By Isaac Massaquoi
I saw a horrific accident on the road leading from parliament building to State Avenue last week and even as I write, the vehicle which on the day of the accident had an MP’s license plate, is completely beyond repairs and is still abandoned near the PPRC office. There’s no word yet about human casualties. We pray, however that the people involved in that accident will pull through with little problems. On the second day after the accident, the Mitsubishi Jeep’s license plates were removed. This was a truly cynical stunt aimed at hiding the identity of the MP whose vehicle is involved in the accident.
I am extremely sorry to have to use this accident to make the real point I want to make this week about this culture of elected officials hiding from the people all the time and turning up in their constituencies on the eve of elections proclaiming themselves messiahs of change and development. Some of them will miss Tower Hill, one of the best places in Freetown. In fact, like Moses, they will not enter the Promised Land of their new office block. Sorry guys!
You know, Tower Hill is an important and interesting place these days. Every time I drive through the area on my way to Central Freetown, I see vehicles belonging to MPs going in and out of parliament building ostensibly doing the business of the people. In fact, the whole of Tower Hill, in south-central Freetown is now well and truly the administrative district of country. There’s the new foreign ministry building nearing completion and a new office block for MPs, both built with Chinese money. Next to the foreign ministry is the Office of National Security, the Lotto Building housing many offices including the Privatization Commission – nobody knows what they are doing; Audit Sierra Leone is moving fast with its new office block next to the ONS building. The National Electoral Commission has a new home just opposite the office of the Vice President and that has further brightened up the Tower Hill landscape.
Even before the House is formally dissolved in August, the place is looking increasingly deserted these days. Many MPs are now rushing back to their constituencies to start donating exercise books and watching Nigerian movies and English Premiership football with the young people in their areas and at the same time using the opportunity to tell them of all the ‘plans’ they have for them should they get into parliament for another five years. I suspect the young people have heard that many times over. In any case, it’s all still a plan, another plan and another plan.
President Koroma made a very important statement at the Brima Attouga Stadium recently. He was addressing one of those many groups trying to catch his attention recently when he said among other things that in the coming elections, those who eventually get the ruling party symbol to run for parliamentary seats will have to first be selected by the party members in their own constituencies. That was a fantastic statement and I suspect that Dr. Koroma had his fingers on the pulse of his party’s grassroots supporters.
In 2007, the APC, for some strange reason decided to select their candidates based on the result of interviews conducted at the party office in Freetown. Some prospective candidates who lost out complained about some arbitrariness and influence peddling guiding the decisions as to who got the party symbol. That was how the party sent so-called diasporans who were totally out of touch with the people they were supposed to be representing.
It will be a good thing if the party stuck to president Koroma’s line; otherwise I suspect there will be many independent candidates even in safe APC seats.
The opposition SLPP too has to be very careful, particularly in those areas where they are expected to do well. We make a big mistake in this country thinking that local people can be fooled again and again. After the war and all the displacement and suffering mixed with hyper-media activity, our people are gradually beginning to take their destiny in their own hands. This process that Dr. Koroma is attempting to put in place will definitely put the crucial decision of who goes to the ballot for which party in the hands of the people themselves.
I recently travelled to a small village just outside Bo town in the company of two other journalists on a private visit. We went to see an old friend who was badly affected by the war. He had withdrawn to that place with his family to live a quiet life for the rest of his days. We hadn’t seen each other for more than a year and on this day we had a lot of catching up to do. Our conversation covered a wide range of issues – football, the English Premier League to be precise; we talked about his life before the war and about the coming elections. I asked the innocuous question: when was the last time your MP came around to speak to you? His face went blank. I put the question again. He looked straight at me and said; it’s four years now.
It so happened that about two months before my visit to the place, in the company of the same friends, I met the MP in question at a petrol station along Fenton road in Bo. Fuel was in short supply and for once MPs and ordinary folks like us were all in queues fighting to get some fuel to return to Freetown. The week before that, a handful of newspapers had published a survey that named about 10 MPs who are not likely to return to parliament after the November elections. This MP was one of them. And you can imagine that I would be keen to suggest to him that his days in parliament were numbered. I did just that. You can also imagine that he would dismiss that survey as bogus and targeted at destroying the chances of those surveyed. He did that with all his might.
As I returned to Freetown later that evening, I thought of this MP who hasn’t been to his constituency for four years but was telling me confidently that he will be re-elected on a landslide. I know that deep inside him, doubts linger as to whether he will survive the party primaries as a first step towards re-taking his seat. Politicians have indeed mastered the art of not compromising in public because it made them look weak. His was an Oscar-winning performance.
My friend in that village showed me two young men who are looking to replace our dear MP. He has a real fight on his hands. This scenario will be repeated across Sierra Leone and the shock waves will be felt like a tsunami inside Freetown in particular. Clearly there are MPs in Freetown who found themselves on Tower Hill on the crest of a wave of discontentment with the SLPP and the huge popularity of the president. Dr. Koroma retains some good amount of popularity in Freetown but I make bold to argue that it will not be enough to help any politician jump over the hurdle of first getting the symbol, (and the president should stay clear of that process) and eventually get into parliament. Any overt interference from the party headquarters of both the ruling and main opposition parties will be resisted and could result in many independent candidates. Let’s not make any mistake about that, those independent as we have noticed in the past are actually those preferred by the people in the affected constituencies who because of ruthless political manipulation are not allowed to get party symbols.
These are exciting times for people like me sitting behind my computer, writing opinion pieces like this, commenting on whether people will return to parliament or not. It is now for them to have all the anxieties and thinking about where they will be after November. For most of the MPs, they have the word POLITICIAN written in the space provided for profession.
