] in the making.”
The Mende people constitute some 31 percent of the national population.
Mr. Bio has probably taken comfort in the fact that ECOWAS has quietly accepted the cleanly organized coups d’état in other parts of the region. On Dec. 10, for example, ECOWAS heads of state officially recognized the military junta that took power in Niger in July because they had said that they would lead only through a “short” period of transition to elected civilian rule, shortened from the initial three-year transition period proposed by the military leaders.
