By Crispina Cummings
With pressure mounting for the House Minority Leader to resign, the 16 MPs supporting Dr. Bernadette Lahai have reiterated their "total support" for her as their leader in parliament.
Addressing a news conference at the embattled minority leader's office at parliament building, Francis Konuwa, MP, of Constituency 14 in the Kenema district said Dr Lahai "remains minority leader of the SLPP until the courts rule otherwise".
He accused his party's leadership of "not doing justice for the party and being disloyal because it's time to unite the party as a family before thinking about winning the 2018 election".
Stile Jengo, MP, from Constituency 83 in Moyamba district said the reason why the SLPP "big guns" were not in favour of Dr Lahai is because she's not in support of the 'Straight Line', that is people loyal to another camp within the party led by the former flagbearer Julius Maada Bio. He said Dr. Lahai "must enjoy her human right to belong to or support any group of her choice".
He said they would continue supporting her no matter what it took because "she is a victim of malice".
On the question of why Foday Rado Yokie, MP, was denied the job of representing Sierra Leone in the ECOWAS parliament, Suahilo Koroma, MP, told journalists that Brima Conteh, MP, who got the job was a fitter person.
He called on party leaders to "stop the blame game and unite the party in the interest of our supporters".
Francis Kaisamba of Kenema, MP, said "several arrangements have been made from the party Secretary General to resolve the issue but it has been proved that our 26 aggrieved colleagues are not working in the line of the consultations taking place".
He threatened that one of the aggrieved MPs, Habib Munda, MP, who is also the caucus leader for the SLPP in Kenema "will soon be impeached because he is not working in line with the aims and aspirations of the SLPP in Kenema".
One of the 26 MPs calling for the removal of Dr. Bernadette Lahai, Maada Moiwa Momoh of Constituency 006 in Kailahun district, dismissed any suggestion that her leadership was being challenged because she belonged to a "so-called Straight Line faction" of the SLPP. He said that was a "mischievous attempt to exploit the divisions in the party.
Momoh told Politico that the "few MPs supporting Dr. Lahai are doing so for personal aggrandisement" and accused her of "deliberately refusing to make judicious use of the intellectual resources in the opposition on parliamentary committees and acting contrary to party dictates in parliament".
(C) Politico 27/02/14
