By Umaru Fofana
Once again Kono was in the news last week. And still is, as the pieces are being picked up in the aftermath of a by-election for an insignificant local council ward seat. Insignificant because its result was never going to impact on anything or prove any point, methinks. A sitting Vice President and a former Vice President went toe-to-toe, way beyond necessity to campaign and do everything else to win the seat.
Cash splashed. Thuggery unleashed. Relationships severed. All because of politics at its miniscule – a local council seat! So much so that you get the feeling our politicians aren’t in politics in the public interest. In fact if I was an SLPP strategist I would have advised them against investing as much resource as they apparently pumped into the election. But that to my mind was not as serious a mistake as the SLPP’s early quarrelling with C4C over the appointment of the Chairlady of the New Sembehun Market Women. Agreed the party did not officially endorse Julius Maada Bio in the runoff last year because Sam-Sumana didn’t want to, but the district voted overwhelmingly for the man who is now the president. They should have let go of that chairlady position to the party that controls the council.
The dominant political party in Kono District is the Coalition for Change (C4C) led by the former vice president, Samuel Sam-Sumana. Born just two years ago, the party won all but one of the nine parliamentary seats in the districts in the March 2018 elections. It also won all but ONE of the local council seats in the Koidu municipality, and lost only three seats in the entire District Council (two to the then ruling APC and one to the SLPP).
In a move that sort of defies – defiles if you may – logic, the reason for the formation of the party and its landslide victory in the district last year has been sent to the dustbin of history – and with it possibly the party itself.
In politics, they say, there are permanent interests and not permanent friends or enemies. But when the friendship or enmity is the raison d’être for the interests, you wonder where to draw the line. The history of the C4C is too recent and all too familiar to delve into here. But it is worth noting that it was borne out of anger and indignation in the heart and head of the people of Kono. Two of their best known politicians were dismissed controversially – perhaps illegally – from their elected positions. An elected Vice President and an elected Mayor. In the history of Sierra Leonean politics no Vice President has succeeded his boss. But you would forgive the people of Kono for thinking that their own would have succeeded Ernest Bai Koroma. Who wouldn’t have thought so if their own was the number two!
We are all well informed about the VP’s sacking, but perhaps not so about the Mayor’s. Saa Emerson Lamina was – probably still is – the most popular politician in Kono District. In the 2012 elections he won more votes in his municipality as Mayor than the sitting president Koroma did in the same election in the same place as presidential candidate. Emerson is a bipartisan figure. He’s amiable too. His calm demeanour and baby-faced looks are disarming. Humility is his massive presence and one he can afford to be arrogant about but is not.
Mayor Emerson was suspended from office to be investigated for some trumped-up charges of embezzlement. Nothing was found because nothing ever existed. Yet he was not reinstated. He was effectively sacked. Talk about abuse of power and due process! So the people of Kono rallied behind him and his uncle – the sacked Vice President.
Because of internal Kono politics what should have brought the district’s politicians together was what had sent them asunder. Plus the fact that President Koroma relied on untruths told to him by less popular figures whose political survival depended on vilifying the popular ones thus creating a wedge.
While Sam-Sumana went into self-imposed exile in Ghana, Lamina went to the United States for some badly-needed rest and reflection. They would later have a flag to run under called the C4C whose forerunners were not necessarily from Kono.
In the recent history of the politics of Sierra Leone – I mean since the restoration of multiparty democracy in 1996 – Kono has carved a unique niche for itself. In fact stretching it to the 1960s, it has been the country’s swing and bellwether electoral district. But that is for another day.
Under the system of Proportional Representation in 1996, there was the Democratic Centre Party (DCP) led by one Aiah Abu Koroma, the father of someone who would later become First Lady. The DCP gained 4.9 percent of the nationwide votes which had almost entirely come from Kono. That was enough to attain the threshold to have seats in parliament under the PR electoral system.
The man, who had served as Attorney General and Minister of Mines in the 1960s and as the Managing Director of the National Diamond Mining Company for 10 years in the 1970s and 80s, was appointed by the newly-elected President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah as Minister of Political and Parliamentary Affairs. His Kono Party – as the DCP party was then referred to – died a natural death even before the following elections, because the leader had joined ranks with the SLPP party. He later died in 2005.
During his re-election bid in 2002, President Kabbah carried Kono by a landslide. I remember interviewing Ernest Koroma then and he made stinging allegations against his father-in-law, accusing him of leading the expulsion of northerners and APC voters from Kono, thereby disenfranchising them. These allegations were of course denied by the father-in-law who called his son-in-law a sore loser. The truth was that there was an exodus of northerners from Kono almost on the eve of the elections.
The dismantling of the DCP, arguably, spelled the relegation of Kono’s interest to the backburner. It ceased being a battleground. Its political leaders had compromised their people’s interest for theirs. Kono never became the sweetheart of the big political parties until during last year’s runoff poll.
I remember once meeting the top UN official in Kono during a visit there by Dr Albert Joe Demby, who had served as Vice President during Kabbah’s first term before he was given a commission to head. I was visiting then as a journalist working for the United Nations. Kono, which incidentally is my place of birth, lay in ruins. Dr Demby was assuring the UN official that the Kabbah government would rebuild it “very soon”. I challenged him.
My challenge was based on the fact that I knew Kono’s relevance to the Kabbah government had waned. With the DCP gone, there was no political threat to the SLPP winning again. The political survival of the Kono leaders even if at the expense of the district had taken precedence. The same mistake could be being repeated with the knell almost sounding on C4C.
During the recent local council by-election in the district, the main opposition APC party whose treatment of Sam-Sumana and Emerson Lamina had given birth to the C4C, did not field in a candidate. The official reason was the party’s stated position to boycott all electoral processes under the current election chief. Coincidentally, it worked well for them because of their apparent marriage to at least some sections of the C4C party including its leader and former Vice President Sam-Sumana. So the by-election was won by the C4C candidate who had combined his party’s votes and those of the APC. He narrowly edged out the SLPP candidate.
Failing to clinch the ward seat is clearly not good news for the ruling party; after all they deployed their very big hitters to the area which is urban area and has many cosmopolites. But it should also concern – perhaps worry – the C4C because of their reduced numbers and the significant increase in the vote tally of the SLPP from what obtained in March last year.
Sources I have spoken to in Kono say that is because even people who were diehard SLPP supporters voted for C4C on first ballot in 2018 because of the determination to unsettle the APC for the reasons I have already mentioned. So those voters have now returned to their party, as it were. The sources stressed on the point that Kono voters did not necessarily vote for Sam-Sumana in 2018. “They voted not for an individual but for a cause”, one told me.
Judging by recent happenings including Sam-Sumana and his C4C executive members visiting former president Ernest Bai Koroma and some statements attributed to the former VP, one cannot rule out the likelihood of the two parties merging ahead of the 2023 election. It is even being rumoured that the former VP is being promoted by his former boss to become the APC flag-bearer. In fact, in a recent audio apparently of him, he denied that his former boss did anything wrong to him. That’s a far cry from those previous utterances of bile in which he was, figuratively at least, baying for the blood of the man whose guts he ostensibly hated.
So I wouldn’t be surprised if by the next APC convention next year Sam-Sumana was readmitted into the party. That leaves the future of C4C in the balance because many of the party’s members will drift along, while those feeling disappointed by the return of Sam will go the other way. This scenario will leave in doubt the future political strategy to be adopted by Kono. It will be all to fight for in the swing district.
The APC should be careful if they want to coronate Sam-Sumana as their presidential candidate. They will need more than just a Candidate Sam-Sumana to win in 2023. They stand the risk of alienating a large section of their stronghold where many are aggrieved that they have never been given the chance to run for president. Port Loko District comes to mind.
This is where the current Vice President springs to mind. Dr Juldeh Jalloh has roots in both Kono and Port Loko. The First Lady also lays legitimate claim to Kono as her home. Kono is a conundrum difficult to unravel.
© 2019 Politico Online
