By Umaru Fofana
I never get tired of explaining how shocked I felt when I went to cover the 2008 US election that saw Barack Obama emerge as the country’s first black president. The cold was too heavy for me on the Chicago side of things, so I preferred being on the west coast state of Arizona – home of then candidate John McCain. The Grand Canyon State has beautiful sunshine which is preferable to the freezing temperatures for an African born and bred like me.
After Googling for the Republican Party office address in Phoenix, my colleague and I got our cab driver to take us there. Once we got there, a pleasant-looking lady walked up to us and introduced herself as a member of staff at the state headquarters of the Grand Old Party. We reciprocated. At a time when the US media was heavily polarised – like now – we stressed on the fact that we were from the BBC, before asking for Senator McCain’s campaign itinerary. She flattered us with some kind words for the British broadcaster.
The lady, probably shocked as much as we would later be, said that we had gone to the Republican Party office, “not Senator McCain’s campaign office”. My colleague and I – both Africans even if one is based in London – were astonished.
We wondered whether there was any difference between the political party and its presidential candidate. As if we had rehearsed it, we did not voice out our surprise. And moments later, the lady asked us for a moment and ushered us into one of the office rooms and offered us water in the scorching weather. She later returned with the address and telephone numbers for the candidate’s campaign headquarters. We thanked her and left.
Three years later, I returned to the US as a guest of the State Department under their Edward R Murrow programme. A programme named after one of the most celebrated American broadcast journalists who brought World War II to the American audience through CBS. He is immortalised by George Clooney through his 2005 movie “Good Night and Good Luck”.
During our lesson tours, a professor of American politics told a group of about a dozen African journalists assembled from various countries on the continent that a presidential candidate in America was on his own. Your party is the platform and you have your policies to defend, he told us. I later engaged the professor in the sidelines and argued why I thought that was so. The parties have their ideologies, and the candidate crafts their own policies and argues them out to the electorate.
For example a Democratic Party candidate would certainly conflict with his Republican Party counterpart on issues such as gay rights, abortion, taxation, etc. Those ideological differences are what distinguish the parties from each other. So the candidates stand on their own stead based on those core values of the parties. Crucially, the parties are run as institutions and are busy with many other things including administering themselves.
This explains why, back to Arizona, my colleague and I walked away into our car, and looked at ourselves like kids that have just been given a lecture about flying a plane. Impressed! Stunned! And probably also angry! How on earth can we not remotely imbibe such in our body politic? Here it is common for executive members of a party to openly support one candidate against another in a contest to become standard bearer. And it is not necessarily to side with the best candidate or the candidate who is good for the country; rather the candidate who for some dark reasons is favourable to the party bigwigs. We all know the scandal around Hillary Clinton in the last election when it emerged that some members of her Democratic Party had appeared to have acted unfavourably towards candidate Bernie Sanders in leaked emails that appeared to have supported Mrs Clinton.
One of the biggest things most suffocating governance in Sierra Leone is conflict of interest. Such is how pervasive it is that most don’t see it as an issue. The normal abnormality! Such is how wrong and retrograde it is that it eats into state resources where such resources should be spent for state advancement. Such is how bad it is that it makes officials spend more time working for party at a time they should be working for the state.
In office, President Ernest Bai Koroma and his APC party refused to listen to heads who told them that it was wrong for Minkailu Mansaray to be a cabinet minister when he was deputy leader of his party, Musa Tarawallie to be Organising Secretary when he was a cabinet minister, Alpha Kanu as Publicity Secretary of the party when he was in cabinet, etc. If you went to their offices you would see them much busier with party activities than with state matters.
Unfortunately, nothing has changed on that front under the government of Julius Maada Bio. Among others, the SLPP party National Chairman and Leader, Prince Harding lobbied for and got the coveted post of Chairman of the National Telecommunications Commission (NATCOM) and the party Secretary General, Umaru Napoleon Koroma is head of the National Privatisation Commission. Where do you draw the line?
How does anyone expect these gentlemen to dedicate time and energy to either the state or their party in equal measure or as they should?! They are either preoccupied with party matters when it is the state that pays them, or they pay attention to the state at the expense of their party which should be an institution and where they are pivotal.
I can understand the arguments some may put up – namely that they don’t get paid by their party in their executive capacities. That may well be so. And this is exactly why they should resign those party positions and get others to do the job there while they get paid in their public jobs.
But it should serve as an opportunity for our political parties to be made into institutions rather than the tribal groupings that they are. They should be run by paid executive members and staff. That way they can dedicate their time and energy to running their party and allow statecraft to be carried out by those who are not distracted by the running of their party.
Imagine the SLPP Chairman or Secretary General was invited to a party function in Koinadugu or Pujehun, wouldn’t they use their official state vehicle, get per diem for themselves and their driver, wear and tear the vehicle, among others? That is a conflict of interest which is an anti-corruption offence.
It is time for the SLPP to stop doing the wrong things all in the name of “the APC did so before us”. That is why they were voted out. Sierra Leoneans deserve better than this namby-pamby politics.
(c) 2019 Politico Online
