News Story

GREELEY, COLORADO, USA - PROF. KELFALA M. KALLON: President Ernest Bai Koroma’s call for attitudinal change in Sierra Leone (presumably as a precursor to meaningful socioeconomic development) presupposes that our attitude is a major cause of our economic misfortunes, on the one hand, and that there is a desired set of attitudes that Sierra Leoneans need to inculcate in order to ameliorate our economic and social conditions, on the other hand. Before fully interrogating these presidential premises, I must point out that in spite of our allegedly “unpatriotic” attitudes, President Koroma inherited a buoyant economy that had the fastest rate of growth (in terms of real gross domestic product) in the West African sub-region.

Empty sloganeering in order to deflect attention from economic hardships is firmly ensconced in the political history of nations. Perhaps the most audacious example of this on the African continent was the “African Authenticity” campaign of Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko. The Mobutu government, while carting the country’s wealth into foreign bank accounts of the leader and his cronies, entreated the Congolese to project their African image by replacing their European names with “authentic” African names. And of course, El Presidenté himself led the way by changing his name from Joseph Mobutu to Mobutu Sese Seko, changing the country’s name from the Republic of Congo to Zaire, and renaming the capital city, Leopoldville, as Kinshasha. Prominent Zairean personalities also followed suit, two famous examples being François Luambo Makiadi (Franco) and Pascal Tabu (Rocehreau) who changed their names to Luambo Makiadi and Tabu Ley, respectively, in order to project “African Authenticity”. As Momoh’s “Constructive Nationalism was to later do to Sierra Leone, Mobutu’s “African Authenticity” left Zaire a bankrupt nation and plunged it into a ferocious civil war whose ember is still flickering. This was in spite of the fact that the Congo is one of the most mineral-rich countries in the world.

In Mao’s China also, the intelligentsia were blamed for the consequences of the government’s socialist policies. To remedy the problem, Chairman Mao imposed a Proletarian Cultural Revolution which operated on the false notion that only a complete rejection of western influence (bourgeois attitudes) would ensure China’s economic and social development. Accordingly, bureaucrats, planners, technocrats, and other intellectuals (the alleged purveyors of bourgeois attitudes) were sent off to hard-labor camps in the countryside for political and cultural re-education. In their absence, power and policy-making shifted to radical cadres and sycophants that surrounded Chairman Mao. In the Soviet Union also, those who refused to swallow the socialist garbage were labeled as reactionaries whose attitudes and activities contradicted the socialist creed. To transform them into good comrades, they too were similarly exiled to hard-labor camps in Siberia for socialist re-education. Again, while these exercises in attitudinal change led to heinous human rights abuses, the economies of these countries floundered.

In Europe also, we are reminded of Hitler and Mussolini, both of whom exhorted their countrymen to inculcate nationalistic attitudes in the service of their respective fatherlands. Those who were not supportive of their programs (Catholics, trade unionists, and the Jews, among others) were subjected to gross human rights abuses. In the end, these countries were plunged into senseless wars that destroyed their economies and imposed untold hardships on their citizens.

In our dear Sierra Leone, the land that we love, the use of state-sponsored brutality and sloganeering as substitutes for sensible economic policies and good governance have an established pedigree in APC (mis)governance. For instance, in 1968, President Stevens sought to change the attitudes of Sierra Leoneans toward the APC by carting many notable Sierra Leoneans to Mafanta Prisons. Even die-hard APC partisans who were later suspected of having the wrong attitude towards Stevens’ dictatorial tendencies (such as Dr. M.S. Fornah, Ibrahim Taqi, Brigadier John Bangura, Bank Governor Sam Bangura, and others) were summarily “murdered” at the behest of the state. As we all imbibed the attitudinal change that Stevens had so assiduously sought by giving him his One-Party State, our economy floundered and the standard of living of the average Sierra Leonean, which had been the envy of other West Africans, started to nose-dive. As in Mao’s China and Stalin’s Soviet Union, the human rights of Sierra Leoneans became increasingly imperiled as people began to complain about the economic hardships to which they were being increasingly subjected.

Stevens’ hand-picked replacement, President J.S. Momoh, sought to reverse the economic slide and improve the APC’s human rights record by starting his rhetorical campaign of “Constructive Nationalism”. Dishonestly mislabeling the consequences of APC (mis)governance as attitudinal lapses on the part of Sierra Leoneans, President Momoh extolled attitudinal change as a prerequisite for our socioeconomic resurgence. However, in spite of his lofty sloganeering, all we got was a “destructive regionalism” that eventually metamorphosed into corruption and crass nepotism that became known as “EKUTAY-ism”. As a result, the country fell to the bottom of the human food chain and into a decade-long brutal civil war.

Now, another APC president, Ernest Bai Koroma, has been bitten by the attitudinal-change bug. Interestingly, like Momoh before him, President Koroma has not given us a blueprint on how he proposes to change the attitudes of the Sierra Leonean public. However, in his inaugural address (in which he first mentioned attitudinal change as a rallying cry for his government), President Koroma specifically pointed to the fact that people had vandalized busses that were donated to us in order to ease our transportation problems. But who exactly were these vandals whose activities the president abhorred only after he became president? Wasn’t it an open secret in Freetown that unruly APC youths (who were allegedly being sponsored by certain APC politicians) were responsible for these flagrant acts of vandalism – just because the busses were painted green, the SLPP’s colors?

Also, even as he read his inaugural address, the President knew that his supporters had vandalized the SLPP Headquarters on the day he became President – in full view of the Police. Yet, he did not admonish those supporters for such acts of vandalism. President Koroma also unarguably knows that none other than his Resident Minister, Southern Province recently led a group of APC thugs to licentiously sack the SLPP’s Southern Regional Offices in Bo. Again, if the President sincerely believes that vandalizing private and public property is an anti-developmental attitude, why has he not vigorously brought those who are responsible for vandalizing SLPP property to book?

Corruption was the other anti-progressive attitude of Sierra Leoneans that the President has pledged to eradicate. However, his record on this issue especially says otherwise. For example, the President’s own brother allegedly had a case to answer for some stolen Bumbuna cables – a thieving enterprise that, in my opinion, was not a purely economic endeavor but also an orchestrated scheme on the part of APC supporters to sabotage the SLPP’s yeoman efforts to finish the Bumbuna Project prior to 2007. That case was quashed upon the President’s assumption of office. Additionally, under the President’s watch, a criminal case against Leatherboots for his savage attack on Tom Nyuma was also quenched. Contracts for the procurement of electricity, drugs, and other items were granted under dubious bidding processes. Also, most recently, a very public row erupted between the NEC Chairperson, Dr. Christiana Thorpe (of “cut yah, put yanda” fame) and her co-Commissioner in which the latter accused the former of forging her signature. Contrary to what one would expect from a President who spouts transparency and accountability as the hallmark of his style of governance, President Koroma dismissed the person whose signature was forged, leaving the alleged forger at her desk. To add salt to our festering national wound of corruption, illegality, and unconstitutionality, President Koroma’s allies in Parliament have now schemed (APC style) to use procedural shenanigans to validate the forged document into our electoral map. Thus, it appears as if President Koroma does not say what he means or mean what he says – at least when it comes to corruption and attitudinal change.

Clearly, vandalizing public or private property (whether by stoning government busses, stealing electricity cables, or vandalizing the SLPP’s property) is purely and simply a criminal offence. So is corruption! Therefore, by pointing to these as attitudinal problems, President Koroma has blatantly mislabeled criminality as an attitudinal shortcoming. And, most definitely, ample empirical evidence abound that the certainty of punishment is the most efficacious way to deter crime. On the contrary, sloganeering, no matter how deafening, will not abate criminality; it merely raises the temperature in our already-polluted atmosphere with more presidential hot air.

In conclusion, President Koroma must be reminded that liberal democracies have created tremendous economic prosperity for their citizens without resorting to an iota of attitudinal-change sloganeering. They achieved this by implementing sensible economic policies and using their laws and institutions to deal firmly with criminality. Even China, which was an early practitioner of attitudinal-change sloganeering, has created tremendous prosperity for her people by replacing her erstwhile socialist rubbish with sensible economic policies. On the other hand, governments that have substituted sensible economic policies with crass sloganeering have typically wrought economic and social disaster on their peoples.

The lessons here for President Koroma are as follows: (1) Empty slogans do not cause economic progress; (2) Given (1), President Koroma needs to inculcate the sort of attitudinal change that would cause him to divorce politics from the rule of law and, thereby, enforce the latter without fear or favor. Alas, given the President’s revealed preference for doing nothing about crimes committed in the APC’s behalf, his modus operandi will only incentivize the very anti-progressive attitudes that he claims to abhor. Thus, my unsolicited advice to the President on this issue is simply this: Bra nah for blo pan dis attitudinal-change labo labo en fett de suck-air way you don bring pan we pipul.