By Isaac Massaquoi
By the end of this week more than half of the former members of the parliament dissolved by President Ernest Bai Koroma on Tuesday would have realised how nothing lasts forever. The oldest member of that house came to Tower Hill in 1982 and through manoeuvrings like switching parties here and there he managed to stay on all this while. I was recently in his constituency in Kambia on some private business and I heard interesting stories about his stewardship.
I am not sure any Sierra Leonean will miss this parliament. Not for the quality of the debates, not for their love of country, not for their sense of duty and certainly not for their modesty.
I spent many years covering parliament for the then SLBS. It wasn’t an easy experience especially if you had to either walk or pay your way to Tower Hill with your cameraman, wait for many hours in the press gallery for the MPs to start work (which they never did on time) only to be told by particularly those MPs who were normally completely out of their depth, that your report was biased in favour of the opposition.
Sometimes without bothering to understand the realities on the ground at broadcasting house, at New England, some MPs would stand up in the House under the widely misused Standing Order 23 and complain that the camera wasn’t well focussed on them in the tv report. For people like those, appearing good on TV is the most important issue in a country where thousands are dying of poverty and disease.
I have a little pamphlet produced by the National Democratic Institute which has a biographical data on all the current, sorry former, MPs. I don’t always like to make too much fuss about academic qualifications because I think they represent solid personal achievements that do not necessarily matter to everyone but if you are going to be representing people in a place like parliament, you have to be totally honest about your academic qualification.
One former MP gave his qualification as BA Qualif. In the old system at Fourah Bay College, BA Qualif simply meant the student was in the third or qualifying year of the BA program. In the case of this MP it may well be that he dropped out of the course for one reason or the other in the third year. Does he have any academic qualification apart from his school certificate
result?
You see, I know of a case where a man who was nominated for public office went to parliament and made false declarations about his academic qualifications. Parliament failed to investigate, which was very easy to do. They approved the man.
Somehow ruling party MPs who normally dominate the Committee on Appointments feel they must approve all presidential nominees. They think it’s an abomination for them to go back to the president and say “we don’t think this is the best Sierra Leonean you can find for this job.” In fact the whole committee system has to be completely overhauled so that the real job of providing oversight of the activities of government is not compromised on the altar of pecuniary gains.
When Sierra Leoneans heard the loud cries from the former MPs over some of them being in Oversight Committees not of their preference, we went home asking what the fuss was about. The former MPs preferred to be on committees covering, let’s say big budget ministries, like trade, agriculture, mining, transport and health. Less favoured ministries are labour, tourism (whose describes herself as “useless”) and sports where the minister is fighting one battle after the other with the Football Association and everyone else in sports but himself.
So labour which should take care of the welfare of the nation’s workforce is not important? Transport is important because they have some oversight coverage over the Queen Elizabeth II quay eventhough they can’t get commuter vehicles from Waterloo to stop increasing the burden on the people by truncating their journeys into three and charging for each separately.
In 1996, together with other journalists, I accompanied the Parliamentary Committee on transport on a visit to the quay. We arrived at lunch time. I was surprised to see a long table well
laid-out with lots of food and drink. I had asked my cameraman to keep his tape rolling after his establishing shots and capture the moment the General Manager came down to receive the leader of the committee so we could try and make sense of the body language.
In the weeks preceding our visit, newspapers were running stories about corruption at the ports and the wickedness of the foreign company that was executing a management contract there at the time. To my surprise we went straight to the dining hall and soon all fifteen MPs and about five journalists quickly tucked in. While we ate, the General Manager’s personal assistant announced that his boss would see us after the lunch.
Our tour of the compound lasted less than an hour and the journalists asked more questions than the MPs who initiated the trip in the first place. On our return to the Manager’s office, all the MPs went in and asked us to stay out. We were under no illusions about what was actually taking place there.
The personal assistant came out with white envelops and handed one each to ever journalist.
As soon as we came out of the port, I asked the leader of our delegation, on camera, for his assessment of what he’d seen. The man is also dead now but I couldn’t believe how far he’d
travelled from his fiery parliamentary speeches about the “suffering of Sierra Leonean workers at the ports and the corruption plaguing the place.” As far back as 1996, I had understood why MPs are concerned about which oversight committee to belong to.
The outgoing parliament threw modesty completely out of the window. Why was it necessary to have special vehicle license plates? I have heard some of the arguments but I just don’t get it. This was solely done, to make themselves animals of higher quality to the rest of mankind.
We elected a group of people to watch over our interest in parliament collectively. But what did they do? They went into parliament and continued to divide the nation along lines of RED, GREEN and ORANGE. Why was it necessary to create that spectacle of wearing such bright party colours inside the nation’s parliament? I have watched many parliaments on TV and I have never seen such a thing in my life. I hope people now understand why it’s difficult to get a truly national debate in that house.
Before the start of parliamentary business the clerk always reads out a prayer. Let’s just read the following line: “We thy unworthy servants gathered here...do most humbly beseech thee to send down thy heavenly wisdom from above to guide us in all our deliberations, laying aside all private interests and personal affections, prejudices, that the outcome of all our counsels may be to the glory of thy blessed name.” Our former MPs were busy with “personal interests” and I am not sure the outcome of all their deliberations were to the glory of God. How is it possible to pass nine complex oil agreements in half an hour on the last day of parliament? Why won’t the former MPs touch the FOI bill with a barge pole?
Let’s me make this point: Boycotting parliament is a strategy opposition parties all over the world use to call attention to issues of serious concern especially when they feel the majority is intent on not allowing them to have their say. But when MPs boycott at the slightest provocation, serious questions must be asked about the quality of the representation the opposition provided. Some of the contributions I saw on TV were shallow and un-researched Pre-legislative meetings were turned into extra-ordinary events where MPs collected
per-diems. I attended at least four of such session and to be honest I wasn’t impressed with the way business was conducted. In the name of undertones, the meetings were disrupted by partisan sniping and unnecessary ins and outs. I am also not sure I saw any serious independent experts on any of the subjects called in to help our MPs understand some of the complex issues they legislated on.
One thing MPs like is when they travel to meetings of talk shops like the ECOWAS and Pan-African Parliaments. And indeed the Commonwealth Parliaments meeting. The late SB Marah used such opportunities as baits to control some of the most powerful debaters on the PDP side of the 1996 parliament.
The signals we are getting from talking to people on the ground in the constituencies are clear: many big names will fall at their party’s primaries. I am surprised that some are still in the race wanting to return to Tower Hill.
Apart from the big so-called constituency facilitation fees the MPs collected, we are now hearing that they are all in line to receive ex-gratia payments running into tens of millions of leones. Now we understand why the stakes are so high. They worked out a fantastic welfare package for themselves, leaving the rest of the people feeding off scraps.
I wonder what constituency facilitation really means. Look at how our people live in places like Mabela and tell me their MP received such a fee at any time in the last five years. Can somebody please tell me what constituency facilitation means?
The truth is, people are getting fed up with the way elected officials are behaving themselves in government. There is no serious alternative to democracy but if in Sierra Leone democracy means our leaders enjoying wealth at the expense of our people who are then left to die of easily preventable diseases like cholera and are made to settle every little argument by splashing themselves with faeces, then we might as well call in the Greeks to re-define the thing all over again.
