Sierra Leone: Poll looks set for 2nd round run-off vote with 75% results in

(Reuters) – Sierra Leone’s presidential election results were too close to call after three quarters of the votes had been counted, with the 2 frontrunners neck-and-neck, making a 2nd round highly likely.

The main opposition leader Julius Maada Bio, candidate of the Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP), took a slight lead with 43.3 percent of the vote, against ruling All People’s Congress (APC) candidate and ex-foreign minister Samura Kamara’s 42.6 percent.

The other 2 main candidates – Kandeh Yumkella, a former United Nations Under-Secretary, and Samuel Sam-Sumana – attained 7 percent and 3.4 percent of the vote respectively.

There are 12 other minor candidates.

President Ernest Bai Koroma is stepping aside after his maximum 2 terms in office and the vote to replace him has largely been peaceful, a triumph for a country that lived through a brutal, diamond-fueled civil war in the 1990s.

But the winner faces a huge task trying to kick start the West African country’s economy, which after recovering from the war has been ravaged by low prices for iron ore, its main export, and recovery from an Ebola epidemic.