By Abdul Majeed Sesay
“Too often, the public forgets that the true existence of a firm (corporation) is to make profits before assuming other responsibilities.” (Abdul M. Sesay, Virtue Matrix, Reviewed. 2004)
Mission: The Sierra Leone Corporation (SLC) strives to be firmly united, ever it stands and hopes the hills and the valleys will re-echo its cry in seeking true profits and prosperity in its investor-friendly lovely land corporation that is called Sierra Leone.
Vision: Breaking all barriers that let no one stand in our way of doing business and enticing investors into our corporation. It will empower anyone who brings bags of prosperity to live freely, largely, and lavishly in the land.
Motto: We look after our friends and stockholders and will give them deals and contracts that they will not refuse.
Disclaimer: Before we get into the issue of facts and figures regarding how much this corporation is worth and the reach of its influence, we would do a little background about its state of affairs and how it came into being. This is part one of a long series of a corporation named Sierra Leone. Any similarities and resemblance to actual names, symbols, places, and historical events are solely my imagination. They are coincidental and remain a work of fiction.
Background: The Sierra Leone Corporation has 27,601 square kilometres of office space. There are 6.7 million people of whom 2.6 million are common stockholders who have privileges (voting right) while the remaining 4.1 million are its employees and customers. After years of toil and struggle, a new leadership emerged at the helm of the corporation that further opened up business ventures in oil, telecommunication and mining exploration (others not named) with hundreds of years of cumulative contracts including land acquisition to outside interests. We would denote these foreign investors as preferred stockholders in the corporation, meaning they would be first to payout (their investment stake) and other interest if this corporation is bought, sold, merged, or acquired by a competitor that is even bigger. We would talk about hostile acquisition later as the series progresses.
SLC continues to become prosperous attracting more and more investors but there are worries that a loss of investor confidence at this point in time may be disastrous and the common stockholders (voters) would find a scapegoat to punish if their interests were threatened or their stock shares plummeted. The chaos and uncertainty that bankruptcy might bring into the corporation would be explored in greater detail later.
There are eleven constituents (parties) that make up the membership of this corporation and they are sun, palm, moon, hoe, house, broom, cassava, cotton, lamp, mango, and rice. The head of the corporation for the most part often comes from the sun or palm constituents. The others are either newcomers or are too weak in terms of numbers, resources and influence to challenge or threaten the leadership swing between these two forerunners.
There are tense moments every five years when a new leadership change or retention takes place in the corporation and even before that the jockeying for credibility to win the contest already begins after each election cycle. Sun and palm are busying documenting each other’s overreach and excesses to play to the common stockholders as to why they should be thrown out, replaced, or retained with another mandate.
It should be noted that a great number of the 2.6 million common stockholders who vote do not read too well as to what is going on in their corporation and get swayed one way or the other when the time comes to choose a new leadership. "They would steal from you and rob you blind when elected." "They would take your land from you and imprison you." "They would beat you and lock you up". "They would harass you and don’t care about you if you allow them to take leadership". These are just some of the slogans and messages you hear while this intermittent squabble rises up to a crescendo during active campaigning.
Preferred stockholders hedge their bets (playing it safe) and bankroll both sun and palm so that their juicy contracts (and influence) would not be reviewed and revised if they happen to back the wrong guy. The importance of big money by outside players and investors in politics and deals during election time including abuse of power and official violence, would be explored in greater detail as we document this corporation named Sierra Leone.
The corporation is increasingly swamped with patronage (who knows you), corruption, nepotism, and influence-peddling becomes the order of business. Greed, the lustful desire for bribe, illegal gains and possession becomes rampant. High authority in the corporation ruthlessly uses its power and those in the knowhow ravenously use their connections. Who you know determines the position you get and the need for powerful surrogates becomes more important than experience or educational competence. Only the strong unaffiliated survive through persistence, intuition, cunningness, and sometimes through flashes of brilliance. Bridging the egos, mentality, insecurity, biases and the attitudes of some of the sun and palm constituents require a Sisyphean task effort. Dichotomously, sun and palm would continue to dislike and distrust each other and continue to fool some of their hungry (as in hunger) constituents that their banner is still better than the other guy in the corporation no matter what!
Some of the common stockholders got opportunities to travel overseas and study to become savvy professionals in different fields. Their moral, technical, and financial supports become critical to the corporation back home and most of them can no longer support preferential treatment in the awarding of contracts geared more towards protecting the speculative investor rather than the true interest of the voting common stockholders in the corporation.
The second part of our series would be published next week. Here is food for thought before we end this part. “The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is not enough of everything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics” – Thomas Sowell. Economist. See you soon.
The author is a member of the Ohio Chapter of the All People’s Congress party who is now based in Lungi, northern Sierra Leone. His email is <sesaymajeed@gmail.com> and his telephone is 088-222-901.
(C) Politico 04/03/14
