By Isaac Massaquoi
As I write this, the inevitable congratulatory emails, some with CVs attached continue to inundate President Koroma’s inbox from all over the world. I don’t know how much of his time will be required to go through all of them. But I can safely say that many of such mails will be deleted as junk. The point is even an ordinary guy like me finds it extremely difficult reading through all the emails I get from friends and organisations that keep churning out one document after the other. Sometimes friends have had to alert me by phone to emails before I could respond.
There are many reasons why this is so, but the main ones are that the internet service providers we work with are just incapable of providing the services they advertise, so that it’s a real pain getting on line and doing uninterrupted work for even one hour, also the fact that the service is expensive puts it beyond my reach and for good measure, I sometimes decide not to use the computer for three to four days – to pull myself out of the technological slavery of the 21st century.
As the most important person in Sierra Leone, the president should have no such worries. I imagine his lines are always up, his office can afford the cost and if, like me, he decides to avoid technology for a few days in a week, he has staff to look through his mails on his behalf. But even they can’t read all the messages. At this time, he is celebrating an election victory and Christmas is here in three weeks. Imagine that. Those of us in the newspaper business love this time of year. Prosperous individuals and businesshouses all like to wish the president a Merry Christmas. It’s time to make some pennies.
Apart from that just imagine for a while, how many people try to get to the president on a daily basis using all channels – staff contacts, mobile phones, emails, appearing at events in which the president is in attendance and so on. His situation has been compounded by the fact that he has just come through an election and is in the process of forming a cabinet. Just read some newspapers; watch TV and see the stunts some people are performing all over the country and you will understand what this is all about.
Some of the people sending these emails are perfectly genuine Sierra Leoneans looking for an opportunity to serve their country but by Jove there are many others who are only looking to secure jobs in cabinet, on boards of Parastatals, in the few diplomatic missions we have, while some are simply looking for the opportunity to be close to the presidency, if not the president.
Nobody should envy the president. This is a difficult job which he must do very soon.
Let’s try and put on paper the angles from which the typical cabinet minister will come from. Here we go and in no particular order: Friends the president believes can deliver results is our first group. President Koroma will bring some of his trusted friends into his cabinet. He worked with a handful of them in his first administration and has had time to assess them. Some of those friends will fall out of the next government because they failed their friend. Whether the friendship will continue after that, I don’t know. I can only say that the friendship will be severely tested if they are left out of government.
There are also Technocrats whose competences are in short supply in Sierra Leone. While their loyalty to the president will be considered, these are the kinds of appointments for which the president may be tempted to put away political party considerations in the national interest. Such appointments normally influence the way the country’s development partners behave and they are normally in the finance and development sectors.
There are those who will continue to be compensated for their loyalty to the Party. I am talking about those people who through toil and pain brought the APC from its death bed after the devastating blow from the NPRC. They are old APC who have a re-assuring presence in the party. They are a disappearing breed but they are very important and the president is aware about how obstructive some of them can be. The last thing the president needs as he tries to cement his legacy in his second and final term is a group of party insiders holding a grudge over being dropped from cabinet.
The next group are the converts who helped defeat the opposition by taking votes away from them in the areas they dominate and contributing to the general propaganda that helped convince majority of our people that the opposition needs some more time in training school. The president can easily send them away because they are unreliable but will new ones come in 5 year’s time? These are the people who are normally made deputy ministers or members of boards of Parastatals for their troubles.
The 2012 election will be remembered for the fact that many MPs never got to face their people because they were defeated at their party primaries. That is mostly because they were unpopular. In some cases some of the old MPs pulled out of the primary race for fear of being disgraced by upstarts. When some of them threatened to go independent or join the opposition, they were called to Marine House to be told that to stay in the party and pray for the victory they now enjoy and they will be considered for jobs – even ministerial jobs.
There are those people who will end up in the cabinet as part of the ethnic and regional inclusion hints we are hearing. All they need is to be remotely connected to the APC or for an APC man to convince the president, their APC credentials are clean.
The final group are those who in recent times have discovered that the president was their “relative” and their greatest friend of all and are therefore all over the place, pretending to be doing something in the name of the APC, opportunistically sending out feelers as to whether some political office might just be available.
I make no pretence that this list is exhaustive. There are people who for reasons nobody understands will be considered for a ministerial position. It’s the prerogative of the big man.
This is an interesting position to be in.
I am among those Sierra Leoneans arguing that we must reduce the number of ministries as a cost-cutting measure – particularly the deputy ministers. In some ministries the deputies have barely anything to do and the cost of keeping them in office keeps rising daily. Many people were prepared to let the president off in his first round after coming to power with that eclectic coalition of political parties and interests. He now has the opportunity to rationalise state administration with the ultimate philosophy being that the 21st century is not the era of big governments. Sierra Leone deserves a small, mobile and highly motivated government that will deliver the Agenda for Prosperity without the noise and unnecessary propaganda that accompanied what was achieved in the Agenda for Change.
In all countries, including the biggest donors to Sierra Leone, the governments are taking bold decisions to introduce tough austerity measures which are hurting their people, just to balance their books. We cannot afford to pretend we are on a different planet and can hence continue to do business as usual.
There are demonstrations on the streets of Athens, Madrid and other European capitals almost every week. The Republican candidate in the last US elections complained a lot about their opponents operating a big government while he promised to cut “all non-essential expenditure.” The money we spend on some deputy ministers could be described as “non-essential expenditure” and must be cut.
Over the last five years, the president has had to take very difficult decisions but the task facing him now will surely challenge his management skills in a serious way. He probably needs our prayers. The Body of Christ that intervened to end the political impasse this week should keep the president in mind much more intensely as we move into next week. The word on the street is that we will have the new cabinet before Christmas so that the nation will return to work bright and early in the New Year.
Good Luck to those ministers who will make it in the end.
© Politico 06/12/2012
