Liberia: CDC Accuses Election Coordinating Committee Head of Partisanship

The ruling Coalition for Democratic Change (CDC) has accused Cllr. Oscar Bloh, the Chairperson of the Election Coordinating Committee (ECC), of being a supporter of the opposition Unity Party. 

At a press conference yesterday, the ruling party displayed a video allegedly showing Bloh, Senator-elect Amara Konneh, and other senior members strategizing for the November 14 runoff election between President Weah and former Vice President Boakai.

In the video, the map of Liberia is displayed with green and blue colors indicating the stronghold of the ruling party and the opposition Unity Party.

The Daily Observer, however, cannot confirm the authenticity of the video displayed by Jefferson Koijee, the Secretary General of the CDC and the Mayor of Monrovia.

“We have written to the international community, the US embassy, and particularly to USAID about an individual who is masquerading as a civil society practitioner,” Koijee said. 

“He is a card-carrying partisan of the Unity Party and has received money from the US government, deceiving them under the guise of a civil society practitioner. Oscar Bloh, who is supposed to be neutral, is in the Unity Party war room, coordinating the Unity Party election. What is he doing in the Unity Party war room?”

Koijee, however, did not provide any evidence to back his claim that Bloh, who has denied the allegation, is a Unity Partisan. 

He noted that the letters to various foreign missions and development partners were geared towards “making the world know that the head of the country’s biggest election monitoring group has taken a political side ahead of the runoff elections.”

However, the Election Coordinating Committee, in a release issued on behalf of Bloh, rejected the claims that its chairperson is a member of the Unity Party, assuring “the Liberian people, its international partners, and all political parties that it never compromised its posture and will remain a non-partisan national domestic observation group.”

“The ECC wishes to make it absolutely clear that the video is fake and malicious, and the person in the video is not Cllr. Oscar Bloh. Cllr. Bloh has never visited the data center or ‘war room’ of any political party, including the UP, and he has never had any conversation or meeting with Mr. Konneh,” the group, which is a conglomerate of some of the country’s leading pro-democracy CSOs, added.

However, the release did not mention the ruling party but named one Manuel Fle Chea, who they claimed posted the video on Facebook and alleged that Bloh had been caught in conversation with Konneh to conspire with some workers of the National Elections Commission to steal the runoff election.

Mulbah Morlu, chairman of the ruling party, had on November 8, written to Catherine Rodriguez, the Chargé d’Affaires of the US Embassy, and USAID, requesting the cancellation of assistance to the group based on “evidence that its director is working in close connection with the Unity Party.”

“Dear Ms. Rodriguez, the National Executive Committee of the Coalition for Democratic CDC writes to formally inform you of the compromised actions of Mr. Oscar Bloh, the Executive Director of the Elections Coordinating Committee (ECC), who was caught in partisan activities of the Unity Party in pursuit of the election of Joseph N. Boakai,” the letter reads.

It adds: “By his partisan actions, which include the abuse of access to privileged information pertinent to the transparent conduct of the 2023 general and presidential elections, Mr. Bloh has extremely compromised the neutrality of the ECC.”