By Mohamed Jaward Nyallay
Ahead of the three-day peace and cohesion conference which starts today, a high level UN and ECOWAS delegation arrived yesterday on a private jet.
The head of the UN West Africa office, Dr. Mohamed Ibn Chambas and two senior officers from ECOWAS, Aderemi Ajibewa (Director Political Affairs) and Ebenezer Asiedu (Head of Mediation) are here to add impetus to a conference already characterized by opposition boycotts.
The conference which has been dubbed “Bintumani” is being hosted at the Bintumani Conference Centre in Aberdeen.
The Sierra Leone government is organizing the conference as part of efforts to reunite a country sharply divided along political, ethnic and regional lines.
It has been billed as a prelude to the formation of a peace commission, which was proposed last year by President Julius Maada Bio in his first State of the Nation address to Parliament after assuming office in the disputed March 2018 general elections.
But the conference has come under scrutiny over questions about the lack of inclusivity.
Two of the country’s largest opposition parties say they are boycotting over failure of the government to consult them in the preparation of the conference, among various other reasons.
The main opposition All People’s Congress (APC) and the Coalition for Change (C4C) said they won’t take part.
The National Grand Coalition (NGC) decided at the last minute to take part after they had also said they wouldn’t.
The C4C presidential candidate, Chief Samuel Sam Sumana said he would not be available to attend the conference. This came following an invitation from the government for him to moderate one of the sessions during the conference.
An official of the party later told Politico that the whole party would not be attending.
“We as a party will not be at Bintumani for the conference,” Koighor Aloysious Foh, National Secretary General of C4C, said in an interview.
The APC also said it would not attend as a party. Its National Secretary General, Osman Foday Yansaneh, in a brief telephone interview with Politico said the party was scheduled to release a position paper later in the day.
But Information Minister Mohamed Rahman Swaray said there was no deliberate attempt to ostracise anyone, urging those planning on boycotting it to put the country first and resolve the “nibbling concerns later.”
There are doubts as to how effective the conference will be considering the boycott by the two parties.
© 2019 Politico Online
