Freetown — Over lunch the other day at Chatham House in London with some old friends there, I was asked - apropos of something that I had recently published in that venerable Think Tank's magazine World Today on Sierra Leone's forthcoming elections in August - my views about the much-speculated prospects of widespread violence during the polls. Will the government attempt to rig the elections in favour of its preferred candidate, the current Vice President Solomon Berewa, in the manner in which Nigeria's Obasanjo did for Musa Yar'Dua? Where is violence likely to begin? What are the signs to look for in order to spot rigging?

As you can see, these come close to the familiar old question: Did you beat your wife? But one of the chaps at the lunch was going off to Sierra Leone as an elections monitor, so I tried to answer the questions very carefully. I noted that to begin objectively understanding recent and current events in Sierra Leone, one must first abandon two common (and cognate) assumptions about African politics: the idea that only government is capable of rigging elections in any meaningful sense; along with supporting idea that only government has the capacity and willingness to unleash violence on political opponents. I will return to these points in a moment.

First,a word or two about the elections. Sierra Leone has conducted two successful elections since its war ended in 2002. The first, nationwide Presidential and Parliamentary polls, held in 2002, overwhelmingly re-elected President Tejan Kabbah and his Sierra Leone Peoples Party (SLPP). And in 2004, local government polls across the country witnessed significantly gains by the opposition All Peoples Congress (APC), including a win of the municipality of Freetown, although overall the SLPP carried far more councils.

The Presidential and Parliamentary polls in August, however, will be far more significant than the previous two. They will be conducted wholly by the Sierra Leonean state, through its National Electoral Commission (NEC). The UN force Unamsil, which helped conduct the 2002 and 2004 polls, is no longer in the country to provide logistical support, security, and oversight. The elections, in other words, will be a crucial test of whether Sierra Leone can now finally be counted as stable and democratic. Success in this regard will mean that the elections have to be relatively free of violence and undue tampering.

Failure, which is the opposite, is simply not option.

I make these obvious points to stress a larger one: which is that these elections are bigger, more important than the ambitions of any one presidential candidate or political party. They are about the future, the security and well-being of about 5 million souls.

Now to the point I made at the Chatham House lunch. In the course of researching and writing a large report on the elections for an international organisation recently, I chanced to read the report by IFES (the International Foundation for Electoral Systems) on the 2004 local council elections in Sierra Leone. The report revealed widespread irregularities, so widespread and egregious indeed that it has since not been released to the public. The report showed convincingly that the former NEC was dysfunctional - so much so that its polling agents across the board seriously tampered with the polls with impunity. A quick analysis of the findings showed quite clearly that candidates for the opposition APC rigged the elections (using polling agents) in many cases more comprehensively and competently than did candidates for the ruling SLPP. That was, in some ways, an eye-opener - even for me who knows a thing or two about Sierra Leone's post-independence political history.

Electoral violence is part of that history. This is utterly regrettable, but one ought to bear this in mind. It is all very well now to state, and this is true, that the Sierra Leonean state now has a reasonable monopoly over armed violence, but the operative word is reasonable. It is not absolute. It is quite clear that the country's stability is fragile, and sociopathic entrepreneurs, whether projecting themselves party leaders or warlords of sorts, can still cause enormous havoc and undo the hard-won gains of a very expensive peace (won after thousands of deaths).

To its credit, the Sierra Leone government seems very well aware of this. To any fair observer, the government has, since the current electoral process began, been cautious to the point paralysis in dealing with evident challenges to the security of the state by some members of the opposition. I use the words "evident challenges" very advisedly. Bluster and chest-thumping on the campaign stump may have their appeal, but it crosses the line for a major party leader to explicitly threaten to unleash violence in the event of electoral loss. The two major opposition leaders, Ernest Koroma (APC) and Charles Margai (PMDC or Peoples Movement for Democratic Change), have made these threats publicly - Koroma, to a friendly newspaper in Freetown, and Margai, at several public gatherings. Nor can their threats be dismissed as mere bluster.

Shortly after Koroma issued his threat, the Revolutionary United Front Party (RUFP), the group that represented the deranged guerrillas who spearheaded Sierra Leone's decade-long carnage, announced that it had joined the APC to help defeat the SLPP in the polls. As an electoral force, of course, the RUFP is absolutely insignificant: it failed to win a single seat in both the 2002 and 2004 elections. Its value, as Koroma must understand, is purely symbolic, flowing from the (swift) logic of the machete: primitive violence and brutality. Following, Koroma instigated a rally of the APC ignoring the little legal requirement regarding police permit - and of course some violence was reported.

Now I have met Koroma a few times, and I know him to be a gentleman of an almost anodyne type. I understand this on a personal level. During a meeting with Koroma over a year ago in the course of work I was doing for the British government, Koroma mentioned that he would be traveling to London the following week. That visit would coincide with the launch of my book at Chatham House. I casually invited him to drop by. To my surprise - as well as immense pleasure - he did, and he bought a copy of the book, which I duly signed. So you see, all this sound too desperate, and Koroma should appeal to his better instinct and make a public renunciation of his threat.

I am not so sure about Margai. I have met Margai a few times since he broke away from the SLPP (in the process resigning as a cabinet minister) to form his PMDC. He had lost the party leadership to his senior colleague, Berewa, and found that the party was no longer good enough for him. This is, of course, his right; and he may be well correct in denouncing the leadership process as rigged. What is less clear is why he thinks that that experience guarantees him majority support for the presidency - and the failure to realise such a vote an indication of fraud for which violence must be unleashed on the nation. The PMDC, for all the initial enthusiasm (now almost completely waned) that greeted it, is a very new entity, rather like a new bookstore. No one has voted for it, and it can therefore claim no electoral support anywhere. This is just by way of delivery of some home-truths. The PMDC is an untested party, the leadership driven largely by the belief - half complacent, half demagogic - that disenchantment with the ruling party in some quarters automatically translates into votes for its most vociferous critic.

As everyone knows, this is a dangerous delusion, and people close to Margai should be telling him this.

It is clear that no one is doing so. I met Margai last year with an American colleague. We were staying at the Cabenda Hotel, owned by Femi Hebron, founding member of the PMDC. My colleague and I - on assignment for the UK government - expressed an interest, to Hebron, in talking to Margai. Margai dropped by the next morning for a chat. I was impressed by his sense of commitment and determination. But throughout the one-hour long conversation, concentrated around what alternative vision he had for the country, the most concrete things I noted from Margai were, to the effect, "When my uncle" [Milton Margai] or "When my father" [Albert Margai] was in charge things were better etc The next time I met with him was at his party's offices in Freetown, where, at the All Political Parties Association (APPA) meetings, he vowed that he it was just a matter of time before he would be sworn in as President, and that the SLPP will not even come a distant second, so unpopular had the old party become. He claimed that he had no confidence in the NEC, the judiciary, and the police. I wondered how anyone wanting to be President of a country through a democratic process could be so contemptuous of its core institutions, but alas, Margai did not appear to get my point.

He already claims to have extra-legal instruments of coercion to defend himself and his interests. He has claimed to command the support of the bulk of the former RUF and Kamajor militia combatants, and therefore his party "has what it takes to protect its interests" - the quote is from the recent International Crisis Group (ICG) report (July 2007).

Margai was being asked in the context of recent home burnings (over 100 dwellings destroyed in a series of arsons) in Pujehun District, a stubborn stronghold of the SLPP. I investigated this incident while in Sierra Leone recently, and found that the burnings were indeed perpetrated by ex-combatants and other supporters of the PMDC who objected to pressure being put on a PMDC supporter by his brother, the Paramount Chief of Malen Chiefdom, an SLPP supporter.

No one has been arrested for these terrible offences, even though the Sierra Leone Police intervened to put a stop to it, and many of the perpetrators are well known. Isn't Margai, in a perverse way, right about the unreliability of the police after-all? The same kind of reckless lawlessness (and impunity) seems to be at the bottom of the recent violence in Kailahun District, another stronghold of the SLPP. Margai simply has little, or no, support in these areas, and what support he has is concentrated among the ex-Kamajors, who resent the treatment meted out to Hinga Norman by the so-called Special Court of Sierra Leone. (To the consternation of some of us - for long supporters of Norman - Margai has, since Norman's death, been claiming to 'continue' Norman's 'legacy'!

The fact that Margai was Minister of Internal Affairs, in charge of the Police that so brutally arrested Norman, makes no impression on the man! He certainly did not resign because of the shameful treatment of Norman; Margai resigned simply because he saw his presidential ambition frustrated by others in his former party.) Margai seems to be in too much hurry. In every human endeavour the line between ambition and impatience, commitment and desperation, determination and over-zealousness, can be very thin, and it demands enormous good sense and nobility of purpose to maintain a fine balance. For an important politician in a situation like ours, maintaining that balance can make all the difference in the world.

Someone should tell Margai that it is simply not realistic for him to expect his PMDC to make significant electoral gains, let alone win the Presidency, in so short a time since its inception.

The two traditional parties, the SLPP and the APC, are still very strong. And whatever its many faults, the current SLPP government cannot, by any measure, be considered a failure: a government that has maintained the fragile peace, more than tripled enrolment in schools, built or refurbished hospitals and police stations across the country, constructed or refurbished hundreds of miles of roads, in the constrained circumstances that Sierra Leone found itself in since the war, cannot be considered a failure. This Presidential election, someone must tell Margai, is really a contest between Solomon Berewa and Ernest Koroma.