By Umaru Fofana
When he was Minority Leader in Parliament and head of the then opposition All People’s Congress, Ernest Bai Koroma and his party made an interesting attempt at fusing a feature that is germane to the Westminster-style democracy into the presidential one that we have. He appointed a Shadow Cabinet. And I remember him discussing this with me over lunch at Paladio restaurant as we watched the Michael Jackson child sex abuse trial on television.
To work effectively a shadow cabinet exists only in a parliamentary system where, in direct opposite to what obtains in Sierra Leone, all cabinet ministers must be members of parliament. Since they are all in the House opposition MPs can therefore “shadow” the ministers by carefully studying their utterances and policies with a view to poking holes into them and providing alternative solutions to society’s problems.
Such is the importance of their role in Britain that the leader of the opposition, the Opposition Chief Whip and the Opposition Deputy Chief Whip get remunerations for opposing, in addition to their salaries as MPs. In fact the leader of the opposition, apart from his salary as an MP, gets £ 73,617 per annum, around half what the Prime Minister gets.
In the United States the Minority Leader gets paid the same amount as the Majority Leader in both Houses of Congress – US$ 193,000 per year – almost US$ 20,000 more than ordinary congressmen and congresswomen get. In other words, the role of the opposition is so crucial that the state should invest in them, not government undermine them using state resources and institutions, and any well-meaning citizen should be very concerned about that alternative group so they are not emasculated or even extinct.
In Sierra Leone, like in many other countries on the continent, the wish of the government of the day and their supporters and apologists is death for the opposition. Such an approach only destroys democracy and leaves any modern day society in a huge governance and accountability deficit especially where the media gravitates towards money and power, and the opposition is poor and weak, and their supporters are further weakened and impoverished.
Describing what obtains in Madagascar political analyst Juvence Ramasy says: “Everyone wants to be in power, so after every power struggle, these politicians run over to the winner”. It sounds pretty much like Sierra Leone. Ramasy’s assertion followed the defeat of Didier Ratsiraka in 2002 and the demise of his party, Arema. And when his successor, Mark Ravalomanana was ousted his party, TIM, was also weakened. The politics of Madagascar has been nose-diving ever since; and with that democracy in the country. Sierra Leone must not be allowed to go down that path which is why the goings-on in the main opposition SLPP should concern any progressive Sierra Leonean in the same way the APC imbroglio in yesteryears concerned many of us.
The current situation in the SLPP can best be described as pitiful. With virtually everyone in the party fighting against everyone else, the SLPP are enmeshed in rancour, entrapped in violence and riddled by division; to the extent that some members can get the government – led by their rival party – to bring pressure to bear on the police who have so often been used against the opposition, to rein in on their opponents within their own party.
That section of the SLPP who feel hard done by the apparent state interference into their party’s affairs and support one of the factions – the last year flag-bearer Julius Maada Bio – have started making some interesting parallels.
Bio’s men, and women, have interpreted their political vicissitudes to mean those experienced by Ernest Bai Koroma between 2002 and 2007; before he became president. However overly, they say Bio and the SLPP did better at the polls last year with 38% of popular votes, even by the official results which they still contest, than Koroma did in 2002 when he first ran for president and got around 20%. Koroma was challenged within his APC party to the extent he was dragged to court by his own within his own. Bio is also now being harangued by a significant section of his SLPP party.
Koroma faulted the election results of 2002 saying, among other things, that they were rigged and that his supporters attacked. Bio is also still pooh-poohing the November election result claiming widespread fraud and intimidation of his supporters. Conclusion: If you believe them, Bio will learn and get more mature in the lead up to the next election which should happen in 2018 and then win and become president of Sierra Leone. So they want him as flag-bearer, again. Interesting.
But things are certainly not as cut and dry as these Bio People may want us to believe. Even by their own admission they know the obstacles that stand ahead of their man are far more difficult to navigate than those that had beset Koroma. As a result some of them are getting animated and perhaps even paranoid. For example, they seem to believe that if Allie Bangura, the seeming favourite to become Chairman/Leader of the party at next month’s national delegates’ conference, does win, he could become ambitious to the extent of wanting to run for president. I do not believe that. But you cannot rule that out, especially if he steadies the stormy SLPP ship and becomes appealing to the base of the party. Additionally there are those around Bangura who have antagonised Maada Bio so much that they know they risk alienation should Bio lead the party, again, as flag-bearer and win for that matter. There was a lot of complaining of alienation by non-Bio people within the party in the run-up to the last election by some SLPP big hitters which some of them cited as reason for their leaving the party.
This is where Bangura must play that role of a “Unifier” which is his mantra, and ignore the call by some of his people for the crucifixion of Bio and his group. Whether or not he is interested in becoming president he needs to work with that crucial Bio faction to be able to make his party perform its role and, perhaps, win State House for the SLPP as he has boasted.
But back to the Bio People who think the trials and tribulations of Bio today are akin to those Koroma faced; hence they may just have a similar destiny. They are ignoring certain fundamental differences between the two men, the two situations and the two political parties and their internal democracies. The demographics are a huge difference too. Voter registration was not as thorough in 2002 as it was in 2012. In the regionally-slanted political system such as we have today, the northwest had over six political parties at the time, even though they registered less people. The southeast had only one. Whereas Koroma lost the presidency then he won a parliamentary seat and that was to prove crucial. It gave him a platform to lead the challenge against government and to set up the Shadow Cabinet I spoke about. In other words he had a legitimate platform in parliament even though his leadership of the party was being challenged.
But even that challenge to his leadership was perhaps more over technicality that reality or over his popularity among party delegates. Bio won the last delegates conference with around 40%. The vast majority voted against him. Now the internal democratic structure within the APC is different to that of the SLPP. More than the latter, the former allows for imposition from the top even when in opposition. I will justify that in a moment. But both parties can be imposing when in power. The decision to have Solomon Berewa as the SLPP’s candidate in 2006 was a manifestation of that.
Building up to the APC national delegates’ conference in 2002 to elect a flag-bearer, there was an apparently deliberate attempt to rig the process. There were allegations that the delegates’ list was tampered with by the Secretariat led then, as now, by Usman Yansanneh. It led to a boycott of the process by aspirants like MK Suma, Eddie Turay, Dr Moses Sesay, Serry Kamal, Abdul Karim Koroma and, I think, even Jengo Stevens. No-one can afford to do that in the SLPP when they are in opposition. If you need reminding wait for it in part two, on Tuesday, to know those who, after that Koroma selection, stayed on or went on to join the SLPP. Or even what was to befall them several years later after their party returned to power. Then you will begin to appreciate what the real fight in the SLPP is all about.
Also in that sequel, I will endeavour to point out the political graves Maada Bio and his supporters could have been digging for themselves and consequently for their party. They include the fact that Bio has never come out publicly to denounce the violence being perpetrated by some of his supporters against fellow party members. And his determination to remain flag-bearer until the next election; a position that does not exist more than two years before election. Join me then.
