By Umaru Fofana
I hate criticising the National Electoral Commission because already the nature of what they do, like what we journalists do, is enough to attract a deluge of lambasting especially from politicians. One of the reasons James Jonah succeeded in holding elections here in 1996, even if not the most perfect of polls, was because the media was on his side even when a lot of the elements within the military junta then could not be said to have been supportive of him.
Besides, I like and respect – a great deal – the head of NEC Christiana Thorpe. I think she is very tenacious, largely honest and fairly impartial. But she sometimes tends to act without being consultative and can be dogged even where being otherwise does not take anything from her or from the success of her entreprise.
When I was students’ union president at Fourah Bay College in 1995, college fees were raised to the rooftops. I do not want to mention it now because it may sound like pittance even if it was a fortune then. After several attempts to persuade government to see the need to reverse the fees to the previous year’s, I lost patience with Christiana Thorpe who was then minister of education – not because the fees were not reduced – and decided to take the student population of around 1,000 to her office.
My executive wanted her to come down from her office to address the student body so they would not think we had sold them out. Ms Thorpe refused to budge. After laying siege around her office for hours - keeping vigil there actually - then came Tom Nyuma who was a war hero and highly respected by the students at the time. But he lacked formality. So the services of the cool and calm Dr Akim Gibril who was then Chief Secretary of State showed up. Only his intervention could persuade Thorpe to come down and address us. That, to be honest, was unnecessary and for which she took a flack.
But I have to admit that I respected her tenacity in 2007 when she disregarded the fact that her partner was a Member of Parliament of the then ruling SLPP party and chose to crown the opposition candidate as the winner.
However I have to disagree – very strongly too – with the National Electoral Commission’s decision last week to unilaterally increase nomination fees for November’s elections by one million percent. This is not only unprecedented anywhere in the world it is also a recipe to compromise an already corrupt political system which lacks any effective machinery to check campaign funding and rampant bribery in its body politic.
You need justification? Hell no! You probably only want it. So here we go:
After the elections of 2007 the Political Parties Registration Commission (PPRC) in collaboration with the National Democratic Institute attempted to do an audit of the campaign expenses of the political parties that had contested. The figures released by the parties and the sources of such funds, left a whole lot to be desired. It was particularly murky for the erstwhile ruling SLPP party. The same situation obtains at present with the ruling APC party. And you want to know why? The parties raise funds illegally and accept money from retrogressive sources who buy them t pay back with the people’s resources should they win. NEC skyrocketed fee can only worsen this. And we will see more corrupt mining lease agreements and other concessions at the expense of the nation. Contrary to the lines of one of the poems of Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka which says “the ripest fruit is the saddest”, in Sierra Leonean politics the ripest fruit is the happiest.
How can NEC justify this: presidential candidates who paid Le 1 million as nomination fee in 2007 are to now part with Le 100 Million, while parliamentary candidates who paid Le 250,000 are to cough up Le 25 Million. And this includes Paramount Chief MPs, who, very obviously, will have to demand their nomination fees and more from their poor and impoverished subjects who are already overburdened.
The argument that this is a way of taking the expenses from the taxpayer to the candidate is as warped as it is untenable as postulated above. I do not think any of those running for parliament can afford to part with le 25 million as candidate fee without leaving a gaping hole in their bank account. And here is how that gaping hole is expected to be refilled:
Such a candidate, if he wins, will have to rely on corporate assistance – a euphemism for bribes from corporate institutions – to get back on his feet. In this society, voters, unless where they have direct personal concessionary interests afterward, do not fund the campaign of a candidate however well-meaning such a candidate may be. It is the reverse...voters expect to be cooked for, given money to attend to their personal businesses, and have their financial problems solved by the candidate they “support”.
There is no gainsaying that it is the business of Government to fund the country’s elections. Whatever donors do is complimentary, may be supplementary. In fact this issue of the budget of our election does not stop to amaze me. If the cost of our elections shoots up in Leone terms that is easy to understand in that the value of our currency keeps tumbling down. But when it increases so astronomically in US dollar terms it needs explaining by NEC beyond the figures pasted on their strategic plan.
This is not the first time we are holding elections in recent times. If our elections had cost colossal amounts in 1996 I would have understood because they were the first time in a long time that we were holding any credible polls. But since then we have held nationwide elections every two years – in 2002, 2004, 2007 and 2008. So why should these elections cost us such huge amounts that the NEC boss thinks candidates must finance it no matter where they get the money from?
In a publication, “Money In Politics: A study of party financing practices in 22 countries” by the National Democratic Institute, it is established that “Corruption related to political party funding poses one of the greatest threats to democratic and economic development worldwide. Corrupt election finance practices compromise the greatest asset of democracy: the faith and support of ordinary citizens in the political system.”
This is a worrying trend in our country today. Our politics is being hijacked from the ordinary people by corporate institutions and multinationals led by our politicians and in cahoots with some players in the media deliberately because of selfish reasons or inadvertently because of naivety. Or maybe because of both.
Opaque financing of political parties or candidates leads to undemocratic and anti-people decision-making. Consequently the participation of the masses in the country’s body politic is discouraged as cynicism about the prospects for reform takes centre stage.
The problem with money in politics, it is said, is not so much the amount that is spent on campaigns as it is who pays for them, what they get in return, and how that affects public policy and spending priorities.
I hope Christiana Thorpe and her team at the NEC will not prove unnecessarily stubborn and she proved in that students strike in 1995 and decide to wait until the international community tells her what to do. If things get awry, they will leave us here and come back again to make more money. Again let government pay the Le 88 Billion – after all I understand they have paid half that amount and have not denied paying the rest. Please listen to common sense and don’t take our country’s politics from the palms of corrupt businesspeople to their pocket. We will all be doomed. Have I made myself clear, ma’am?
