News Story

By Prof. Kelfala M. Kallon, Colorado, USA. President Ernest Koroma’s self-evaluation of his performance during his first five months in office, which appeared in the March 5, 2008 issue of Awareness Times, would have been comical if his claims were not so insulting to our collective intelligence. For example, in spite of the economic hardships his government has wrought on the people of Sierra Leone, President Koroma claimed to have done much for the country during his five months in office. Particularly amazing and perhaps most galling was the President’s claim that “his All People’s Congress (APC) government has within five months succeeded in deepening the democratic process and unifying the country by effecting a smooth transition that has never happened in the history of Sierra Leone”.

In the United States, when the President gives an address about the state of the nation, the opposition is given an opportunity to respond. It is in this tradition that I shall respond to the President’s self-evaluation in a series of essays on his record. Because of the blatant preposterousness of the President’s claim that his administration has deepened democracy and fostered national unity in Sierra Leone, this first essay will critique President Koroma’s democratic credentials.

Democracy, as I understand it, requires not only “majority rule with due respect for the views of the minority” but also a heightened respect for the rule of law. Most importantly, democracy demands that each and every citizen enjoys the full protection of the laws of the land without regard to race, ethnicity, creed, and political affiliation. To wit, our Constitution recognizes and protects the fundamental human rights and freedoms of all Sierra Leoneans. And to emphasize these protections, it requires our president to swear an oath that he would discharge his duties “according to law, . . . preserve, support, uphold, maintain and defend the Constitution of the Republic of Sierra Leone as by law established,” and most importantly “do right to all manner of people according to law, without fear or favour, affection or ill-will.”

In my opinion, President Koroma started violating this oath the moment he became President of Sierra Leone. For instance, there was a criminal case against the President’s bodyguard, Leatherboot, for savagely beating up Tom Nyuma at the Country Side Hotel in Bo during the election campaign. Allegedly, the President’s brother also had a case to answer for some stolen Bumbuna cables. Rather than have these cases go through the proper judicial channels, both were quashed immediately after the President took the reins of power. (Additionally, Leatherboot was promptly absorbed into the Sierra Leone Police as a presidential bodyguard at lightening speed). Unless the President issued secret pardons to the accused persons in these cases, the swiftness with which these alleged criminal matters were disposed of leads to the obvious conclusion that His Excellency did not administer the laws of Sierra Leone without fear or favor in these instances.

Also, even as President Koroma was being sworn into office, his supporters were busy vandalizing the offices of the SLPP in broad daylight, and in full view of the police. When this became known to him, the President apologized to the SLPP and assured the party’s leadership that the law will bring the culprits to book. However, contrary to what one would expect from a President who has been rhetorically embellishing his democratic credentials, President Koroma has never publicly issued a strong condemnation of this wanton act of lawlessness and victimization of the SLPP. Instead, he has sat by idly while his supporters and lackeys have gone around the country wantonly intimidating and persecuting members of the SLPP and other innocent citizens like Pastor Cnteh with impunity. The recent case of his minister leading APC thugs to destroy the Bo SLPP Office and subsequently ordering the arrest of the Mayor of Bo are to date the most glaring demonstrations of the historical propensity of the APC for lawlessness and violence. Thus, when one peels the rhetorical chaffs off the President’s claim to love and respect democracy, all one is left with is a President who has overseen the reintroduction of the APC’s culture of violence and lack of respect for the rights of other Sierra Leoneans who disagree with them politically.

This lack of respect of the rule of law is not the exclusive preserve of only the President’s supporters. Indeed, even President Koroma has exhibited an utter disdain and disregard for the rule of law by illegally bludgeoning the erstwhile Governor of the Bank of Sierra Leone from office even though the Constitution granted the power to remove the latter to only a super-majority of the members of Parliament. When his minions in Parliament ratified this most egregiously offensive assault on the “separation of powers” in our Constitution, the President became emboldened enough to illegally remove other supporters of the SLPP from their respective positions without due regard to not only the constitutional rights of these individuals to legally earn their livelihood, but also the contractual obligations of the government to these Sierra Leoneans.

Given the history of the APC, the recent sacking of the erstwhile Chief Justice of the Supreme Court should warn all Sierra Leoneans that President Koroma is intent on applying to the Judiciary the same unconstitutional methods he has employed against other state functionaries that he perceives as SLPP members and/or sympathizers. As in the first coming of the APC, it should be now apparent to all who care about Sierra Leone being a land of laws not a land of strong men that President Koroma is dangerously reincarnating another “conclave” of APC judges whose primary loyalty would be to the President, not to the rule of law.

Another key pillar of democracy is respect for, and protection of, the people’s right to be informed, on the one hand, and their right to freely express their opinions, on the other hand. The perpetual harassment of the employees of the New People newspaper and now the editor and proprietress of Awareness Times, Dr. Sylvia Blyden, suggests that the President falls very short of what one would expect from a democrat.

On the issue of Dr. Blyden’s predicament particularly, I am amazed at the President’s claim that he neither knew about nor ordered her detention. Yet, I am sure that the President is aware of a State House press release which threatened to use the Public Order Act, 1965 against Dr. Blyden – which was essentially a threat to detain her without charge. And this is exactly what subsequently happened. Thus, unless President Koroma wants us to believe that he is so cocooned by the sycophants around him that he is oblivious to what is happening within even State House, no sensible person would believe that he knew nothing about Dr. Blyden’s detention, even if he did not authorize it. Indeed, if we accept the counter proposition that the President is really unaware of what is going on in State House, we should then justifiably conclude that he has sub-contracted the presidency to the caboodle around him. Because President Koroma is much too intelligent to be so stage-managed, the only sensible conclusion one can make from his claim of ignorance about the very bad things that his appointees and supporters are doing is that his style is a very resplendent reminder of Siaka Stevens’ first law of politics – namely, “use your thugs to terrorize your political opponents and then feign ignorance about the whole thing.” This too is chillingly frightening for the future of our nascent democracy.

In my opinion, the most preposterous evidence that the President used to shore-up his democratic credentials is that he has arrested no one. Perhaps the President needs to be reminded that the human and constitutional rights of Sierra Leoneans are not grants of presidential magnanimity. Moreover, our President needs to be reminded that, as John Stuart Mill, the great English philosopher and political economist, once opined, depriving people of the right to legally earn their livelihood, as he has done to the countless SLPP supporters he has illegally dismissed, is a worse fate than imprisoning them. In this regard, therefore, I will borrow a familiar phrase from the President by characterizing his claim that he has imprisoned no one as “nothing to write home about”.

Finally, President Koroma claims that his government has engendered national unity. Yet a cursory look at his appointments leaves no one in doubt that his is, first and foremost, a Government of the North, by the North, and for the North. As expected, some of his demagogic supporters have argued that what appears to critics as a Northernization policy is merely a manifestation of the President’s desire to surround himself with people that he trusts. Nothing more needs to be said here if the President of Sierra Leone, who claims to value national unity, trusts only Northerners -- except that in the interest of truth-in-advertizing, President Koroma should perhaps rename his All Peoples Congress (APC) as the Northern Peoples Congress (NPC).

In a nutshell, therefore, when one honestly compares President Koroma’s record on promoting democracy and national unity with that of Alhaji Ahmed Tejan Kabbah, the most charitable conclusion one would make is that President Koroma’s record is, to borrow his favorite phrase once again, “nothing to write home about”. I suspect, however, that if Shakespeare had been alive today, he would have off-handedly dismissed the President’s preposterous claim that he has deepened democracy and fostered national unity in Sierra Leone as an ‘old wives’ tale that is “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”.