Without any attempt at mincing my words; the ruling Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP), since 2018 to date, has never made any genuine and honest efforts to bring about sustainable peace, true reconciliation, and meaningful national cohesion in Sierra Leone. Don’t tell me about the political gimmick called Bintumani III because that conference was a collection of idle minds who cooked up an illogical story just to waste state resources. I will spew it out if you ram down my throat the half-hearted Independent Commission for Peace and National Cohesion because it was a concept that was fathered at the SLPP’s Wallace-Johnson Street headquarters, in Freetown, and is now being breastfed and clothed at State House.

Even the SLPP former Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs, Lahai Lawrence Leema, knew that the Special Investigation Committee (SIC), appointed by President Julius Maada Bio to investigate the 2022 August 10th protest, would be a kind of a “show trial” which was why he treated it with the disdain it deserved. When one takes a critical look at the SIC’s composition; one notices that it was the same SLPP motley crowd that was cloudily painted to make it look like a rainbow. Little wonder that Mr Leema “did not present himself to the SIC despite repeated attempts made to have him provide answers to the Committee….[And]… as a Minister of State, his refusal to meet with the Committee was disparaging and manifested unbridled impunity….(According to the SIC final Report.)”

And don’t tell me about that weeks-ago caricatured National Dialogue between the All People’s Congress (APC) and the SLPP. It was a sort of circus in which seemingly political clowns crowned their clownishness at the Bintumani International Conference Centre in Freetown! There was nothing national in that “National Dialogue”, as the person (President Bio) whose disputed status provoked the “dialogue” treated the three-day process in the same manner Lahai Lawrence Leema treated the Special Investigation Committee.  My point, or fact, is: that the SLPP government seems to be very deceitful when it comes to sustainable peace, true reconciliation, and meaningful national cohesion. What the SLPP government appears to be more concerned about are window-dressings, showmanship, and brinksmanship. It is also seemingly good at how to perpetrate and perpetuate all the negative “isms” which are creating more chasms than unity in Sierra Leone since 2018.

If the Bio-led administration truly believes in sustainable peace, true reconciliation, and meaningful national cohesion; then it needs to always consider and reconcile different political views and shades of opinions. It has to allow established democratic institutions and processes to always serve the needs and interests of Sierra Leoneans generally not the SLPP particularly. The Bio-led administration has to allow the wheels of Justice to spin fairly and impartially.  But the SLPP government of President Bio doesn’t seem to be interested in democratic niceties. It doesn’t appear to be interested in strengthening the foundations of statehood. It doesn’t seem interested in making the Opposition and other voices outside the State House have a voice in making important decisions that concern the health and security of the state. The SLPP government of President Bio seems to be more interested in partisan supremacy!

And that partisan supremacist tendency appears to have been some of the antecedents to most of the political disturbances in Sierra Leone in recent times. The seemingly tooth-for-tooth policy of the Bio-led administration may eventually leave Sierra Leone toothless! Trying to govern the country in a sort of distinctive Green versus Red lines will only lead to more headaches. It is high time President Bio started seeing issues from a broader national perspective than through the parochialism of partisan power struggle. I think he has been having troubles and headaches with his presidency, since 2018 to date, simply because he appears to be repeatedly playing the fabled man in Chinua Achebe’s novel, “Arrow of God”, who usually brings home ant-infested faggots; and keeps complaining every time he is visited by lizards.

It is common sense that when an intelligent man is faced with such a situation, he should stop complaining. He should bring out the bundle of sticks, and untie them in the sun to allow the ants to go away; then the lizards will have, or see, no reason for visitations to his hut! Even the Chief Priest of Ulu in “Arrow of God”, Ezeulu, reaches a point in his life when he realises that his centuries-old beliefs and practices are no longer in sync with the moving times. President Bio should know that he has to move with the times or the times will have to drag him along if he still wants to be a stick in the mud. He must know that what suited Sir Albert Margai in the 1960s will not suit him now because that era and his are different. He must know that he is no longer the military leader he was in the 1990s when Might was right and in vogue. And President Bio should know that modern day politics is all about give-and-take rather than take-and-take. In summary: he has to change his leadership style by pruning the egocentricities!

For an event, or events, to occur; it or they must have had an antecedent or antecedents. Sierra Leone will be running in vicious circles if a genuine national conversation is not triggered soonest. That national dialogue should be devoid of the usual window-dressings, showmanship, and brinksmanship that have always characterized the SLPP government’s half-assed, bastardized, and half-hearted so-called national conversations. It is on that note that I will end today’s One Dropian dropping with a quote from the preface of Wole Soyinka’s book: The Man Died, “Even in totalitarian states, the time comes when past ‘errors’ are admitted, high-placed criminals unmasked and victims rehabilitated…[In Sierra Leone] we [have] fail[ed] to establish a climate of [genuine and honest] enquiry which, even if they do not provoke immediate consequences, at the very least, by the vigour with which they are pursued and the manifested rejection of falsifications, ensures that such unresolved anomalies remain on ‘HOLD’, sinking finally into the armoury of public wrongs which will reinforce the channels to eventual change.”  One such channel to eventual change will be a genuine national conversation on the issues which have been plaguing Sierra Leone in recent times and times past.

Courtesy: By Mohamed Sankoh aka One Dropmedsankoh@yahoo.com/+232-76-611-986; https://nationalistsl.com