Sierra Leone’s President Julius Maada Bio recently announced that the country is to drop its current Single-member plurality voting system and return to the old proportional representation previously practiced in the country.
Making the announcement on Friday, top electoral commissioner Mohamed Konneh said the decision to go back to the earlier PR system followed a presidential directive in accordance with the country’s constitution.
He said because the country’s constituency boundaries had expired and could not be redrawn within the constitutionally stated period ahead of the next election “the boundary delimitation exercise which had commenced is halted with immediate effect”, hence the need for the adoption of Proportional Representation-PR.
As opposed to the single-member plurality system which allows for a single-member constituency representation, proportional representation gives room for multi-member representation. MPs in Sierra Leone got elected based on the percentage of the popular vote their parties received nationwide; as long as they received at least more than 5%.
It could be recalled that in 1996 when multiparty democracy was reintroduced in Sierra Leone’s electoral system and with the civil war raging at the time, the country conducted its parliamentary elections under a proportional representation system. However, in 2002, the proportional representation system was scrapped after single-member representation got favoured and adopted, with MPs elected on a -first-past-the-post basis.
Following the recent announcement by President Bio, the main opposition All People’s Congress (APC) party in the country appears offended and so considers mounting a legal challenge, according to representative Sidi Yahya Tunis, who called the president’s decision “ill-advised”.Well, the question remains: Is proportional representation best for Sierra Leone?
In his article titled “Proportional representation is best for Sierra Leone”, Charlie J. Hughes on Sierra Leone Telegraph, opined that while every election since 2002 (that the Single-member representation was adopted) has been declared free and fair, they have been accompanied by circumstances of uncivil politics, mobilization of hate constituencies, and sporadic violence.
He argued that “in contradistinction to single-member constituency system, multi-member representation systems including Proportional Representation, dissuades rancor significantly in one critical way. The fact that everybody will be represented under their preferred party means there is no question of winning at all costs for anybody; a key driver of violence, rancor, and divisiveness. Everybody wins irrespective of any imbalance in the proportion of representation of the different parties”.
For the former chairman of Sierra Leone’s National Electoral Commission (NEC), Mohamed N’Fa Allie Conteh who wrote on TheOrganiser.net “the single-member district voting system has been on the wane worldwide because it has a number of glaring shortcomings. It routinely denies representation to large numbers of voters, produces legislatures that fail to accurately reflect the views of the public, discriminates against third parties, and discourages voter turnout. PR on the other hand is gaining traction largely because it avoids an outcome in which some people win representation and the rest are left out. Under PR rules, no significant groups are denied representation”.
However, Mohamed Gibril Sesay, an award-winning writer and Sierra Leone’s Minister of State, Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Int’l Cooperation, believes that Proportional Representation-PR undermines accountability at the local level. According to him, “the electoral system we already know, single-member representation, allows for people to know who directly represents them in their constituency as against the PR system. I hear all the talk about how accountability to a local area could be allowed for in the PR system. But I have not seen one suggestion as to how it can be operationalised or implemented. Relating to strengthening the accountability strengths with the system we already know, single-member representation, we have been noticing how the dominant parties in the country are moving towards primaries at the local level to elect their candidates for elections”.
In 2002, when the Sierra Leonean government successfully scrapped the proportional representation under which parties were awarded seats in parliament on the basis of the percentage of votes they polled in the various constituencies throughout the nation, the country’s Information Minister Cecil Blake explained that “Each party will have a nominee from the district – someone homegrown – who will be accountable to the district”. Blake noted that the aim was to allow for legislators to be elected in their own districts.
For fostering a-win-for-all situation, Proportional Representation is good just as the Single-member representation which enables constituencies to choose the representative best known to them . However to avoid ‘immediate’ violence from aggrieved members after elections over single-member representation, this writer believes proportional representation will suffice.
This writer also believes that the Proportional Representation is more all-inclusive as the single-member representing a district often has the tendency of giving more attention to members of his/her political party than the rest, especially those of the opposing political parties.