By Isaac Massaquoi
Let’s imagine that today’s date is November 17 2012 and you’ve just bought a copy of Politico newspaper. You will probably be reading while standing in one of the long queues that would have formed outside polling stations all over the country with people waiting to cast their votes. Counting from today we have only one hundred days left. So it is pretty close, isn’t it? On November 17 you will be making a very important decision that we have often treated with levity.
In America they have a tradition by which they start making up their minds about the effectiveness of a new government after the first one hundred days in office. And they take it seriously. In this write-up I am attempting to get you to start thinking about the issues you will consider in reaching that very important decision as to which party and candidates you will put into State House, Parliament and the local government administration.
I am putting on paper my concerns as an ordinary Sierra Leonean trying to make up my mind purely on the basis of the information available to me and my experiences living in Freetown but travelling to some of the remotest parts of this country at least twice every month working with colleagues living in those places, observing how those other Sierra Leoneans live and sometimes asking them many questions. I have written a lot about those issues in this column so you will probably notice that for this special edition I am basically consolidating those points so that you can lay hands on them easily.
Let’s face, it for Ernest Bai Koroma (APC) and Julius Maada Bio (SLPP), election 2012 is nothing more than getting hold of state power and with that control the people and their resources. In truth, they are the only parties that have any realistic chance of taking State House and winning any significant amount of seats in parliament. This is really not a difficult prediction to make but I remember running into problems with an overzealous politician from one of the smaller parties for making the same statement in 2007. He was really rude to me but that’s journalism’s equivalent of what people from other trades call occupational hazard. The young man joined the APC in early 2008 and is all over the place singing the praise not of the native land, but of Ernest Bai Koroma.
I have repeated the statement now but this time, I suspect it’s good news for him.
Then, as now, the real question facing our people remains how their vote will impact their lives. Will our people’s votes decide, for example whether they will have food on their table everyday in sufficient quantity and acceptable quality?
Will their vote keep their communities safe? Will it bring clean drinking water? Will it guarantee their children good health care and a decent education? Will it improve the roads? Will it bring their children who graduate from colleges the good jobs they deserve?
It’s not as if I am the only one asking these questions just now. Other colleagues in the media and civil society have been hammering away at them for many years. I beg to be challenged with hard evidence of how the lives of our people have improved since Siaka Stevens.
Let’s specifically look at perhaps one of the most serious problems confronting our nation going into the elections in November. Lawlessness has taken hold - the Rule of Law is in peril.
Imagine this: every time inter-secondary school athletics meets take place, the whole city is paralysed by sporadic acts of violence – motorists are compelled to wind up and petty traders either cover their wares and stand guard over them with clubs or run helter-skelter. Also on public holidays, mask devil parades authorised by the police with the open support of politicians looking to secure votes, become opportunities for petty thieves to distress people all over the place.
In recent times, some of our musicians have joined in. They mobilize gangs of supporters to attack others after bad-mouthing their colleagues in songs – the so-called ‘beefing.’ It’s beginning to look like every small gathering, be it for music, masked devil parade, politics or sport is an opportunity for violence and naked thieving and the police look powerless.
I have nothing against the police. In fact, I believe the police force has undergone enormous transformation considering what we used to know. And there exists a core of well-trained, disciplined and dedicated police officers up and down this country, who are professional and want to keep the nation safe. Their efforts are however being held back by an equally hard core criminal element that joined up only to facilitate criminality and despite all the talk about national development and human security, many communities are either totally unprotected or are inadequately catered for.
The police talk about Community Policing, what’ happening with that? They talk about Police Partnership Boards, how about that too? IG Munu should not tell me those structures are all in place for the sake of it. Why is it that we can’t sleep anymore? People are forming neighbourhood watch groups to police their communities. What is really happening?
As we talk about law and order, we must open up and raise a few more questions about the very make-up of the structures by which our state is governed. We cannot change that with the 2012 vote but let’s look for parties and candidates that have clear commitments to reforming the political governance of Sierra Leone to end the winner-takes-all system.
In the past and even as we speak many people and interests are locked out of the system just because they are not part of the ruling party or they belong to the opposition or indeed their political allegiances are undeclared.
Paramount chiefs who are not elected by universal adult suffrage are sitting in parliament influencing decisions always in favour of whatever government is in power. Some have abandoned their people and are sinking deeper and deeper into party political activities even against the interest of large sections of their people. This state of affairs should not be allowed to continue.
I think we should study various forms of proportional representation from Germany to New Zealand and Australia and evolve a Sierra Leonean system of proportional representation that creates the space for minority interests to be represented at the highest level of governance. We should not allow our frustrations with the flawed one that former President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah pushed through parliament to stop us from taking another look at that system that is working well in some of the great democracies of the world.
In the area of education everybody agrees that the number of people in the formal school system continues to grow steadily but we have many more children in particular outside the normal school system and there are many others that have dropped out of school and are roaming our streets aimlessly. Look at those seven year olds who are being used by their parents to facilitate begging in Central Freetown and other parts of the country and the many others that are in conflict with the law and are being processed through the criminal justice system. Why are we not focussing sufficient attention on the next generation?
A dangerous gap is opening up now between the elites of today and the children I am talking about now and I doubt they will be ready to occupy those important positions today’s middle class will soon vacate either as a consequence of disease and death or migration or old age. How can our vote change this situation? Isn’t that a serious enough issue to determine how you vote over party and tribal loyalties?
No doubt we have witnessed some positive movements in the healthcare delivery system. The Free Health Care project has done some good. I am sure more of the people covered by the programme are visiting real medical facilities now than ever before. The real impact of the project will be felt when clean statistical data are produced for the nation to see. I am not talking about politically-correct figures meant only to score political points.
I have to say however that the plan must be expanded to cover all Sierra Leoneans eventually. Those looking for our votes must also commit to putting a lot of money into family planning programmes to make them more widely available so that our sisters take good control of their reproductive health.
These days we hear a lot about how the nation’s infrastructure is being developed. And once again we have to admit that efforts are being made in that direction. But to usher us into the kind of infrastructural facilities that the country needs to accelerate socio-economic growth, there’s far too much left to be done. Just imagine how difficult it is to move from one point to the other in Freetown. Try going in or out of the east of Freetown at any time of the day and feel the pain of sitting in a gridlock. Freetown is just impossible. The main highway out into the provinces is almost cut into two now at Calaba Town and the old road, as we pointed out last week, is completely abandoned with all the hundreds of thousands of Sierra Leoneans who live there. We have to be clear that we are voting for candidates and parties that can deliver.
Our collective desire to portray ourselves as a civilized democracy will continue to carry a huge scar as long as the majority of our people live in such vicious and grinding poverty. Democracy is much more than going to the polls every five years. In fact, if things continue this way – when for many people there appears to be no connection between their vote and the policies and priorities their government pursues – the argument for Westminster-style democracy is seriously weakened at the core. It doesn’t seem much use talking about any other form of government but if democracy, with all the freedoms and promises of people power that come with it has failed to deliver in Sierra Leone, we have to ask whether some prudent social engineering wasn’t necessary yesterday so that the whole thing made sense to our people today.
(c) Politico 09/08/12
