The chairperson of the National Electoral Commission (NEC), Dr Christiana Thorpe, has announced that the parliamentary bye-elections will be held on March 29 this year.
She stated that she had got notification from the clerk of parliament of vacancies in the House and that in line with the legal provisions that these vacancies be filled within a six-month period they would, as a Commission, organise the elections in March.
She announced that the bye-elections would be conducted in Constituency 28 (Bombali District), Constituency 42 (Kambia District), Constituency 49 (Port Loko District) and Constituency 103 (Western Urban District).
Dr Thorpe also announced that the commission had also concluded the boundary delimitation.
She said the delimitation exercise was based primarily on population but that the commission tried as much as possible to keep the chiefdoms and sections intact when delimiting the wards.
The NEC chair explained also that after the delimitation there were 394 wards and 475 prospective councillors.
She informed that they were waiting on Statistics Sierra Leone to do the description of the wards (the Meets and Bounds) and after which would be tabled in parliament for approval before the commission do a revision of the electoral register.
The local council election will be held on July 5 2008, on a partisan basis using first-past-the-post.
However, independent candidates may also contest the elections using any symbol from a range of symbols to be provided by NEC.