Julius Bio briefly ruled the country in 1996
He returned Sierra Leone to democracy
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Bio ruled the country briefly after staging a palace coup in January 1996 to overthrow Captain Strasser’s military government. This came on the back of a division within the ruling Supreme Council of State over whether to introduce multi-party elections that year. Bio had said at the time that Capt Strasser wanted to relent on his promise to hand over power to an elected civilian government. Bio’s tenure as Head of State was just three months long, during which he conducted elections and left power after Ahmad Tejan Kabbah was elected president. He subsequently resigned from the Sierra Leone Army and migrated to the US where he lived for about a decade and continued his education. His supporters have since been calling him the “father of democracy”.
