By Isaac Massaquoi
Last Tuesday a close friend came to see us in the office and as typical of events in the last few months, started a discussion about the elections and their outcome and the messages that would represent for the future of Sierra Leone. Our friend loves good conversation; he enjoys disagreeing with people over things as mundane as what may have convinced the mercurial Roman Abramovich to hire the indecisive Benitez as Chelsea Manager. (By the way let nobody put a penny against any bet that says Benitez will be sacked by Christmas).
Anyway... On this visit, the friend asked this question: Is there an alternative to this kind of election we’ve just conducted to take some decisions about our leaders every five years? I wasn’t quite
ready for any long conversation on the day because I had some work to turn in on a tight deadline. It was production day and those who’ve seen newsrooms at work at a time like that can understand why someone once wrote the following words in a newsroom: “You don’t have to be crazy to work here, but it helps”. I refused to answer his question because I could easily have suggested
the Chinese system. It’s a system that is widely criticised as undemocratic but I would have argued that it’s working well for the people of China.
I used the last few words of his question to begin my attack. I asked him what he meant by “this kind of election”. He quickly went overdrive with his views about what kind of political systems Sierra Leone must adopt. I am still trying to locate his political ideology somewhere between what obtained in Uganda under the Movement System and Colonel Ghadaffi’s Socialist Jamahiriya.
I have been looking for any organisation that will give me figures to show how much money Sierra Leone lost throughout the campaign; how much airlines lost in the last three months; how much business confidence has been affected by all the push and pull and how long it will take for things to return to their positions.
All the anxiety created by this election was so unnecessarily hurtful to the nation’s economy and social cohesion that I am now beginning to understand what our friend meant by “this kind of election”.
On that same Tuesday morning I received a call from another friend who lives in the far east of the city who told me that shots had been fired at a vehicle apparently coming from Bo and had failed to stop at a police checkpoint. He told me police and soldiers were taking up positions in the Wellington area. After about ten minutes, somebody came to visit my colleague whose office is just next door. The visitor was breathless as he explained what, according to him, had happened. He said “a green jeep loaded with ammunition” had been intercepted by soldiers but the driver fled before he could be arrested. “This country is not safe”, he said. In a country so obsessed with colours, I hope you appreciate why this man took the trouble to attempt to be so “exact”. My colleague questioned him as if they were in front of microphones inside a radio studio with a large dose of journalistic cynicism. The visitor didn’t like my colleague’s doubts about the veracity of his information.
This man’s account of the event spread all over Freetown before I arrived at our office on Siaka Stevens Street in the heart of town. The place looked deserted at 3pm on a Tuesday afternoon. Shops around the PZ area were all closed with young men standing in small groups gossiping. It took several hours later before the police high command could go on radio to quash the rumours.
At the same time word had gone round that Christiana Thorpe would announce the final results of the elections at 7pm and that a curfew would be declared for the rest of the evening to forestall violence because of the result.
As I drove home from work, parts of Freetown were completed deserted. My mind went back to the day John Karefa Smart went on radio and announced that Nigerian troops on ECOMOG duties here were on the verge of launching “Operation Wild Chase” to drive Johnny Paul Koroma and his men from Freetown. Between the Vice President’s office and Rokel Secondary School, I saw about
three dozen well-armed soldiers moving in some kind of a battle formation. I even saw an anti-aircraft gun mounted at the back of a pickup truck. The usually bustling Model Junction was empty. The trauma of the war years was well and truly back on our streets.
Why, in God’s name are we doing this to our country? We are not the only country to conduct elections but it seems as if we do everything way over the top. We are hearing stories of neighbours attacking neighbours, groups of partisans standing in street corners harassing passers-by in clothes with certain colours. In remote places people are already taking the law into their hands. These are serious times in Sierra Leone and it requires tough action from the police and all political leaders to secure our civil liberties and general law and order.
In the first three months following the 2007 election the same overzealousness was reported all over the country and we are still living with the consequences. I came face to face with it in the town
of Boajibu a former prosperous mining town that lies about 24 miles off Blama junction on the Bo-Kenema highway. I was there as a consultant with a local NGO to train community people in doing
Participatory Video. PV, as we call it, is a technique by which local people with no TV production skills are taught how to use basic camcorders to tell their own stories. The idea is to eliminate
journalism that is constrained by economic considerations and political correctness that professionals engage in all the time, and get the story fresh from the people through their own lenses.
We arrived in the town in early evening hours and quickly did a round of meetings with the chief and her officials, youth leaders, political party representatives and religious leaders. They all gave us their blessings and welcomed the training program. While we were assembled for the start of the training, a tall man wearing a poor version of Levi's jeans and a Chinese Communist Party red shirt walked up to the high table from nowhere with the arrogance of a Roman Conqueror and asked everybody to disperse because, “ruling party officials in the town were not informed about the project”. He was a reasonably educated man and spoke only English. He told my local coordinator that times had changed in Sierra Leone because the new government was ready to “oversee all development programs”. He was attacked by mostly the women who told him he had “no business” interfering. The town is SLPP-dominated but with the change of government, the few people who kept faith with the APC in opposition and those who switched at the last minute were determined to make their presence felt.
We managed to get him out of the Court Barray but he was adamant that our training program must not go ahead. I explained to him that his party was represented at our planning meeting and that the only reason the youth leader was not part of the training was that he lost his mother overnight and that he came to see us at the residence of the Catholic priest in the town to inform us of the unfortunate incident. I told him that our program had nothing to do with partisan politics. Our man insisted we call off the meeting or he would inform the APC Regional Minister in Kenema of our “subversion”.
At that point I lost patience with him. I had a few hours of work to do and my British counterparts couldn’t understand what was going on. How could we allow this guy to derail our program? It was only when I threatened to call the APC National Secretary General Victor Foh that he relented and asked that we “resolve the issue amicably”.
As he left the Court Barray, he told me he was sorry but wanted to let “those arrogant people know their government is no longer in power”. This was my story from five years ago. I suspect other
people have theirs too.
This election has also tested our national institutions in a very serious way in the sense that they have been required to take difficult decisions and we know how they’ve performed. When US president Obama talked about “strong institutions” and not “strongmen”, we now get the feel of what he meant. Some of our institutions have performed badly while others have provided openings for Researchers to produce theses on how democratic Sierra Leone should insulate institutions and other arms of government from ruthless political manipulations.
I wrote not too long ago that the system of political representation in this country has failed as it continues to marginalise minority views and lead down the road to a one party state in which the winning party will actively encourage, bribe, bully or threaten opposition politicians to switch allegiances.
I don’t know what type of proportional representation system to use but I will ask that we call a national conference on this issue in the first quarter of 2013. It’s so urgent that the opportunity will
be lost if 2013 runs out without action.
All existing proportional representation systems, from New Zealand to Germany and Australia will be looked at with the idea of evolving a Sierra Leonean system that will give every Sierra Leonean a voice in the way their country is run. It’s not a popular position to canvass at this time but I am used to speaking up on such matters with the clear understanding that people will disagree with me and will do things to let me know that. They are welcome.
© Politico 27/11/2012
