Cllr. Joseph Kpator Jallah has won the Senatorial by-election with 22,019 votes amounting to 36.46 percent of the total votes cast.
NEC Chairperson Davidetta Brown Lansanah released the final results of the June 28, 2022, rerun on Friday in Monrovia during a press conference.
Cllr. Joseph Jallah who origins from the lower Lofa belt will now ascend to the Liberian Senate along with Steve Zargo from the upper Lofa belt though his (Zargo’s) seat is up for contestation in the 2023 general and presidential elections.
The Congress for Democratic Change, a coalition member of the ruling Coalition for Democratic Change party supported candidate Jallah in the rerun which apparently hastened his removal from the chairpersonship of the Liberian People’s Party (LPP) during its 5th national congress on May 6, 2022.
Cllr. Jallah had been a founding member of the progressive LPP since 1984 and the Movement for Justice in Africa (MOJA) since 1979.
He served the LPP as its chairperson from 2005 to 2022 making it 17 years and according to report, the national congress should have been held next year but the party was forced to conduct the congress so as to set its record straight by unleashing Jallah to whichever party he desired as the LPP and CDC were in no merger.
61 year old Jallah is the first Director of the Liberia Drug Enforcement Agency and he also served as Deputy Minister of Justice during the Ellen Johnson-led administration. In 1987 he was held in contempt by the Supreme Court of Liberia for an article he published but university students rallied to have him purged off the charges.
Mr. Jallah is a former student leader with the UL-based Vanguard Student Unification Party (SUP) and lecturer of Social Science at the University of Liberia as well as a career lawyer who worked in the Legal Department of the Central Bank of Liberia as the lead counsel thereby practicing private law.
The National Executive Committee of the CDC endorsed Cllr. Jallah after he was cleared by the National Elections Commission as an independent candidate vying for the Senate in the Lofa County rerun election alongside five other candidates.
The party’s support for Cllr. Jallah also influenced by existing commonalities he share with his kinsmen after contesting five times; though he came second in all of the elections and he remained consistent since 2011 with his people thereby building of CDC’s development platform which seeks to prioritize the interests of ordinary Liberians, teachers, students, farmers and civil servants alike.
While committing (to the Jallah campaign) the entire framework of the National Patriotic Party, the Liberia People’s Democratic Party, and the Congress for Democratic Change, the leadership of the CDC asserted that it became important to throw its full weight behind the candidate’s campaign in order to push forward the national interests of citizens, chiefs, farmers and students of Lofa County.
Lofa County remains one of the least developed areas in Liberia as some residents in various voting precincts however; major political stakeholders are now turning their attention the Presidential and General elections next year.
Meanwhile, Unity Party which was once the godfather of the land defeat signifies possible change in voter behaviors in Lofa as the defeat of seemed identical to the failure of the Coalition for Democratic Change win in the senatorial race that then Senator George Weah earlier held in the CDC stronghold of Montserrado County.
