The impoverished country will vote on its first new government in 10 years on Tuesday in an election that a prolonged economic crisis and a slow recovery from the Ebola epidemic has left unusually open
A strange slogan went up from the hundreds of Sierra Leoneans struggling to catch a glimpse of Samura Kamara, the presidential candidate for the ruling All People’s Congress. “We are Chinese!” they chanted during the campaign stop last week. “We are Chinese!”
Sierra Leone will vote on its first new government in 10 years on Tuesday in an election that a prolonged economic crisis and a slow recovery from the Ebola epidemic has left unusually open. A new party led by a former UN executive, the National Grand Coalition, stands a chance of upsetting the traditional two-party system.
But many people perceive one of the poll’s most powerful players to be a trading partner 8,000 miles away that has invested heavily in the struggling west African country and has been a close ally of the outgoing president, Ernest Bai Koroma.
Over the course of Koroma’s presidency, Sierra Leone has broadened trade relations with China to levels not seen since the 1980s. Chinese companies have secured the largest iron ore concession in the country and built roads through underdeveloped areas, including a US$159 million tollway. China has become one of the largest importers of Sierra Leone’s fish and timber.
Sierra Leone, one of the world’s poorest countries, faces decades of debt bondage for a new US$300 million international airport on which construction has just begun, despite warnings from the IMF, the World Bank and many others that it would be a white elephant and a vanity project.
