By Lawrence Williams
The government has established two new administrative districts within its southeastern political stronghold, alongside a restructuring of the western area urban and rural jurisdictions barely three months to a planned decennial census, according to an official gazette publication.
Under the new administrative framework, Bandajuma district has been carved out from sections of Bo and Pujehun, while Kpanguima district is formed from parts of Kenema and Kailahun.
The capital, Freetown, has now been bifurcated into two separate municipalities, the Freetown City Council and the Freetown West City Council. The Western Area Rural District has similarly been partitioned into the York Rural Council, Waterloo Rural Council, and Mountain Rural Council, with the prominent Tree Planting community being elevated to official village status.
Furthermore, Lungi, home to the nation’s international airport, has been upgraded to a municipality governed by the newly created Lungi City Council.
The statutory order additionally created several other townships, villages, and chiefdoms or elevated their administrative standings across the country.
These new local government divisions were introduced despite extensive public consultative sessions where residents strongly rejected proposals to partition Freetown along political fault lines.
Government officials maintain that the creation of these new administrative units is strictly aimed at enhancing public service delivery rather than securing electoral advantages.
Conversely, some opposition figures have denounced the move, accusing the administration of redrawing electoral boundaries for gerrymandering purposes.
Meanwhile, existing local councils continue to face severe financial strain due to chronic delays in the disbursement of their approved budgetary allocations.
Policy analysts warn that proliferating administrative councils will further strain national public finances, given that current local authorities already struggle to receive their approved budgetary transfers from the treasury.
In April last year, the Budget Advocacy Network highlighted this fiscal crisis, revealing that the central government failed to release statutory funds to local councils for the entire 2025 fiscal year, after disbursing only partial allocations during FY2024.
Former Attorney-General Joseph Fitzgerald Kamara has strongly criticized the redistricting exercise, describing it as premature and lacking grounding in credible, validated population census figures.
Contrasting the current order with the 2017 boundary alterations under the APC, which created Falaba and Karene districts in the north, Kamara noted that the previous exercise was strictly guided by official 2015 census data.
He characterized the current boundary redrawing as an instrument of political engineering rather than an administrative reform, branding it as “undemocratic, illegal, and politically motivated, and a dangerous provocation aimed at manipulating the electoral system for the ruling Sierra Leone People’s Party’s (SLPP) benefit.”
Meanwhile, the national population and housing census slated for December faces mounting uncertainty, as acute fiscal shortfalls leave authorities scrambling to secure international donor backing to bridge an $11.5 million budgetary deficit.
