Culled from Pambazuka
President Koroma is expected to win a second term in next month's elections, but not
because he has transformed the country; he has deployed clever
tactics. The legacies of identity politics, violence, corruption,
poverty and inequality remain.
In
the late 1980s, a common joke told on the streets of Freetown was:
‘What did Sierra Leoneans read by before they had candles? …
Electricity!’ By then, life expectancy in Sierra Leone was one of
the lowest in the world. Infant mortality was amongst the highest.
The literacy rate was just 15 percent. Since 1978, the country had
been a one-party state. The effects of a collapse in world prices for
Sierra Leone’s exports were compounded by decades of economic
mismanagement and endemic corruption.
When Albert Margai left
office in 1967, after three years as prime minister, he was worth an
estimated US$250 million – despite receiving an annual salary of
just US$4,000. In 1985, when President Siaka Stevens stood down, he
is said to have amassed a fortune of US$500 million. The Bank of
Sierra Leone, in contrast, held US$196,000 in its foreign reserve
accounts. Salaries of lower level public officials went unpaid.
Hospitals, schools and roads fell into disrepair. In 1991, the United
Nations ranked Sierra Leone last of 160 countries in its Human
Development Index. The country was taking its final steps towards
war.
On the eve of the November 2012 presidential,
parliamentary and local council elections, Sierra Leone is often
depicted as a country unrecognisable from a quarter of a century ago.
Since the civil war officially ended in 2002, consecutive national
elections have been won by different parties. When Ernest Bai Koroma
and his All People’s Congress (APC) party were elected in 2007, the
incumbent Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) accepted defeat –
albeit reluctantly. In 2005, the United Nations’ largest deployment
of peacekeepers – numbering 17,500 at its peak – was withdrawn.
In 2012, Sierra Leone committed 850 peacekeepers to the African Union
Mission in Somalia (AMIS). International hotel chains Radisson and
Hilton Worldwide have signed agreements to open outlets in 2013 and
2014 respectively. Free health care for pregnant women, nursing
mothers and children under five was introduced in April 2010.
According to some estimates, Sierra Leone’s economy will grow by 34
percent in 2012 due, in large part, to the onset of iron ore
exports.
The achievement of voting the opposition to power in
2007 – an infrequent occurrence in Africa – was tarnished by
virulent accusations of fraud and manipulation. The decision by the
National Electoral Commission (NEC) to nullify votes cast at polling
stations with over 100 percent voter turn-out provoked outrage from
the incumbent party. Of the 477 invalidated polling stations, 426
were in electoral strongholds of the SLPP. The party accused the
NEC’s Chief Commissioner, Christiana Thorpe, and the international
community of connivance in an orchestrated scheme for regime change.
The NEC maintained that, in the absence of a provision in the
electoral law specifying the body mandated to annul votes in
instances of unambiguous electoral malfeasance, it had the de facto
right – and responsibility – to do so. It also insisted that the
annulled votes would not have affected the final outcome of the
election. The SLPP countered that only the Supreme Court has the
authority to cancel votes.
For the 2012 elections, the
principal way the NEC has sought to mitigate electoral fraud is by
implementing a system of biometric voter registration. ‘Credible
elections start with credible voter registration’, remarked
Christiana Thorpe during a presentation at Africa Research Institute
in London in July 2011. Rather than manually registering voters
before each election, biometrics enable creation of a permanent
electronic register which can be updated as new voters become
eligible or existing ones die. The system captures unique data –
thumb prints and facial features – in addition to personal details,
and can identify whether someone has registered more than once by
centrally matching thumb prints. The NEC’s determination to improve
the integrity and transparency of the electoral process is
laudable.
The shortcoming of biometric technology is that it
counters the symptoms – not the causes – of electoral fraud.
Biometrics cannot detect whether a registrant is underage, or
determine an individual’s nationality. There is also no evidence of
a deliberate strategy by any political party to rig elections through
multiple registrations. All previous electoral registers have
contained names of the deceased, the underage and foreign nationals –
but the most significant type of electoral misdemeanour has been
physical stuffing of ballots and false recording of results by
temporary election workers. Both parties, when in power, have used
their position to fund political campaigns and buy voters. This
practice remains widespread. Political parties continue to organise
and condone the intimidation of voters, often perpetrated by their
youth wings. Biometric technology offers little scope to tackle these
transgressions. Elections are more than just a technical
exercise.
For many, elections – and the preceding campaigns
– provide the true measure of how Sierra Leone has progressed. As
yet the fundamental character of political competition in Sierra
Leone has not been altered. Identity, not ideology or policy, remains
the paramount factor. Ethnic and regional voting blocs – sustained
by entrenched patronage networks and corruption – are as rigid as
ever. The APC draws majority support from the Temne, Limba and other
northern tribes, and Krios of the Western Area, while the SLPP are
favoured by the Mende and tribes of the south-east. Elections are
regarded as ‘winner takes all’ contests with defeat entailing
exclusion and disadvantage for the losers, and their regions.
The
past is still utilised in pursuit of political advantage. Shortly
after Julius Maada Bio was elected leader of the SLPP in July 2011,
there were renewed calls for an inquest into the December 1992
executions of 26 people suspected of plotting to overthrow the
government. The extra-judicial executions – by firing squad –
were ordered by the National Provisional Ruling Council (NPRC), which
had itself seized power by force in April 1992. Britain promptly
suspended aid to Sierra Leone. Maada Bio, one of the chief architects
of the NPRC coup, was heavily implicated in the executions. In
January 1996, Maada Bio ousted NPRC leader Valentine Strasser and for
a short time was head of state. With former members of the NPRC junta
now prominent within the SLPP, the calls for an inquest were viewed
as brazen political manoeuvring by Koroma and the APC.
In
2011, when Michael von der Schulenburg, then Executive Representative
of the UN Secretary-General in Sierra Leone, criticised the proposed
inquest, relations with President Koroma soured. In 2012, in a leaked
UN document, Schulenburg noted ‘there can be little doubt that the
decision of the President to force my early departure will be seen –
rightly or wrongly – by virtually every Sierra Leonean as an effort
to remove a potential obstacle to his re-election and as an opening
the door to manipulating the election outcome in his
favour’.
Political parties still use violent means to
achieve political goals. Election campaigns for the 2007 elections
were tarnished by clashes organised by the upper reaches of the APC
and SLPP. A return to war was never probable, but President Ahmed
Tejan Kabbah threatened to suspend the vote and impose a state of
emergency. On 9 September 2011, during a ‘thank you tour’ to SLPP
supporters, Julius Maada Bio’s convoy was pelted with rocks by mobs
of APC supporters in the southern city of Bo. Maada Bio required
stitches to the head.
SLPP mobs retaliated by setting fire to
the APC district office and residential properties. A public enquiry
concluded that the violence was both premeditated and orchestrated by
elites of both parties. The government’s recent purchase of US$4.5
million of predominantly military grade weapons caused a public
outcry due to suggestions that they were intended for the Operational
Support Division (OSD) of the police – a force which within living
memory had been used by President Siaka Stevens as a personal
paramilitary unit. After much public – and international –
pressure, the government transferred the weapons to the army for use
by Sierra Leonean peacekeepers in Somalia.
Sierra Leone
remains beset with privation that pre-dates the civil war. Koroma’s
insistence that ‘attitude is everything’ – a slogan
ubiquitously plastered across billboards in the capital – offers
little solace to Sierra Leoneans who were promised a ‘peace
dividend’. In reality, many people find themselves in a similar
financial predicament to that of pre-war days. Hype regarding the
country’s economic potential and the unprecedented scale of
investment in the mining sector have raised expectations – but
offered few discernible benefits to ordinary Sierra Leoneans. The
purchasing power of low income earners has halved since 2007. Food
prices have spiraled. A cholera epidemic concentrated in the slums of
Freetown had killed 392 residents by September 2012. Youth
unemployment remains endemic.
Sierra Leone’s 2012 elections
are unlikely to reveal anything new about the country and its
politics. President Koroma is expected to win a second term, but not
because he has transformed the country’s economy. The incumbent has
deployed clever tactics, co-opting proxy parties – including the
Revolutionary United Front Party – to carry out political dirty
work, and enticing high profile SLPP politicians to defect, most
notably veteran Tom Nyuma formerly of the NPRC. The contest is
proving harder fought than Koroma – and many in the international
community – anticipated. Efforts to dismiss Maada Bio as a relic of
Sierra Leone’s authoritarian past have met with resistance due to
his popularity amongst ‘youth’ and the military. But despite his
charismatic appeal, many in the country consider Maada Bio to have
more style than substance.
In Sierra Leone, the process of
building a modern democratic state after a decade of war has been
heavily contested. Important progress has been made, particularly in
the area of electoral management. But legacies of identity politics,
violence, corruption and inequality have been – and will continue
to be – harder to overcome. While the economy has grown, it is
structurally little different to its pre-war incarnation. The notion
that African countries like Sierra Leone should pursue a model of
‘authoritarian developmentalism’ in order to hasten wealth and
job creation is fanciful. Sierra Leone’s government budget is
minuscule, about US$500 million per annum, most of which is from
donors who insist on democratic and liberal economic reforms in
exchange. The government is not in a position to adopt political and
economic policies that will inevitably be unpopular with donors. Nor
does it possess the human capital or institutions to successfully
implement such measures.
What is certain is that any further
consolidation of democratic reforms will be intimately tied up with
the state of the country’s economy. But the imperatives of how to
create employment and distribute wealth more equitably have been
keenly avoided by Sierra Leone’s political class.
Culled
from PAMBAZUKA NEWS
NOTE:
We forwarded this article to a government official, last week, asking
for a rejoinder before we would publish. We still await their
response. Once we get it we will bring it to you.
