Chernor Alpha M. Bah the head of the Africanist Press says in a recent post, that President Julius Maada Bio’s propagandists are working strenuously to make the world believe that he and his ruling Sierra Leone Peoples Party (SLPP) are the popular choice among voters.

Bah made mentioned of  the Institute of Governance Reform (IGR), a local civil society organization led by SLPP activist Andrew Lavalie announcement  without any survey data, that President Bio will win the June elections with 59% of the vote.

He said that Lavalie’s colleagues in Freetown, and his associates in London, and other cities in the United Kingdom, have repeated this fictitious narrative in opinion articles published by a couple of international news outlets in the UK and other places. The objective of their propaganda campaign is to convince global audiences that Maada Bio is the leading candidate in Sierra Leone’s presidential election scheduled to take place on 24th June 2023.

He continued by saying that Bio’s leading contender, Dr. Samura Kamara, a former foreign affairs minister in the government of Ernest Bai Koroma. In the 2018 presidential elections, Bio won narrowly against Kamara by less than 2% in both rounds of the presidential race. Five years on, Kamara’s popularity has significantly increased, and supporters of his campaign have multiplied amidst Bio’s unpopularity across the country.

The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) recently projected that Kamara is likely to win the upcoming presidential race.

This real possibility of defeating Bio in the June elections has resulted in Kamara being targeted by both the ruling party and sectors of the opposition groups in the country.

Kamara’s campaign events have been the ongoing subject of police violence in recent weeks. Ruling party supporters have reportedly disrupted his campaign tours in SLPP strongholds in the south and east of the country. Media coverage of Kamara’s campaign activities have also been very minimal compared to Bio’s favorable local and international media coverage.