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Bloomberg
Presidential elections in Sierra Leone will probably go to a second round as the two main political parties remain neck-and-neck with half the votes counted. The count of 50 percent of the ballots showed that the ruling All People’s Congress got 566,113 votes, while the main opposition Sierra Leone People’s Party obtained 564,687 votes, according to the National Electoral Commission. The National Grand Coalition, a newcomer that may influence the final outcome if the election goes to a run-off, lagged with about 90,000 votes.
The APC and the SLPP have dominated Sierra Leone politics since independence from Britain in 1961. The West African nation’s economy is recovering from a slump in iron-ore prices and the worst-ever Ebola outbreak that killed thousands of people and isolated the country.
In 2012, Sierra Leone was sub-Saharan Africa’s fastest-growing economy as Chinese and UK-based investors began shipping iron ore, which took over from diamonds as the country’s biggest export. But the double shock of a commodity price slump and the Ebola epidemic the following year triggered the collapse of the two iron-ore mines in the country and left the economy in ruins. The government’s also dealing with the aftermath of a huge mudslide in Freetown last year that killed about 1,100 people.
Economic growth was about 6 percent last year, from a contraction of 20.5 percent in 2015, according to the International Monetary Fund. Millions of dollars in foreign donations to fight Ebola went missing during the first six months of the outbreak, according to an internal audit.