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Vol 57 No 7

Published 1st April 2016


Sierra Leone

Reshuffle and a long goodbye

A raft of new cabinet appointments has reignited suspicion that President Koroma may be planning to stay on beyond the end of his second term 

President Ernest Bai Koroma named 13 new ministers and deputy ministers, some of them his most devoted and hardline supporters, on 14 March in Freetown. One Freetown daily dubbed them a 'Cabinet of Cronies'. But the reshuffle also tried to please some specific constituencies, particularly party supporters in the West as well as civic activists and women's groups. There was some effort to sort out the splits within the old team and get the ministers to work more effectively together. All this could presage either a burst of governmental energy in what's left of Koroma's second term, or perhaps an effort to stretch out his tenure or stand for a third term, as some of the loyalists have been demanding. The next presidential election is due in November 2017.

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