By Umaru Fofana
A vice president is as powerful or powerless or even useless as the president wants him to be. In Sierra Leone the word PERCEPTION and a Vice President are almost always together, at least perceptibly. So that whatever he does and however he does it, something mostly negative is read into it. Such is the Catch Twenty-Two situation a VP finds himself in – especially in a society where deification of the president is the norm – that if he works hard the boss and his henchmen see him as being TOO hard-working. He is therefore perceived as having something other than hard work up his sleeves. And if he takes his foot off the accelerator because he is being sidelined or misunderstood, a mischievous boss or society sees him as being inept or even inert. If a vice president is more intelligent than the president is he is perceived as exposing his boss’s inadequacy. If he is dumb he is seen as only clinging on to the apron string of the president. In a world full of sycophants if the president is slim the vice is seen as being TOO FAT. And if he is heavy his vice is regarded as being too skinny. But mutually respectful the president and the vice president should be. So they must be if they are to function well. So they have to be if the two must learn to work together and complement each other, and not compete with or against each other. They do not necessarily have to agree on everything provided such a disagreement is for the welfare and good of their people. It is by no mistake that a joint ticket is the vogue in presidential systems around the world. So the president gets directly elected in as much the same way and with the same votes as the vice president does. Unlike ministers who are in position at the magnanimity of the president, the VP is not. It will be disingenuous to say, for example, that someone got elected Vice President entirely because of the popularity of the President to which the VP is said to have contributed nothing. This is why he cannot just get up one day and sack his number two. In Sierra Leone, for example, what we had in November last year by the two main political parties should have called the “Koroma-Sam-Sumana” ticket and the “Bio-Sesay” ticket. Wrong for anyone to imagine that Sam-Sumana and Dr Kadie Sesay did not add any value to their respective tickets. Wrong! But in Sierra Leone either because presidential running-mates are imposed on presidential candidates or are chosen without due consideration for values and track record, our recent history is replete with disagreements between the two occupants of the presidency. In 1996 there was a widely-held view that Dr Albert Joe Demby was imposed on Ahmad Tejan Kabbah as his number two. The two hardly jelled. In fact they were diametrically opposed to each other in terms of values. Vice President Dr Demby was deemed to have had his hands on the tiller on a few occasions while stories were commonplace about how president Kabbah was sending back truckloads of gifts sent to him apparently to compromise him. In 2002 Kabbah decided to drop Demby. Not many people wept over it. It would seem he chose Solomon Berewa out of conviction believing that he would be the type of man he would wish to work with and who would be by his side as his principal adviser. Intelligent and hardworking. And perhaps, crucially, someone to succeed him as party leader and president of the country. It turned out that both men did all they could to achieve that. But the latter was not to be. When Ernest Bai Koroma chose Samuel Sam-Sumana in 2007 little was known about the running-mate outside his home district of Kono. I doubt Koroma himself knew anything significant about him. But the dynamics within the party and, as it is believed and as has been alleged by foreign businesspeople, money made that happen. It did not take long before the reality started manifesting itself. But for the quiet demeanour of the two men the frosty relations they had as they approached the end of their first term would have been monumentally messy. As last year’s elections approached the vice president had a lot of allegations of malfeasance being thrown at him. I have to say that he vehemently denied all of them and was never convicted for any of them. Apparently because there were concerns that Sam-Sumana knew something about some possible shenanigans that had been taking place in government and the fear of losing the crucial swing votes in Kono, Koroma was probably blackmailed into choosing him, again, as his number two. It was very evident that the two had become strange bedfellows. It took only a few weeks after the elections for the frosty atmosphere to return to the presidency. And there has hardly been any letup. State resources are being pumped on maintaining the vice presidency. But not much is being derived from it largely because of the mistrust – perhaps dislike – that exists between the two men. Made worse by the jockeying for pole position as the 2017/18 polls approach with every passing day. With that has come political horse-trading which has sometimes ruffled feathers and caused a furore, especially amid persistent talk of a third term. The youthful age of the vice president has made him ambitious, perhaps naturally. With that have come thoughts of his post-VP life. There is certainly a lot that Sam-Sumana can do as Vice President than he has been allowed to do. Agreed that the persistent allegations against him have not helped to make him function abroad, but it does not take away the fact that he was chosen for the second time and he can probably function within the country and in the sub-region which he does not seem to be being enabled to do. A minister once slammed the door at him over a football issue. I may be right into thinking that the only say he has over the appointment of ministers is the Minister in the Vice President’s Office. If his position is untenable then that should be brought to the fore in the interest of Sierra Leone so that the procedures to remove him can be followed. Otherwise let him be and let him function as he was voted for to do just that. To underscore how ineffective Sam-Sumana has been rendered he became perhaps the first Vice President of an All People’s Congress government not to have been made Deputy Leader of the party. At the Makeni APC convention Sam-Sumana had planned to run for the position. The drama was as humiliating for him as it seemed well orchestrated at the top. He was forced to withdraw. At the APC convention in Freetown, he did not look like a passive observer. He WAS a passive observer. Left without any role whatsoever! And no-one can tell me that this man is not competent to perform more role than he is being assigned now. Otherwise why was he chosen by the president whose sole prerogative it is, under our constitution, to choose his vice president! © Politico 22/08/13
