By Isaac Massaquoi
As far as I know, Ernest Bai Koroma has addressed only one news conference since he was elected in 2007. He may have addressed events with lots of media people in attendance, he has indeed had one-on-one meetings with some journalists from time to time but I am talking about a formal news conference where journalists are able to raise issues with him. I can remember just one. It took place at Miatta Conference Hall with Information Minister IB Kargbo as chairman. Even that meeting did not qualify as a news conference in the true sense of what we know news conferences to be. It was to mark the first anniversary of the presidency of the president.
The press conference, billed to be Lunch with the President, was attended by many party loyalists clad in their usual colours applauding every word the president uttered and almost all ministers and senior civil servants who, for some reason, decided to abandon their offices and make their presence felt at Miatta. In the end only a handful of journalists were able to ask very interesting questions to which Dr. Koroma replied in the best way possible in my opinion, but because of the atmosphere, it was impossible to do follow-up questions and seek important clarifications. In journalism, that is crucial for accuracy and proportionality.
I know the government has been communicating through many other means like the weekly press briefing of the Ministry of Information, and in recent times, there are statements from the State House communications team and so on. I just feel that somehow, he should have met the media alone at least quarterly and open himself up for frank exchanges.
At that news conference I just referred to, Minister IB Kargbo offered me the opportunity to put a question to the president but I had none. Now if the president called another news conference in the coming two weeks, I will like to ask the question which is the topic of this piece. And it relates to the process by which our political parties are selecting their candidates for November’s elections. He will, obviously, answer for his party but I will probably get his take on the nexus between political representation and the people’s burning desire for responsive high quality representation at all levels.
The president is on record as telling his All People’s Congress party supporters that in the forthcoming elections it is up to communities themselves to choose who their candidates will be. He must have been reading papers or listening to radio stations about the disconnectedness of MPs from their people with many constituencies becoming destitute political orphans while their MPs have been taking advantage of their positions to enjoy power and wealth.
When the president said that, even the opposition ought to have welcomed it because I notice that the main opposition SLPP party too is trying out a method of selecting candidates which attempts to give ordinary people a fair chance at being heard.
The signals I am getting from all over the country suggest that the processes set in motion by the main parties to select their candidates has been corrupted and that in the end, the people will definitely not be deciding who their candidates will be in all but very few places.
In the last few days I have been travelling across the country working with journalists preparing for the elections and during our experience-sharing sessions, I heard interesting accounts of how ordinary people have openly revolted against candidates whom they suspected of having questionable links with their parties’ Electoral Colleges.
In one incident in Bomaru, a town in the eastern Kailahun district known for being the place where the first shots in our civil war were fired, a group of young people are alleged to have attacked tribal authorities for endorsing a candidate for local elections they considered unacceptable. I also heard about incidents in Tonkolili district, which is overwhelmingly APC, of splits between the people and their party executives led by education Minister Minkailu Bah.
I was also told of another incident in Fadugu in the northern Koinadugu district, where young people who are vehemently opposed to long-term APC MP, Philipson Kamara planted a palm tree, representing the SLPP in front of the chief’s compound with the message that he risked having an SLPP man representing his area if the authorities insisted on keeping Philipson in office. In parts of Port Loko district, APC partisans openly demonstrated their frustration against their sitting MPs, calling on their party not to select them anymore.
There are many other situations festering now all over the country and as nomination day approaches, we will get to hear about them.
This brings home, in a very clear way that even after half a century, our dominant parties have still not evolved a transparent and credible system by which political representation based on their tickets is decided in a manner acceptable to the majority of the people. The result is that owing to their primordial loyalty to these two parties, our people ended up voting for MPs they feel no connections to. So the hands of the political parties became so strong that while the eventual MP may have reservations about certain government policies and pieces of legislation, it would be suicidal to attempt to satisfy his conscience and the interest of constituents and in the process puts in jeopardy his return to parliament. Then we have the notorious section 77 (K) of the constitution which gives parties the power to remove an MP who betrays his/her party. “A member of parliament shall vacate his seat in parliament... if he ceases to be a member of the political party of which he was a member at the time of his election to Parliament and he so informs the Speaker, or the Speaker is so informed by the Leader of that political party...”
I must state however that every time some political party has tried to use it, parliament itself has used all the tactics in the books to defeat its own laws. The late Kerefa Smart tried it and failed because the SLPP then in government working with Victor Foh, an APC MP at the time, blocked the move.
Now in government, the APC has blocked Charles Margai’s attempt to throw political opportunists like Legacy Sankoh out of the PMDC and consequently out of the House. Has anything really changed in good old Sierra Leone?
My information is that Section 77 (K) was enacted to ensure some form of party discipline and deal with frivolous cross-carpeting inside parliament. Can anybody tell me with any seriousness that Legacy Sankoh, who sits on the PMDC side, is a member of that party? Why is he so brazen even in the face of 77 (K)?
So if in his case party discipline has broken down beyond repairs, why can’t PMDC leaders use 77 (K) to throw him out of their party and force a bye-election? For the last four years, the good people of that Bo town constituency that elected Sankoh under heavy SLPP pressure are, to all intents and purposes, political orphans. Their MP has been busy representing himself, pledging his loyalty to another political party while refusing to do the honourable thing – resign. I think that clause has failed.
In the local elections, the nation will wake up on November 18 to a lot of independent candidates, by the look of things. The same scenario would have been possible were independent candidates allowed to contest at all levels. I think any constitutional review as from now on must make clear the way for ordinary citizens who are fed up with the ruthless machinations of political parties to stand as independents and go into parliament to represent their people without subjecting themselves to party whips who are notorious for blocking dissenting voices from within their parties.
A lot has been written already in many newspapers about our politicians jumping from one party to the other depending on who was in power. A good many of the bright people in the PDP and UNPP ended up in the SLPP effectively destroying their own parties. In recent times politicians are also on the move, even more than English Premiership footballers, to the ruling APC. I am absolutely certain that Ernest Bai Koroma is sometimes very embarrassed by the reasons some of the cross-carpeting politicians give for leaving mainly the SLPP. Do they really think we believe or trust them? I am praying for the day when people like S.B. Saccoh who realised late in the day that he was a true APC are shamed in public and told to go away and pray for God to have mercy on their sycophantic souls.
I am very proud of the progress we have made as a nation towards establishing Sierra Leone as a decent democracy that has a seat in the great assembly of democracies. It was never easy. Keeping it so and deepening that culture will never be easy, let’s not fool ourselves and we have no choice but to plod on.
The greatest danger facing that, however, is that unless the people are convinced that they still have a good reason to vote – because they will get high quality, adequate and sincere representation – elections will be confirmed as the five-year ritual they truly resemble, paving the way for people like The Gambia’s Yayah Jammeh to say, “I told you so”.
(c) Politico 30/08/12
