By Umaru Fofana
At this time and on this occasion it is but fitting that I extend a congratulatory message to the re-elected president, Ernest Bai Koroma. There may have been some irregularities as has been admitted to by the National Electoral Commission leading to the nullification of results from some polling stations, but, to my mind, they were not enough to have changed the results. Koroma won fair and square. The irregularities, if they go beyond the ones the electoral commission
has acted on, would not have denied the president hitting the 55% threshold.
It is perhaps on this note that I would rather the main challenger, Brig Julius Maada Bio and his Sierra Leone People's Party conceded defeat and moved on. It is the only way to go. Any grievances can be channelled through the courts, however deem a view they and many others may hold about the judiciary.
It has to be said that the SLPP fought a very hard and good fight not least when one takes into account what the party had gone through following their defeat in 2007. Their party offices attacked in Freetown, not once, and in Bo.
Take, for example, in Kono where they won council seats at both the municipal and district council levels. They had performed very badly there in 2008 virtually winning nothing. But that is for another piece.
Perhaps the biggest attention to be drawn now is that of the re-elected president Ernest Bai Koroma. I have often wondered why a re-elected president should use any extra money of the state to organise a lavish inauguration ceremony. The tasks ahead are monumental. The expectations of the people who turned out in their record numbers, 87%, are tremendously high. The challenges are massive. No time to waste. No resources to waste.
Often presidents serving their final terms are easy to become lame duck.The notion that they will no longer face the electorate sends them into laziness and they become cavalier. This is one thing that sometimes sets up a party against itself. There are members and supporters who follow an individual leader who, once the leader's tenure ends, their future survival in the party is over or threatened at the very least. At this stage internal party wrangling comes to the fore. Party members start fighting each other. Implosion becomes inevitable. And the party loses power at the next polls.
The All People's Congress have made significant gains from their win in 2007. They gained one seat in Kailahun and added six seats to the paltry one they had won five years earlier and took back the one seat the SLPP had in Kambia and the other in Koinadugu. And arguably most significantly President Koroma avoided a run-off and won by a huge margin, almost 59%. This is a feat.
But before that makes any APC official or member or supporter feel arrogant, they should perhaps be reminded of 2002. In that time, incumbent president Ahmad Tejan Kabbah won 70.5% of the popular votes while his party dominated parliament winning 83 of the 112 seats while the APC had 27 and the Peace and Liberation Party, 2.
The SLPP also won all local councils barring Bombali and Port Loko districts. Five years later, in 2007, their collapse was far more spectacular than their rise was meteoric. In just five years, I repeat.
Now if President Koroma must avoid this for his party, he must not wait until the eve of the next elections which will almost certainly take place in 2018. That would mean doing things that may make his political epitaph written in Greek which very few understand here, and deny him the Mo Ibrahim award which, as things stand, he is at poll's position to win. Looking around for now, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf may be his only serious contender as they will both be leaving within the same three-year span as the award specifies.
Now to avoid disqualifying himself, which will happen if he is deemed to have done anything untoward in the 2018 elections, he should not only work hard now to deliver on infrastructure, which all need, he should also work on governance and justice issues.
President Koroma should not allow himself, again, to be held hostage by a small group of self-seeking people among them some journalists and politicians, who feel they must determine his every twist and turn. A politician, they say, thinks about the next election, while a statesman thinks about the next generation. That should be at the core of his desire – his bull's eye they say.
It is obvious, perhaps natural, that everyone who contributed in any way towards the president's victory is yearning for their pound of flesh. They are determined to get it so much so that any attempt by him to have a more serious and an all-embracing cabinet than the one he has struggled with in the last five years will be resisted. The president must resist that resistance.
The president's cabinet must not only show a national character but should also be trimmed down considerably. It is to be expected that those who helped in any way whatsoever in his victory want to be rewarded with ministerial positions and other lucrative positions and contracts. This would mean too many ministries and too many unnecessary deputy ministers and more commissioners. We do not need that!
Slash a number of deputy ministers to not more than four. Ministries that have a strong civil service department need not be given deputies. Take tourism, for example, where the tourist board has proved to be far more efficient and effective than the rest of the ministry. Just a minister suffices.
Who knows any deputy ministers outside the ministries of information, finance, education and local government? Not many. Sports with all its departmental heads does not need a deputy. Health with all those technocrats does not need a deputy. And the list goes on and on and on. The resources spent on running those deputy ministerial positions per month can go a long way in righting many wrongs in our country.
The president should think country, not APC, in setting up his cabinet. It is not the vogues in advance democracies for a president or prime minister to be changing ministers like he does his hair. It is a fact that either the president's judgement was poor or he listened to to many voices in appointing minister in his first five years. He ended up changing too many of them either through sacking or transfers. Flawed judgement of their character made worse by a poor
parliamentary vetting process. There is no second chance for a second impression. I will return with some prescriptions on Tuesday.
Break a leg, Mr President. The country is still in your hands for another five years. If you don’t allow it to break, there will be no need to fix it.
© Politico 29/11/2012
