By Umaru Fofana
I woke up on Thursday 2 May planning how to cover for the BBC the state-of-the-nation address by the president at the State Opening of Parliament. I called the opposition to alert them that I would like to get their reaction to what the president would be saying in his speech especially about the state of the country’s economy. The party leader in parliament was ill-disposed so I turned to his deputy.
During my telephone calls I was warned that I might be interviewing the party leadership about what would precede the speech and not what would ensue it. I wasn’t sure what that would be. I just assumed a wide range of possibilities ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous.
The day was yet another eventful one in the never-ending eventful happenings in Sierra Leone, not least lately in our parliament where we are in uncharted territory. The party with the most seats is not the president’s party. You can argue about why that is so, but the incontrovertible thing is that it is making governance more difficult than it already would have been. This, in a country where the chasm between the two main political parties is wider than that which exists between the sky which has the sun and the earth on which stand palm trees.
The annual State Opening of Parliament is where the president announces his government’s agenda for the coming year and looks back on the year gone by and allows the MPs to debate his speech. But as it turned out the largest party did not want to watch or listen to it. Certainly not from their seats which incidentally have been made pretty comfortable since the rehabilitation work to expand on the well to accommodate the representatives of new constituencies. I understand some of them later watched the speech on TV. But I wonder how many of them and for how long they or anyone else stayed watching or listening to that speech. It contained some impressive details and achievements but it was long. Too long! So long that much of the detailed information could have failed to sink in. I will come to that in moment.
Not for the first time the events in parliament were full of spectacle, chiefly the walkout by the main opposition All People’s Congress. They were concerned at what they say is government’s alleged bullying tactics and the pending petitions in court against some of their MPs.
Deeply entrenched opinions are divided as to whether or not walkouts are necessary. So I’ll leave that as it is. But not before stating that walkouts are not new. The now ruling Sierra Leone People’s Party did so when they were in opposition. The APC did so before them when Ahmad Tejan Kabbah was president. Kabbah had appointed as head of the newly-formed NATCOM a man called Kanji Daramy. He had served as head of SALPOST where his days were marred by those US Diversity Lottery application forms were found floating off our shores. He would later be moved to become Presidential Spokesman. During that APC boycott of Daramy’s confirmation hearing, both Eddie Turay (he lost to Tejan Kabbah in 1996) and Ernest Bai Koroma (he lost to Tejan Kabbah in 2002) called me the night before the confirmation hearing to alert me to their planned walkout.
Now, fast forward. Last week’s walkout reminded me of what Ernest Bai Koroma would later say in 2012 – this time as president – about walking out of parliament in protest. Hear him:
“Mr. Speaker, in my last address here I told parliamentarians in the habit of walking out and boycotting parliament that they might be boycotted by the people…I hope my good friends will take note of this and acknowledge that the days of walkouts and boycotts are over, as they do not serve any useful purpose.”
The same man who had called to alert me to his party’s intention to walk out of parliament years earlier. I disagreed with President Koroma when he made that statement and I disagree with him now. Walkouts are an essential part of democracy. But it depends on what the end game is. I am as unsure of what the APC wanted to achieve last week as I was about what the essence of the SLPP one was. In the case of the APC one in 2006 or so, the idea was that they could not stop Daramy from being confirmed because they lacked the numbers, but did not want to be a part of the confirmation process because they felt strongly about the candidate. I can take that!
But what was the essence of last week’s boycott?! If I was an APC strategist I would have advised for a midpoint. What is that midpoint? In their Julius Malema-type berets, the opposition MPs greeted the president’s entry by standing up and unfolding their placards which spoke for them. I would have ended it at that. Point made! Photographs taken! Spectacle achieved! Then they should have sat down and listened to the speech even with closed eyes while swiveling their chairs. By the way reports that they walked out when the national anthem was being played are totally untrue.
But back to the long presidential speech, there are many things in Sierra Leone that hardly change however purposeless and punishing they may be. The way the state-of-the-nation address is being delivered by the president in parliament is completely out of tune and touch. I reckon it dates back to the communist approach of Siaka Stevens where the minutest details would be contained in the speech and read out as if to hypnotise voters on the eve of elections. It has been kept as the tradition which methinks is not actually worthy of it.
I noticed that during his speech last week, President Bio did not complete the text, despite having spent almost four hours reading it out. It became very tortuous and torturous to do so. He got so exhausted that he started getting tongue-tied. The speech contained too many minute details which would only pass in a sectoral report. Despite having so much useful information, the speech hardly had any sound bites.
I don’t know if these long and rambling speeches by successive presidents are made so because of the wrong notion that what is said during the state opening is what will be debated by MPs. If so, then that is completely wrong. The president can have a 1,000-page long speech laid before parliament, with a summarised version of about 10 pages which he will read out comfortably and with panache. Someone should correct me but I don’t see any reason why the president cannot stand up to enhance his ability to read out more succinctly and with authority and vim. As a public speaker and broadcaster I know it is a lot more advantageous to deliver a speech standing up than sitting down.
If the idea of having an unnecessarily detailed presidential speech at the state opening was to impress the public, it definitely backfired because very few people – if any – would have been attentive even for a quarter of the way through it. A lot more would have been glued for much longer if the speech had been laconic and known to be so beforehand. But all knew such speeches are long and rambling.
I do not know who exactly put that speech together. But it comes across to me as if it was hurriedly done by a non-expert. In the end, it left some egg on the face of the president who could not keep his audience in rapt attention and who ran out of gasp and almost got to the cusp of losing his voice and even his own attention. The next time trim down the president’s speech and let the line ministries handle the minute details.
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