Yoni Emmanuel Sesay: Sierra Leone Telegraph: 04 September 2026:
On 27 August 2026, the High Court issued an interim injunction restraining APC National Chairman Osman Foday Yansaneh and National Secretary General Lansana Dumbuya from performing their executive functions.
On paper, this may look like a procedural order intended to preserve matters until the substantive case is heard. In practice, its effect is far more serious. It comes close to a functional decapitation of Sierra Leone’s main opposition party.
An interlocutory injunction is ordinarily meant to preserve the status quo. It should prevent irreversible harm while the court determines the dispute. But where an order prevents a political party’s principal officers from convening meetings, passing resolutions and superintending party affairs, under threat of contempt, fines or imprisonment, preservation begins to look very much like paralysis.
That is especially troubling because the APC was already in the middle of an important internal electoral process.
Following the party’s constituency elections of 25 July 2026, its Internal Electoral Complaints Board, the IECB, had been hearing petitions arising from disputed elections across the country.
The Board was not merely receiving complaints. Petitioners and respondents were appearing before it. Candidates, lawyers, witnesses and party officials were being heard. Result sheets, delegate lists, videos, audio recordings and photographs were examined. Where records were disputed, verification was sought from the National Secretariat and the IEMC.
The allegations ranged from violence and disputed delegate lists to disenfranchisement, assisted voting, over-voting, altered results and improper declarations.
The Board also reached different conclusions according to the evidence before it.
In Constituency 111, it found that violence had disrupted the process and ordered a rerun. Other petitions were dismissed. Some were withdrawn. In Constituencies 063, 064 and 067, the Board dealt with disputes over candidacy, corrected results, counting and allegedly altered ballots.
Whatever view one takes of the legality of the IECB itself, one practical fact is difficult to ignore: disputes that might otherwise have spilled into factional confrontation were being channelled into hearings, evidence and decisions. The injunction has stopped that process.
Hearings have been suspended. Decisions awaiting implementation are caught in uncertainty. Candidates whose political futures depend upon those proceedings no longer know where they stand.
The court may ultimately decide that the IECB lacked authority, exceeded its mandate or was improperly constituted. That is a legitimate matter for judicial determination.
But there are two questions here which should not be confused.
The first is whether the IECB was performing a useful internal democratic function. On the evidence of its proceedings, it plainly was.
The second is whether it possessed lawful authority under the APC Constitution, electoral rules, its terms of reference and the laws of Sierra Leone.
The court is entitled to examine the second question. But the existence of that question does not automatically justify an interim remedy so broad that it disables the first. That is the real difficulty with this injunction.
Instead of merely restraining specific disputed decisions, the order reaches into the executive machinery of the party itself. The Chairman and Secretary General remain in office, yet their capacity to act has been severely curtailed.
The consequences are immediate. The Secretary General would ordinarily receive correspondence, issue notices, request records and communicate decisions. The Chairman carries wider responsibility for ensuring that the party’s organs function and that lawful decisions are implemented.
Once both men are restrained from performing executive functions, even ordinary acts become legally dangerous.
Can the Secretary issue correspondence affecting a disputed constituency? Can the Chairman approve implementation of an IECB decision? Can either officer authorise another organ to deal with urgent business without being accused of circumventing the order?
These are no longer simply political questions. They carry the shadow of contempt. The supposed status quo therefore becomes institutional immobility. The effects may also extend beyond the APC’s internal elections.
Before the injunction, the party announced its intention to challenge the passage of the 2025 Constitutional Amendment Bill before the Supreme Court. It argued that Parliament had employed the wrong voting threshold and acted contrary to Section 108 of the 1991 Constitution.
That announcement was made through the party’s recognised national leadership.
The injunction now creates an awkward question: who has authority to instruct lawyers and commence major constitutional proceedings in the name of the APC while its Chairman and Secretary General are restrained from exercising executive functions?
The underlying constitutional issue does not disappear. APC MPs, members or others with sufficient standing may still approach the courts.
But that is different from the APC acting institutionally in its own name. A party which says a constitutional violation requires urgent judicial intervention should not first have to litigate over who is authorised to instruct its lawyers.
This is where the wider danger becomes visible. A dispute about internal party governance can begin to affect the party’s ability to perform its national role as the principal opposition.
The present case also invites comparison with _Alfred Peter Conteh v Dr Ernest Bai Koroma & Others,_ over which Justice Adrian Fisher also presided.
That litigation resulted in unusually deep judicial intervention in APC affairs. The party’s National Executive Committee and National Advisory Council were dissolved. An Interim Transitional Governing Committee was established. The court continued to issue orders dealing with transition, membership disputes, appointments, financial authority and compliance.
The 2026 case is not identical. The present injunction has not dissolved the entire executive or created another transitional body.
But the concern is familiar. Once courts move from deciding legality to effectively determining how a political party may function from day to day, the boundary between adjudication and administration becomes dangerously thin.
The caution expressed in Samuel Hinga Norman v Dr Sama S. Banya is therefore relevant.
The significance of Norman lies in the distinction between genuine constitutional questions and disputes which are, at their core, about the interpretation and enforcement of a political party’s own rules.
Political parties are not above the law. Their constitutions cannot override national legislation, and their officers cannot hide unlawful conduct behind the words “internal matter”. But neither should every disagreement over a party constitution become an invitation for courts to administer the party.
The present controversy appears to involve questions about the tenure of the APC executive, the effect of the PPRC’s intervention under Section 39(5) of the Political Parties Act 2022, the legality of the extension granted to party officers and the authority under which the IECB has been operating.
Those are serious questions. But seriousness does not remove the requirement of proportionality.
If the dispute turns on whether an extension was lawful, whether a body was properly constituted, or whether particular decisions were beyond its powers, then the interim remedy should ordinarily be directed at those matters. It should not unnecessarily disable the wider institution.
Section 39(5) itself appears designed to prevent a leadership vacuum where a party cannot complete its internal transition before an executive’s normal tenure expires.
An order which leaves an executive formally in place but unable meaningfully to function risks recreating the very vacuum the statutory mechanism was intended to avoid.
The democratic cost is already visible.
Candidates with unresolved petitions have no functioning forum. Decisions already reached are uncertain. The integrity of the July elections becomes harder to defend because the complaints machinery has been stopped halfway through its work.
The party’s principal officers face possible contempt if they stray across an uncertain line between permitted administration and prohibited executive action. And the main opposition party may find itself less able to organise, challenge government action and prepare for future elections. That should concern more than APC members.
Courts have an unquestionable duty to intervene when political parties act unlawfully. But judicial power is strongest when exercised with precision.
An interim order should prevent the alleged wrong. It should not, unless absolutely necessary, immobilise the institution in which that wrong is alleged to have occurred.
The court may eventually find that the applicants were right. It may hold that the leadership acted outside its lawful mandate, that the IECB lacked authority, or that particular decisions cannot stand.
If so, those findings should be obeyed. But those are conclusions for the substantive proceedings.
For now, the question is narrower: was it necessary to restrain the political and administrative nerve centre of the party merely to preserve the dispute?
A more measured order could have restrained the specific contested acts, preserved the records, maintained temporary administration under lawful regulatory supervision and expedited the substantive hearing. That would protect the authority of the court without needlessly disabling the party.
The judiciary must protect the rules of democratic politics. But there is a difference between enforcing the rules and taking control of the field.
Sierra Leone needs courts strong enough to stop illegality and restrained enough to recognise when an interim remedy begins to create a constitutional problem of its own.
The APC injunction risks crossing that line.
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