With the Sierra Leone Bar Association’s membership subscription deadline two days away, a presidential candidate has gone public with concerns that administrative dysfunction may be quietly shutting eligible lawyers out of their own democratic process.
A candidate running for the presidency of the Sierra Leone Bar Association has raised a formal alarm over what she describes as a breakdown in the administrative machinery governing member participation in the Association’s upcoming elections a breakdown she warns could disenfranchise eligible lawyers if left unaddressed before the 29 May 2026 deadline.
Martina Baindu Egbenda, one of the candidates contesting the SLBA presidential race, issued a press release this week calling on the Association’s leadership to act with urgency and transparency to ensure that no member is denied their vote through procedural failure rather than genuine ineligibility.
At the heart of Egbenda’s concerns is a reported difficulty faced by members attempting to complete and regularise their subscription payments ahead of the elections the standard requirement that determines voting eligibility within the Association. According to her statement, members have been encountering challenges in having their payments verified and processed, raising the prospect that lawyers who are in fact subscribed may find themselves locked out of the electoral roll due to administrative gaps rather than any failure on their own part.
More troublingly, Egbenda has called on the Bar Association to provide an immediate explanation regarding what she describes as the reported unavailability of the Association’s Treasurer the official who would ordinarily be the central point of contact for subscription regularisation and payment confirmation. The absence, or inaccessibility, of that office at the precise moment when members need it most has compounded the problem significantly.
She has called for the establishment of alternative mechanisms for payment regularisation to be put in place before the 29 May deadline expires.
Egbenda is a legal practitioner with specialties in legal research, project management, administration, and legal advisory services. She holds a Master of Laws in Comparative Constitutional Law from the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary, and an LLB from Fourah Bay College, University of Sierra Leone. In January 2025, she was appointed by President Julius Maada Bio as Administrator and Registrar General of Sierra Leone one of the most senior administrative legal positions in the country, overseeing the registration of companies, businesses, and key legal documentation.
Her decision to go public with internal SLBA concerns, rather than manage them through quiet back-channels, is itself a statement. It signals both confidence in her candidacy and a willingness to use the transparency she is calling for on others as a standard she applies to herself.
Egbenda’s concerns land against a backdrop that Sierra Leone’s legal community will recognise all too well. The SLBA has, in recent years, become synonymous with contested elections and disputed processes that have drawn public criticism and, on occasion, court intervention.
As recently as 2024, members brought legal proceedings in the High Court against the SLBA and its then-president, seeking among other things a verified list of registered voters to be published ahead of elections, the right for duly subscribed but absent members to vote by proxy, and the convening of an Emergency General Meeting to allow members a say in the conduct of their AGM.
That year’s elections in Kenema triggered widespread condemnation, with critics arguing that if the body responsible for upholding the rule of law cannot conduct its own elections in a peaceful and fair manner, the message it sends about the overall health of the legal profession in Sierra Leone is deeply troubling.
The concerns Egbenda is now raising about transparency, accessibility, and the integrity of membership verification ahead of a vote sit squarely within that same fault line.
Egbenda’s demands, as set out in her press release, are specific and time-bound. She is calling on the Bar Association to provide an immediate public explanation regarding the Treasurer’s reported unavailability, to introduce alternative mechanisms by which members can regularise their subscription payments before the 29 May 2026 deadline, and to ensure that no eligible member is denied participation in the electoral process due to verification failures that are administrative in origin rather than the member’s own fault.
The requests are procedural, not political. But in the context of the SLBA’s recent history, procedural fairness and political outcome are rarely entirely separable.
At the time of publication, the Sierra Leone Bar Association had not issued a public response to Egbenda’s concerns. Ground Report Africa will continue to follow the story ahead of Thursday’s deadline.
With the Sierra Leone Bar Association’s membership subscription deadline two days away, a presidential candidate has gone public with concerns that administrative dysfunction may be quietly shutting eligible lawyers out of their own democratic process.
A candidate running for the presidency of the Sierra Leone Bar Association has raised a formal alarm over what she describes as a breakdown in the administrative machinery governing member participation in the Association’s upcoming elections a breakdown she warns could disenfranchise eligible lawyers if left unaddressed before the 29 May 2026 deadline.
Martina Baindu Egbenda, one of the candidates contesting the SLBA presidential race, issued a press release this week calling on the Association’s leadership to act with urgency and transparency to ensure that no member is denied their vote through procedural failure rather than genuine ineligibility.
At the heart of Egbenda’s concerns is a reported difficulty faced by members attempting to complete and regularise their subscription payments ahead of the elections the standard requirement that determines voting eligibility within the Association. According to her statement, members have been encountering challenges in having their payments verified and processed, raising the prospect that lawyers who are in fact subscribed may find themselves locked out of the electoral roll due to administrative gaps rather than any failure on their own part.
More troublingly, Egbenda has called on the Bar Association to provide an immediate explanation regarding what she describes as the reported unavailability of the Association’s Treasurer the official who would ordinarily be the central point of contact for subscription regularisation and payment confirmation. The absence, or inaccessibility, of that office at the precise moment when members need it most has compounded the problem significantly.
She has called for the establishment of alternative mechanisms for payment regularisation to be put in place before the 29 May deadline expires.
Egbenda is a legal practitioner with specialties in legal research, project management, administration, and legal advisory services. She holds a Master of Laws in Comparative Constitutional Law from the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary, and an LLB from Fourah Bay College, University of Sierra Leone. In January 2025, she was appointed by President Julius Maada Bio as Administrator and Registrar General of Sierra Leone one of the most senior administrative legal positions in the country, overseeing the registration of companies, businesses, and key legal documentation.
Her decision to go public with internal SLBA concerns, rather than manage them through quiet back-channels, is itself a statement. It signals both confidence in her candidacy and a willingness to use the transparency she is calling for on others as a standard she applies to herself.
Egbenda’s concerns land against a backdrop that Sierra Leone’s legal community will recognise all too well. The SLBA has, in recent years, become synonymous with contested elections and disputed processes that have drawn public criticism and, on occasion, court intervention.
As recently as 2024, members brought legal proceedings in the High Court against the SLBA and its then-president, seeking among other things a verified list of registered voters to be published ahead of elections, the right for duly subscribed but absent members to vote by proxy, and the convening of an Emergency General Meeting to allow members a say in the conduct of their AGM.
That year’s elections in Kenema triggered widespread condemnation, with critics arguing that if the body responsible for upholding the rule of law cannot conduct its own elections in a peaceful and fair manner, the message it sends about the overall health of the legal profession in Sierra Leone is deeply troubling.
The concerns Egbenda is now raising about transparency, accessibility, and the integrity of membership verification ahead of a vote sit squarely within that same fault line.
Egbenda’s demands, as set out in her press release, are specific and time-bound. She is calling on the Bar Association to provide an immediate public explanation regarding the Treasurer’s reported unavailability, to introduce alternative mechanisms by which members can regularise their subscription payments before the 29 May 2026 deadline, and to ensure that no eligible member is denied participation in the electoral process due to verification failures that are administrative in origin rather than the member’s own fault.
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The requests are procedural, not political. But in the context of the SLBA’s recent history, procedural fairness and political outcome are rarely entirely separable.
At the time of publication, the Sierra Leone Bar Association had not issued a public response to Egbenda’s concerns. Ground Report Africa will continue to follow the story ahead of Thursday’s deadline.
