By Umaru Fofana
17 September 2007. Ernest Bai Koroma had just been declared president-elect of Sierra Leone. As you can imagine, the headquarters of his All People’s Congress party was teeming with people. Supporters had ringed round it. My colleague Kelvin Lewis and I went to see him. It was for an interview.
That morning Koroma had called me after my report on the BBC had woken up many. I had reported that the then ruling SLPP party were planning to go to court, seeking an injunction to have the final result not announced because of objections they had over the cancellation of results from hundreds of polling stations in their strongholds.
I had also reported that the electoral commission was expected to announce that final result at 11:00 am but that I wouldn’t be surprised if the commission did before the courts sat. Koroma called and wanted to know which of the two ways I thought things would go. I told him I was not sure but that my instinct had been telling me that NEC would beat the courts to it. He laughed. Even though it was a telephone conversation I could count the teeth in his mouth. My instinct won. While papers were being readied ahead of the arrival of court officials, sounds of the reverberating celebrations of the result were re-echoing across Freetown.
So our visit to the APC headquarters was to interview the president-elect. He looked so overwhelmed by the victory and the incessant ringing of his phones that we couldn’t go ahead with it at that moment. So Kelvin and I left to file our reports. Not long afterwards, I received a call from one of his aides.
Koroma was going to make an unannounced visit to the outgoing president Ahmad Tejan Kabbah. I was with them. On his way back, he went to see the outgoing vice president and the man he’d just defeated, Solomon Berewa. Needless to say there were very long faces at the house.
When Koroma arrived, he asked that he and a few of his aides be allowed to talk to Berewa and just a few of his. Looking magnanimous, Koroma said that the election result had shown that the country was split right down the middle and that he would take that into consideration in forming his government. He said that in fact there had been some good people in the outgoing government that he would consider retaining. Once he’d said that, the faces of Berewa’s supporters both inside and outside the room lit up.
Whatever happened to that promise, it never came to pass. I suspect the hawks in the inner circle of the new president resisted that. The rest, as they say, is history. An opportunity missed. There have been disagreements galore since then!
Even though the ongoing political disagreements in Sierra Leone are not new – they’ve always happened in recent times after a set of politicians have been voted out – there is need for efforts to make the country cohere better than politics makes it do. Now we have the chance to reset the button.
As if making nonsense of the words to our national anthem, Sierra Leone is hardly the “land that we love” or exalt. The country is hardly a “realm of the free”. People disagree with each other very stupidly and sometimes violently, often for simply holding contrary views. We are not talking to each other, we are quarrelling with each other!
The leaders and their surrogates hound their people for merely disagreeing with their political preference. Great is no longer the love we have for our country or ourselves. Firmly united we never stand. We sing the country’s praise only hypocritically.
The hills and the valleys we have stripped bare due to greed and hate. We no longer bless the motherland but rather seek to disturb its peace and tranquillity. We pretentiously wish her the best when our party is in power – pretentiously because we are it for our individual selves – and genuinely wish her the worst when that political favour ceases to exist. Our every intent is now defined by the side of the political divide we stand.
Today we should have had an opportunity to dialogue as a people and meet as a family. I say “should” because I think it is an opportunity lost. The reasons are manifold.
I hear many peace experts will be at the three-day event. An event whose intent is good but the road to getting there is not so. The ultimate aim is to get all parties feel a sense of being considered as relevant in the governance of the state. Ultimately an Independent Commission for Peace and National Cohesion will be set up.
We need a middle ground in our body politic. The dug trenches serve nobody’s interest. There should be as much magnanimity in victory as should be graciousness in defeat. The reverse did not serve us in the past and cannot serve us now.
The lynchpin to peace or unrest in Sierra Leone has to be the political parties. So it is a bit of a concern that the key parties are either not attending this week’s national conference or are doing so depleted – amid a war within themselves. It is ironical that there is war over a peace conference.
Now the APC have officially announced that they won’t be attending.
I understand from the National Grand Coalition (NGC) party that they will also not be attending as a political party. Consultation between them and the government over the conference has been almost nonexistent, they say. Nationwide meetings on the process held without their involvement. At the very least the four parties in parliament (APC, C4C, NGC and SLPP) should have been involved in the planning at every step of the way. In fact I say all registered political parties.
But the government denies the NGC version of events, insisting that they involved the NGC until they chose to withdraw themselves. Senior government officials I contacted said the civil war within the All Political Parties Association (APPA) did not help matters. Again a pointer, if needed, to show the need for dialogue not least among politicians – at all levels.
Dubbed Bintumani III, the conference comes amid bitter and sometimes violent disagreements, accusations, counter-accusations and recriminations between the government and especially the main opposition APC party. None of it is in the interest of Sierra Leone and Sierra Leoneans. It is all over control of state resources and jobs. Full stop! So why not find a way of fairly sharing that by sharing our thoughts on how that can be achieved at a conference like Bintumani. The government says it wants to use the opportunity to make political parties cohere leading to the establishment of a Peace Commission. You can decide to be sceptical about that, but good to give it a try as a political party.
"It is important, if the Commission is to be accepted as a truly national institution, that its full establishment be preceded by a national conference on peace-building, diversity management and rebuilding of national cohesion” reads the Green Paper that sets out this week’s conference.
"This National Conference, which must bring together all major stakeholders in the country, should provide a platform for frank and open discussions of political events from the elections of 2007, and should focus on generating dialogue and ideas around making the political, economic and governance systems in Sierra Leone more inclusive, accountable, and fair“, the document goes on.
All of this is geared towards tolerance and fair play in politics. So that there is no way a party can feel aggrieved and not be allowed to say so at the conference. There will be foreign speakers present. If not for reasons of decency and the spirit of the conference, the presence of these independent peace experts will enable the political parties speak up, freely. And there will be civil society actors and the media present as well.
I think it is still not too late to establish a middle ground to get the main political parties to participate at this conference or/and in governance generally. It will be good to see them sign a communiqué agreeing to the establishment of the Peace Commission and also to listen to their concerns, the genuine ones of which should naturally be taken onboard.
There is nothing wrong in our politicians talking to each other with those in power giving ground and those in opposition not being gung-ho. It only sends the right signal to their supporters whose aim is survival. Imagine former president Ernest Bai Koroma and President Julius Maada Bio, holding hands in public ad visiting Bo and Makeni together. There will be no loser. Let us learn to jaw-jaw and not to war-war.
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