By Sheik Bakar Kamara
It came to pass that in 2012, Brig. Julius Maada Bio was elected to lead the opposition Sierra Leone People's party (SLPP) into the elections of that year. Party members and supporters, including myself, were excited. One strongly-held belief among SLPP partisans was that the party’s poor showing in 2007 was largely due to the fact that its standard bearer (the word flag bearer is a misnomer in this context), Solomon Berewa lacked the sheer force of personality that was necessary to provide the robust leadership required at the time.
The party needed a strongman to stand up to the perceived “thuggery” of the APC. Maada Bio seemed to fit that bill perfectly. Educated and well spoken, a robust military background, even if slightly chequered, an affable personality, a youthful zest and what he does not fail to remind people of: "name recognition."
Bio was to inherit a political party that was relatively steeped in British democratic traditions and whose founding fathers were - at least to the party’s youth wing – the proverbial "turners of the other cheek" and infuriatingly abhorrent of violence even in the face of APC intimidation and provocation particularly in 2007.
The belief that many held that he was the single most popular figure in the party at the time is greatly undermined though by the fact that it took a last-ditch intervention by his archenemy John Benjamin to cobble together a grand southeastern alliance to ensure victory for a southeastern candidate when it seemed to many that Osu Boie was threatening to nick the polls. In spite of a few defections, the bulk of the party stuck with him to the end.
When Ernest Bai Koroma was eventually declared winner, Bio’s followers cried foul. As a UN elections consultant/observer at the time, I saw for myself at polling stations in Freetown many instances of irregularity at the polls (I saw NEC functionaries who many believed were APC hirelings openly influencing voters at some stations. Whether these and other allegations of fraud were enough to influence the outcome of the pools did not have enough proof.
Bio also did himself no favours. At a meeting with civil society activists at party HQ a few days after the polls, he boasted that he had incontrovertible video proof of ‘massive rigging’ which he said he would produce in court. Presenting those proofs may not have changed the results but it greatly would have enhanced Bio’s reputation in the party and discredited President Koroma’s claim to the presidency. Unfortunately the proof was not forthcoming even to his supporters.
Bio’s greatest faux pas which laid the foundation for the undoing of the party started with him shockingly striving to remain leader even after the elections. In the strangest of reasons, he insisted he needed to provide political direction for the party until the courts gave a verdict on the elections petition. Many detached observers in the party and even some of Bio’s more doctrinaire supporters found it difficult to come to terms with this reasoning.
The rationale behind this reaction was simple: what “political direction” did Bio want to provide when the party already had an elected and legally constituted executive complete with a chairman and leader in the person of John Benjamin?
Soon afterwards, Bio lost the petition but continued holding on to his offices at party HQ. Even though he lost the petition, the massive show of support that the party was able to mobilise behind him during the petition hearings could have been enough motivation for him to have worked for greater unity in the party. Soon afterwards, however, his prickly supporters laid siege to party HQ and in a thinly-veiled manner declared it a no-go area for perceived anti-Bio members of the party.
Many respectable party members, who had gone to visit and commiserate with fellow party members after the elections, suffered humiliation and abuse at the hands of Bio’s supporters. The victims range from the party’s erstwhile Chairman John Benjamin to the mother of Dr. Kandeh Yumkella and other senior members of the party. This ugly trend has now become the order of the day.
This calculated plot by Bio’s supporters to drive every decent person who wants to freely express their freedoms of association, movement and speech has not been limited to Freetown. Dr. Yumkella’s supporters who recently accompanied him on an Ebola assessment mission in Kenema were threatened with violence even though they had no intention of holding a political meeting not least in the party office. This also demonstrates the level of political intolerance that is now the hallmark of the Bio bandwagon. On a deeper level, it also betrays the latent fear that is eating away at the very fabric of Bio’s waning support. This is for good reason. For the first time in his fledgling yet tumultuous political career, Bio, in Dr. Yumkella, has a real competition in his hands.
Bio’s incendiary apostles should learn that their claim of him being his party’s most popular candidate is only truly demonstrated by putting that popularity to the test on a level playing field in free elections. Today, Bio’s supporters who lost the district executive elections in Kenema have taken over the party office in that city while the legitimately elected officials have to make do with the private premises of one of their officials.
Kenema, statistics have shown, is undoubtedly the party’s most loyal district. Since the advent of multiparty democracy in the mid-nineties, SLPP has won every parliamentary seat in the District save for the one that was lost in court – not at the polls – following the 2012 polls. The question that is asked by many is: How can the SLPP genuinely hope to mount a credible challenge at any national polls when one of its heartland districts remains so polarised because of the sickening intolerance of people who claim to be the 'most popular.'
Although Bio continues to deny association with these myriad allegations, that he has consistently failed to rein in on his supporters greatly undermines this denial.
With all the clangers he has and continues to drop, Bio still maintains some support in the southeast. One only has to look for testament of these in the 2012 election statistics. He decimated the PMDC (but for which Berewa could have won in 2012) by shredding their impressive national figures in 2007 from some 250,000 votes to a bare 28,000 and depriving them of all eight of the seats they had won in those polls. In comparison though to the 44% scored by Berewa in 2007 as against Maada’s less than 38% even in the face of dire times under the APC, Bio’s much vaunted support takes some beating. He still, I believe, maintains some key support in the southeast which will never be enough to win him the presidency. But it will complement a KKY ticket.
As things stand today, Bio and Yumkella are the party’s most attractive candidates and can potentially complement one another. Bio continues to hold sway over particularly the restive, youthful rank and file of the party’s heartland in the southeast. It is important to put into context the nature of Bio’s support.
Southeasterners, with a lot of justification, have had a bad deal under Koroma’s APC. On its rise to power scores of highly qualified southeasterners were calculatedly sacked from their jobs and many more deprived of both local and international scholarship. They further argue that the APC has demonstrated from time to time that their party is a purely northern preserve. Proof of this is that no southeasterner has ever headed the APC nor led it to any national polls. Southeasterners therefore believe that their interest is best protected with a southeasterner as their leader.
There is nothing wrong with having a southeasterner as leader, what is wrong is to elect a southeasterner for that sake alone. Some may argue that nostalgia for the SLPP which had been out of power for decades greatly helped the late Tejan Kabbah's cause. But definitely, his national spread in the form a southeastern mother, a northern father and his strong Western Area connections were, I strongly believe, the icing on the cake. Both Maada and Kandeh have no blood lines in one another’s region of birth. But they can complement one another.
Yumkella has an eastern wife and strong southern connections. He is a product of CKC. Crucially also, Yumkella commands great respect in the international community. Did I hear you say he who pays the piper calls the tune? Bio unlike Yumkella has quite some baggage to contend with. On the evidence of the above, the odds are stacked against Bio. Yumkella has a bigger national spread and is a potential vote winner.
Many southeasterners have now come to the realisation that Yumkella remains the best option to deliver State House. In some of my sojourns up country, the cry is "We no longer want a flag bearer but a president." If Bio can summon some courage to rein in his supporters, put an end to newspaper articles by his fans attacking his party brethren, and imbibe the values of tolerance, he and Yumkella can start talking. Ever thought of a Bio-KKY ticket?
© Politico 11/11/14
