Ernest Bai Koroma
Ernest Bai Koroma was president of Sierra Leone from 2007 to 2018, the insurance executive from the north who took the All People's Congress of Siaka Stevens, the party of the one-party state, and made it electable again. He won the run-off of September 2007 against Kabbah's vice-president in the first transfer of power between parties by vote in the country's history, and was re-elected in the first round in 2012. The eleven years were the growth of the iron-ore boom, twenty per cent in 2013 when the Tonkolili mine shipped and minus twenty in 2015 when the price collapsed and the mine closed. There was the free health care for mothers and children from 2010 that Britain paid for, and the roads and the Bumbuna dam. There was the Ebola epidemic of 2014-16 that killed nearly four thousand people in Sierra Leone, in which the state of emergency, the quarantines enforced by soldiers and the three-day lockdowns of the whole country were his and the burial teams and the treatment centres were the British and the charities'. There was the mudslide of August 2017 that buried a thousand people at Regent above Freetown, and a corruption that the audit service reported every year, with a third of the Ebola money unaccounted for. He was born in Makeni in 1953, the son of a Wesleyan teacher, studied at Fourah Bay College, joined the Sierra Leone Insurance Company in 1978 and ran the Reliance Insurance Trust from 1988. He was a businessman who had never held office when the party chose him in 2002, and he lost that year's election to Kabbah before winning the next. The second term's politics were the sacking of his vice-president Sam-Sumana in 2015, expelled from the party and then from office by a reading of the constitution the regional court later found unlawful. There was the talk of a third term that he ended by choosing a successor, Samura Kamara, who lost the run-off of 2018 to Bio. He handed over in April 2018, and was the ECOWAS mediator in Guinea-Bissau. He was charged with treason in January 2024 over the attack on the armoury and the prison in Freetown of November 2023 by men his party said were not his. He was allowed to leave for Nigeria on medical grounds and the charges hang. That is the country's way of handling a former president.
- Lived: 1953 CE – ?
- Nationality: Sierra Leonean
- Roles: president, businessman, politician
