By Umaru Fofana
It seems EXPULSION is the new political lingo in town. As if the controversy surrounding the sacking of the elected Vice President is not suffocating the country enough, the opposition Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) have followed in the footstep of their ilk – the governing All People’s Congress (APC) party – whose reasons for the expulsion of Samuel Sam-Sumana is anything but convincing to me.
Recent developments, like several antecedents, illustrate if anyone needs proof that Sierra Leone’s political class is a joke and the political parties are mainly tribal groupings which lack some of the most basic internal democratic tenets. And you wonder why they behave the way they do when in power? You’d better not!
Until political parties are run as strong institutions that are separate from the running of the government we will continue to create colossuses at the helm who will think they are doing the masses a favour by leading them; and who will think supreme authority is derived from their party and not from the people.
I have cited before how I went to cover the US presidential election in 2008 and was shocked by the lecture I was given by Republican Party officials in Arizona. I had gone there expecting to get a schedule of Senator John McCain’s campaign. I was advised that I should go to his campaign headquarters because “the Republican Party office is different from Senator McCain’s campaign office”.
The APC should be meeting today at an emergency national delegates’ conference to ostensibly rubberstamp the expulsion of Sam-Sumana. It follows the decision by the party’s second highest authority – the National Advisory Council.
The SLPP have held their own National Executive Council meeting and expelled Ambassador Bangura, and their chairman and leader says their constitution is clear and they will not call an extraordinary delegates’ conference for that. “The decision stands until the next ordinary delegates’ conference” Chief Somanor Karpen told me. And President Ernest Koroma himself said the same thing about the expulsion of Sam-Sumana while addressing party faithful during a recent foreign trip. So what is the delegates’ conference about?
Even the selection of delegates to such party conferences is fraught with controversy in both parties, and sometimes bedevilled by outright rigging of the process. Just turn back the clock and how APC held and carried out the delegates’ conference that chose Ernest Bai Koroma as its presidential candidate for 2007. Or the one that chose Solomon Berewa as the SLPP candidate for the same election. I bet my life that a lot of shenanigan will happen again ahead of the 2017/18 election in both parties if only to favour someone favoured by the status quo in both parties. And if you want to be favoured be a sycophant and do not challenge the wrongs within.
Agreed that Alie Bangura might have taken his struggle for redress too far thereby deflecting the party’s actual role of providing an alternative voice for the people, but expelling him cannot be justified not least in the current scheme of things in the country. Were the SLPP not shouting out their uvulas just a few weeks ago over same action meted out against Sam-Sumana by the APC? Spot the difference, if any, between those two parties!
But you have to also blame all of this on the lack of adequate redress mechanism as much at the state level as at the party level. How about our judiciary and the slow nature of the dispensation of justice? How about the Political Parties’ Registration Commission and its lack of the necessary clout especially in dealing with undemocratic tendencies within the ruling party which has ostensibly buoyed the opposition into doing same? Or even the PPRC’s lack of systems and perhaps authority to redefine internal democracy within the country’s political parties. Young men – now older folks – who could have contributed meaningfully with new ideas to move the country forward are being frustrated into leaving or are even kicked out to protect some no-do-gooders. Their crime: standing up, becoming ambitious and sometimes being critical of the status quo.
Like the APC, if the SLPP had the requisite internal democracy entrenched it is highly unlikely they would ever have got to the extent of expelling such senior members from their ranks. Of course we know both actions are more political than keeping genuine stability within the parties; never mind for the public good. The only difference between what obtains in our parties and in the secretive North Korea in this regard is that a state sanctioned death does not accompany expulsion even if all the trappings are removed to make them look miserable and dead in all but name.
The decision by the SLPP to expel and the rumoured threat to kick out more can only leave one with the impression that if the party’s leader and chairman Chief Kapen was not its leader he would long have been expelled because of the unsubstantiated allegations that have been peddled against him bordering on another new word in the political parlance, “anti-party activity”.
The lack of internal democracy within our parties is eroding the country’s polity or body politic. State-funded trips are used by state officials to carry out party activities blurring the line of demarcation – if any – between state and party. Why not? When cabinet ministers are also party executive members I wonder who would expect any line of demarcation.
All of this begins from the way the parties run themselves. It is common that national and even regional executive members of the opposition SLPP are openly taking sides with one standard-bearer aspirant or another. And there is no internal party discipline to bring them to line. If they win and get to power they will only be inclined to do what is currently being done by them and by those in power.
The SLPP cannot even run its mouthpiece newspaper without undue influence by one of the potential aspirants for standard-bearer at the next polls. There must be a massive firewall in a political party to protect it from such undue advantages. Let the party’s structure serve all members of the party. The more democratic a party is internally, the more democratic it is if elected to govern. The less democratic they are, the consequences are dire once they get to power, which is why internal democracy must be strengthened within our political parties.
Why for example for a country that practices a runoff ballot if any one presidential candidate fails to reach 55% threshold not have its political parties have a similar method of choosing its candidate? Perhaps if that system applied in the SLPP, Julius Maada Bio who became its candidate with less than 40% of the votes would have shored up his position in a runoff and mended fences to be able to do better at the presidential poll.
In fact let every card-carrying member be allowed to vote in the selection process of a presidential candidate. That does not only give ownership to everyone who cares to join a party, it also makes bribery – which is believed to be a hallmark of delegates’ conferences – very expensive and probably discouraged. If only delegates’ votes mattered in the Democratic Party in the USA, Obama would perhaps not have secured his party’s ticket to run for president ahead of Hillary Clinton.
Anything short of those basic democratic benchmarks the people will continue to wallow in the failed political system we find ourselves in where we are the pawns and not the Queen, or King or even the knights.
(C) Politico 30/04/15
