By Umaru Fofana
Before I get down to brass task may I wish you a very Happy New Year and hope and pray that 2013 be the best yet for you. Already it has started on a very good footing for those who have been nominated to serve us as ministers, while it has been not so good for those who have been shown the door.
In a style characteristic of him, President Ernest Bai Koroma announced his much awaited cabinet (reshuffle) over the weekend. As it happened during the last reshuffle last year, there was fevered speculation and conjecture that there would be an announcement on state radio and television around 10 PM on Friday. The waiting went on until around 02:00 a.m. or sometime thereabout between Friday and Saturday.
One good thing, if that is what it is, about the announcement is that it defied most of the rumours that had been swelling around. This is a very good tendency because it is good when a president is not that easily predictable with his appointments.
Apart from that the whole affair turned out to be anticlimactic and a damp squib. The cabinet was largely an old recipe into a new sauce with around 80% of the old ministers deemed ineffective, retained. The only new comers as full cabinet ministers are those of finance, health, local government and trade and industry. Women representation is unimpressive with only two so far. Let us hope that at least two of the remaining four will go to women.
The cabinet has been further enlarged, unnecessarily I dare say, at a time when we need a smaller and more effective government to save cost and ensure efficiency and easier hands-on supervision.
It is interesting that for six weeks – since his re-election – President Koroma had been struggling to put his new cabinet together. At least that was the impression. The delay left the impression that he wanted to do something very dramatic. It turned out to be, very largely, a soap opera. His most decisive actions were his most disastrous – sacking Ibrahim Ben Kargbo as minister of information and retaining Dr Minkailu Bah as his minister of education.
To have sacked Ibrahim Ben Kargbo as Minister of Information was like the president undoing himself. Unless the decision was informed by a huge national interest override, in which case the people have a right to know, sacking IB Kargbo was ill-advised. I am not questioning the president’s prerogative to hire and fire. He has that. But I think the people deserve to know the reasons for dismissals or questionable transfers if dictatorship is not to be nurtured.
In IB’s place is Alpha Kanu. Like IB, Alpha Kanu is very eloquent and a master of the Queen’s language. The first time I heard him on a podium, it was in parliament, and he almost knocked me off my feet with his eloquence. He’s got the gift of the garb. But he lacks any journalistic or public relations experience outside politics – professionally or academically – to be an effective information minister. If you are wondering, then cast your mind back on Professor Septimus Kaikai and how his eloquence alone was used as the only qualification to make him Minister of Information under President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah. It was a disaster.
And the manner of Alpha Kanu’s earlier transfer from the ministry of mineral resources to a ministry that had never existed outside State House and lacked even an office space, remains a concern to any progressive Sierra Leonean. Equally concerning is that as things stand, there is no line of demarcation between Mr Kanu as spokesman of the All People’s Congress party, and Mr Kanu as spokesman of the government of Sierra Leone. The least he could do now is to resign as APC Publicity Secretary. And even there he has a huge task to change public perception of him and his face from that of a political party and the state. It will take a long time to see him as a government spokesman as opposed to a party one. If for some reason IB Kargbo deserved to be sacked, to my mind, it would have done the government a lot of good to have elevated his deputy, Sheka Tarawallie. As Press Secretary, Shekito, as he is fondly called, redefined that office. And as deputy information minister he gave his boss reasons to sleep unlike the two who had held the position before him. He would have needed less work to shape up, especially so because of his media background. His transfer to the ministry of internal affairs might just prove a waste of his intellect. And with a boss like JB Dauda who is a has-been and has little or nothing left in him to offer as policy head and I wonder why he has even been reappointed, Shekito may just have been given a poisoned chalice. Perhaps the appointment or transfer that is most insulting to Sierra Leoneans is that of the former Minister of Internal Affairs, Musa Tarawallie. This is a man whom a commission of inquiry implicated in political violence and recommended that he be not allowed to hold any public office for years. A Government White Paper that accompanied the report pledged government’s commitment to respecting that particular recommendation in due course, in so far as it had to do with removing him as a cabinet minister.
If time is still not due, then it never will. As if to tell us all to go hang, he has now been transferred to the Ministry of Lands, Country Planning and the Environment. President Koroma’s desire for a large government is underscored by his decision to split the ministry of energy and water resources. To assign a whole lot of staff and minister and deputy minister begs many questions. The deputy minister under the previous arrangement should simply have been asked by his boss to dedicate himself to water resources, with intermittent supervision.
But more important is the fact that the nomination of Minister of Water Resources, Momodu Maligie, goes against the spirit, even if not the letter, of the 1991 constitution. Section 56/2/b of the 1991 constitution reads: “A person shall not be appointed a minister or deputy minister … unless he has not contested and lost as a candidate in the general election immediately preceding his nomination for appointment”. Mr Maligie contested for District Council Chairmanship in the November elections. A general election, according to the elections act, is restricted to parliamentary elections. So the letter of the law does not bar him. But the spirit of section 56/2/b was to guard against failed candidates being compensated with ministerial appointments. In this regard, Maligie is simply being compensated after losing the council election.
Diana Konomanyi has been nominated for Minister of Local Government. In a cabinet that has only two women, so far, it will be hard on her and the women of Sierra Leone to be criticised and sent to the gallows. But her record as Chairman of the Kono District Council leaves not much to be desired. She did not live up. She was, among other things, accused by her councillors of inertia and absenteeism from council meetings sometimes under “flimsy excuses” and sometimes none at all. But she is a strong APC woman. No doubt about that. She braved it for the party in the district when most scorned it.
President Koroma may just have displayed his reconciliatory skills by appointing Ms Konomanyi after retaining his vice president amid fevered and all-round controversy. These two – the VP and Ms Konomanyi – have not seen eyeball-to-eyeball in recent times. In fact Diana clearly supported a rival candidate for president Koroma’s running mate. Something that led to violent clashes in Kono district. Whether the decision to make them both work in cabinet is to ease off the pressure, is open to conjecture.
But also many of the Kono chiefs are not friends with Ms Konomanyi either. As local government chief she has them to contend with. And strangely that is her home.
Dr Sam Sesay’s retention as agriculture minister is an excellent decision. I have said times without number that this man was the unsung efficiency in President Koroma’s cabinet the last time round. His knowledge of the goings-on in his ministry is amazing. His mastery of all things agric is breathless. His honesty to himself is unbelievable. That was top notch!
For today I will end with the president’s decision to retain perhaps his most unpopular minister. As education minister, Dr Minkailu Bah has presided over the erosion and near demise of the sector. Pupils have done very badly in schools under him. University lecturers and teachers have been on strike too frequently under him. For the first time in peace time Sierra Leone, Fourah Bay College has wasted a whole semester after delaying by several weeks in the previous year, owing to a deluge of issues that left addressed let alone redressed by Dr Bah.
To be continued.
(C) Politico 10/01/13
