Julius Maada Bio was elected President of Sierra Leone in April 2018 on a platform to fight corruption and introduce fiscal discipline in government. A governance transition committee Bio established to investigate his predecessor, Ernest Bai Koroma, reported that the Koroma administration left Sierra Leone in serious economic difficulty, citing a large external and domestic debt burden driven mostly by an “expanded payroll” of US$263 million, or 14.4% of GDP.

Bio’s multiple audits into the Koroma regime's past activities uncovered egregious political and financial corruption, nepotism, and widespread economic graft that permeated governance during the ten years of the All Peoples Congress (APC). Bio imposed travel bans on Koroma and several of his former ministers.

Then in late November 2023, shortly after the disputed June 2023 elections, Bio accused Koroma of plotting to overthrow the controversial government created by a tripartite agreement between the APC and Bio’s SLPP. Koroma was then exiled to Nigeria, where he stayed for two consecutive years before returning to Sierra Leone in early September 2026. Yet, in a two-day conference held in Freetown last week, Koroma and Bio publicly announced they had reconciled their differences, calling for peace and national cohesion across the country.

In this episode, we ask what became of Maada Bio’s anti-corruption campaign and the findings of the commissions of inquiry against Koroma and his APC ministers. We examine how Koroma and Bio’s reconciliation and peace efforts affect accountability for human rights violations, transparency in governance, and Sierra Leone’s fight against corruption.

In recent years, Sierra Leonean politicians have amended key provisions of the country's constitution and public-election laws to consolidate a de facto one-party state and entrench the SLPP and APC’s power-rotation politics.

This chain of anti-democratic laws and regulations began with the 2021 cybersecurity legislation, followed by the 2022 Public Elections Act and the 2025 counter-terrorism law, and has now culminated in the current Constitutional Amendment Bill at the center of a so-called litigation in the Freetown courts.

In this episode, we examine the implications of the constitutional and judicial crisis created by these disingenuous and illegitimate amendments to the country's multiparty constitution and public election laws, highlighting that the current tripartite regime, which resulted from the rigged elections of June 2023, lacks the legal and constitutional mandate to pursue any legal reform in Sierra Leone.

In this special episode, Africanist Press editor-in-chief, Dr. Chernoh Alpha M. Bah, briefly reviews the Africanist Press Podcast since its launch in December 2023, announces the return of the weekly Voice From Exile audio series, and outlines plans to introduce a new investigative journalism project on Sierra Leone as the country prepares for the 2028 elections.