By Umaru Fofana
"No part of the education of a politician is more indispensable than the fighting of elections." - Sir Winston Churchill.
While you mull over that I wonder whether you have ever wondered what would have happened to Barack Obama had he been a Sierra Leonean and wanted to run for the highest office in the land? Well, I have. He would have been frustrated and left to writhe and die. Reason: our country's politics is broken and it kills those who are not favoured by those who have established a fortress for themselves and turned into fiefdoms our tribal groupings called political parties. Fiefdoms that will not hesitate to carry out a pogrom if only to keep their hands on raw political power or get them to it.
I repeat, Sierra Leone's politics is broken perhaps into smithereens. The personal aggrandising politicians seem more plentiful than the people they claim to want to lead. So also are the rogue elements in power and those around them who are more of consiglieres than advisers. The shadow state is on the rise like yeast in flour. And they are becoming desperate because of the limitless access they have to state resources and power, and the unchecked use thereof. Otherwise what explains the surge of people in the mining sector wanting to succeed one from the insurance business. It seems we are insuring anything but Sierra Leone and Sierra Leoneans. Or why would someone who has had a taste of power - either as incumbent or in the distant past - be said to be bent on wanting to stay in or return to power. At any and all cost, it would seem.
There is a tragedy that could be unfolding if we do not fix our broken politics. The lynchpin of it all is that our political parties are more of tribal groupings and backward bending individuals. Not well-meaning people with a common aim of fixing Sierra Leone's innumerable problems without fixing their own business and family interests first, second, third and fourth. To make a tragedy look like a comedy, the Political Parties' Registration Commission cannot fix it - certainly not in its current form and leadership.
"I think Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic nominee...I'll tell you why. I think she will because I think she has staying power, star power, and money power. She brings a big organization that is well funded right off the bat, and one of the lessons I learned is you have to be able to play the long ball."
It is unlikely you can attribute that quote to its owner. It was President George W Bush's assessment of who he thought would win the Democratic ticket in the battle to succeed him as US president, as cited by Richard Wolffe in his book "Renegade...The Making of Barack Obama". But here is what Bush said of another Democratic contender at the time, Barack Obama: "Certainly a phenomenon and very attractive. The guy is very smart". President Ernest Bai Koroma can never say that publicly about anyone running for the opposition SLPP. Nor could Ahmad Tejan Kabbah have said so about an APC candidate. Never mind any other of the two parties saying that about anyone wanting to lead the other party. Reason: our politics is indecent, uncivilised and crooked. And a huge section of the electorate is far from independent of bribery and drugs and alcohol. Thanks to the same politicians who keep keeping the youth uneducated and poor so they can continue using them as they wish.
It is interesting that Barack Obama tried, and failed, to attend the Democratic party congress as a delegate just a few years before he stole the headlines around the world. Not that the party denied him membership. Rather because he did not have a pass or was not a delegate which not all party members are.
Four years later - in 2004 - he attended it as the Keynote Speaker as Democrats assembled to crown John Kerry as their presidential candidate for elections later in that year. He had been nominated by the man whom he would later appoint as Secretary of State. That speech brought him a spotlight that was never to extinguish and introduced him to the nation outside his native Chicago, and indeed to the outside world. The party's big hitters did not scamper to get their own crony and bury the talent of the young man who would later become Senator and then President. He was chosen on his own merit.
In Sierra Leone, when our political parties hold their conferences or conventions or whatever you wish to call their gatherings, there are hardly any new ideas to democratise the party. No serious speeches are made by serious people. No status quos within the parties are challenged in the interest of equal opportunities within and without. No seriousness is attached to these gatherings. Instead it is deification of the incumbent who is made to feel a sense of messianic ordination. Never mind any keynote speaker from any brilliant and dispassionate old man or budding gem. As for the former they will be compromised to make the incumbent leader look like the closest to Jesus or Muhammad that exists, while the latter will be frustrated and forced to step down if it is an elective congress. Killing our Obamas - that is what that is called.
The Democrats spotted Obama as a brilliant young man with a huge potential for party and country. They nursed him. And for this his skin colour did not matter. He had joined the party because he believed in what it stood for - because there was something it stood for in the first place. What do the APC and the SLPP stand for reader? Anyway... And with honesty, fairness and a deep-rooted culture of internal party democracy he became president of the USA. Since those are lacking in Sierra Leonean party politics, he would never have become president here. The same way we send away our own Obamas, frustrated and denied, and deny the country of their contributions. All because some bigot close to another bigot does not like or prefer them.
In their book "THE BATTLE FOR AMERICA 2008", Dan Balz and Haynes Johnson give this hair-raising account of how ordinary members' will within a political party can carry the day, and not the will of a few crooked party big von:
"Now, as Obama waits at the Selma airport, before him on the tarmac sit two large, sleek Gulfstream jets. As he watches, the motorcades of black SUVs roll onto the tarmac and up to the jets. Out of one SUV comes Bill Clinton, followed by his Secret Service detail and his aides. The second, even larger motorcade brings Hilary Clinton and her entourage. Within minutes, the former president's plane is taxiing down the runway. Obama's small plane is scheduled to depart next. The pilot tries to start their engine, but he can't. The battery is dead. Don't worry, the pilot tells Obama, airport crews are searching for a long extension cord. They'll plug it into a generator in the lobby and run it from the terminal back to the plane and jump-start the engine. Still, the plane won't start.
While Obama and his aides are cramped inside the plane, sweltering in a cabin without air-conditioning, they watch as Hilary's Gulfstream takes off. Bemused, Obama tells his young aides, 'I guess this is a grassroots campaign.'"
Such was how lowly he started off. But the spirit of equality and equity saw him through. The Democratic party allowed and enabled him to run his campaign unhindered without the power of the former First Family being used unduly against him. Again it boils down to internal party democracy which gives fair and equal access to all. It is lacking here where especially the party in power uses the people-given power to subvert the people's will and do whatever suits a few at the helm. It is lacking in the country's general body politic.
Mohamed Kamarainba Mansaray, ordinary, is a nobody in Sierra Leonean politics. There is no constituency in which he can contest and win on his own personal merit. I think. He is not known. He has not done anything for this country. In essence he is a political nonentity. That notwithstanding, he has the right to exercise his democratic right like any other Sierra Leonean. If he holds dual citizenship, then he cannot be a minister, by law, never mind run for president. But how many ministers and their deputies in the current government who hold other citizenship anyway. I know at least a few. But since that has not been officially used against Kamarainba albeit being talked about, I will leave that for now and deal with the apparently undemocratic manner in which he is being bullied by those within the party who think they must remote-control, willy-nilly, the supposed election of the party's presidential flag-bearer.
For the Secretary-General of the APC party to deny the young man his right as ascribed in the party's constitution to ascend to Foundation Member or even deny he is an ordinary member thereof shows how impossible it would have been for Barack Obama to become President of Sierra Leone. He would have long been history. If it is not broken, don't fix it, the adage goes. I say, if it is broken and you do not fix it, it will break you as well. Our politics is broken, and needs fixing. Certainly not by those who broke it. See you next week.
(C) Politico 01/05/14
