Nearly three years after fleeing the political fallout of a deadly uprising, Ex-President Ernest Bai Koroma is finally coming home.
Sierra Leone’s Vice President Mohamed Juldeh Jalloh delivered the news to a crowd of local leaders and residents in Makeni on Friday, framing the former president’s return as an act of national healing rather than a routine homecoming.
“In the spirit of peace and national cohesion, the former president Dr. Ernest Bai Koroma will return to the country this weekend,” Jalloh announced, according to a video posted to Facebook.
For Koroma, 72, the announcement closes a turbulent chapter that began in the chaos of November 2023. Armed attackers that month stormed a military armoury, two barracks, two prisons, and two police stations, clashing with security forces in what authorities swiftly branded a coup attempt.
Twenty-one people were killed, and hundreds of prisoners escaped before order was restored. The state’s response was severe: two dozen soldiers and Koroma’s former bodyguard were handed prison terms of between 50 and 100 years by a military court over their alleged roles in the mutiny.
Koroma himself, who governed Sierra Leone from 2007 to 2018 as leader of the All People’s Congress, was swept into the investigation. Days after being charged with treason and related offences, he left for Nigeria in 2024.
What was meant to be a short medical absence stretched on for years. Judicial authorities had cleared him to stay in Nigeria for three months for treatment, but he remained there for more than two years instead, his case hanging unresolved over Sierra Leonean politics.
The turning point came this past July, when the government moved to close the case without fanfare. Sierra Leone’s justice ministry said it had dropped the charges against Koroma, offering no public explanation for the decision.
Behind the scenes, though, the shift appears to have been the product of sustained regional diplomacy. According to reporting from Pan African Visions, Koroma’s travel to Nigeria for specialist treatment had itself been facilitated through an arrangement involving the Economic Community of West African States, and he remained subject to court-imposed bail conditions throughout his time abroad.
When the charges were finally dropped, Koroma said in his first public reaction that he had been informed the proceedings against him were discontinued “in accordance with the laws of the Republic of Sierra Leone.”
ECOWAS provided the occasion for his first tentative steps back onto Sierra Leonean soil. He briefly visited the country in July, during a summit of the bloc, at the invitation of President Julius Maada Bio.
News agency Xinhua reported that it was his first time back since leaving in January 2024 and that he traveled to attend the 69th Ordinary Summit of ECOWAS at the invitation of the bloc’s chairman.
In a statement afterward, Koroma struck a conciliatory note, urging Sierra Leoneans to focus on national unity and reaffirming his commitment to “peace, reconciliation, and the democratic future” of the country.
That July trip, however, was framed as a visit; this weekend’s return is being described as permanent.
The timing is unlikely to be lost on anyone in Freetown. Koroma remains one of the APC’s most influential figures, and his homecoming lands squarely in the run-up to presidential elections scheduled for 2028.
His return could reshape the opposition party’s internal calculus around unity, succession, and strategy heading into that vote, and it will almost certainly reignite scrutiny of how the 2023 uprising was investigated and prosecuted in the first place.
For now, the government is emphasizing reconciliation over recrimination. Whether that framing holds once Koroma is back on home soil, addressing supporters in earnest, is the question that will define Sierra Leone’s political conversation in the months ahead.
WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW
Ernest Bai Koroma, Sierra Leone’s president from 2007 to 2018, is returning home permanently this weekend after treason charges tied to the deadly November 2023 coup attempt were quietly dropped in July, ending a two-year exile in Nigeria that began as a short medical leave.
With presidential elections set for 2028, the real story isn’t the homecoming itself, but its timing: Koroma remains a powerful force within the opposition APC, and his return is set to reshape Sierra Leone’s political landscape just as the country heads toward its next election cycle.
