By Umaru Fofana
I understand that not long after his election as president in 2007, Ernest Bai Koroma was advised by a church leader to avoid making promises and to always confine himself to talking about what he does and not what he plans to do.
Well six years on, he seems to have forgotten or ignored that piece of advice. But I believe he has not always talked the talk but has sometimes walked the walk and done the deed. His efforts in the area of electricity, albeit with monumental challenges and among the most expensive in the world on the customers, have been bold, innovative and perhaps unprecedented. I think it has been a great expression of intent as if to make the point that it should and could have been long done.
However forgetting or ignoring the advice of the Man of God could cost the president before his mandate ends. Today or tomorrow. His unfulfilled electoral promises and policy statements include separating the Office of Attorney General from the ministry of justice, not appointing any Member of Parliament to his cabinet, strengthening science and technology by inconsequentially adding that to the portfolio of the Ministry of Education, decriminalising libel, promulgating a Freedom of Information law, etc.
Picking up from that last bit, it has been touted that President Ernest Bai Koroma is a friend of the media. This, in my view, is both misleadingly and false. Perhaps even disingenuous. Like all presidents of Sierra Leone before him, he has some friends in the media. Plain and simple. And because he is more easily blackmailed than any president before him, Koroma has appointed many journalists to important public positions or has taken the friendship beyond friendship if only to compromise them and let them compromise him. Again, not out of his liking for the media but out of his relationship with these journalists.
The president has to be grateful to the media generally. As the first opposition leader to rise to the presidency in the history of Sierra Leone – Siaka Stevens won to become Prime Minister – he had time to rub shoulders with journalists many of whom were very generous to him in part because the government at the time had become arrogant even if not as intimidating as his has become. Not that the former government did not have their own friends in the media. They did, with many of them now some of Koroma’s staunchest apologists and appointees.
If President Ernest Bai Koroma does like the media and he is not just parleying with a select group of journalists, how come he has not dealt with the anti-press laws throughout his presidency? How come he has not interacted with the media as often as even a media-hating president would do. Such is his dislike for the media that he has never attended any function organised by the Sierra Leone Association of Journalists.
My thinking of his decision not to be holding news conferences – he held only one throughout his first term presidency which followed the London conference – had been that he had a lot he could not defend especially as a first term president who had his eyes on the next election. The news conference he held to mark his first anniversary was anything but.
So when he made the promise on 5 July 2013 that he would be respecting Advisory Note Number 8 given to him by his team of advisers, I thought the decisiveness that comes with final term presidents had started manifesting itself. And that the man now meant business. How wrong! He told us that his advisers had asked that he should be talking to the media more regularly and holding at least one press conference every month. He sounded and looked very confident and excited on that late Friday morning into the early afternoon. And in his characteristic way, he smiled and committed himself to the monthly meeting with journalists. He actually enjoyed it in the beginning. Not he did in the end as the questions were inconveniencing. Not a very good speaker and fast thinker, he bucked his feet and stumbled and fumbled. He misspoke by convicting bank officials who were yet to be tried. By the way many of them were later found not wanting.
It is exactly three months ago since he assured that he would be meeting the media every month. May be 100 days make one month. So we await the one hundredth day later this October. Whatever the calendar days, the failure by the president to live up to his words is another sign of him scorning the media and ignoring the partial advice.
I have maintained that a president who is on his way out of the corridors of power must pay far more attention than the one facing the ballot box. So amassing wealth in readiness for exiting the presidency is not the way to pay attention. Posterity can hardly be lied to. Perhaps the advisory note of the State House team has been shredded like the church leader’s advice against making promises. Does the president want to wait until there is another crisis before he calls the media for another engagement? Does he think things are not already splattering on his face?
I sometimes feel the president does not listen to the official media advisers at State House. After all I do not think they are all incompetent for their job. His Director of Communication, Unisa Sesay in educated and intelligent enough to be able to give the president the kind of advice he needs in dealing with the media. But how much fiat does he have when he is hardly ever noticed save for his appearances on some badly moderated TV programmes if only to make himself useful. The best can be made of Jarrah Kawusu Conteh if only the communication department is allowed to operate as it should.
But I know from observing that State House does not operate as it should. Those who should be doing things are not the ones who do them. Those who are either not employed or employed to do something else are doing other people’s job. And the president either acquiesces to this or refuses to take action. Again, because he has surrendered himself to blackmail and blackmailers.
© Politico 08/10/13
