Commentary
It is no surprise to a lot of people that the opposition SLPP lost their petition against the ruling APC at the Supreme Court of Sierra Leone recently. What a terrible waste of time and money.
For the SLPP to even think that they won last November’s elections in Sierra Leone despite all the evidence to the contrary makes me wonder what kind of leadership this party, the oldest and one of the largest in Sierra Leone, currently has.
I was chatting with a friend a couple of weeks ago and the issue of the SLPP came up. He observed that the SLPP, despite the high number of educated people it has, continues to make blunder after blunder in politics. "Ee fiba lek say den sweh dem" (It seems as if a curse is on them), he said.
I replied that I did not think there is any curse on the SLPP, but that politics is a profession like any other profession and you become better at it by doing it for a long time. A lot of politicians in the SLPP go into politics right from the university classroom (lecturers or professors), the medical clinic (doctors) or court room or law chambers (lawyers) and so on; whereas in the APC most of the politicians are just career politicians with many years’ experience.
That’s the fundamental difference between the two parties: For the SLPP, it seems to me, you need to have at least a first degree to be considered worthy for political office while in the APC all you need is the ability to read, write and speak English with lots of political experience. Political experience and a political base are more important to the APC than a string of university degrees and the ability to speak English like Dr. Abass Bundu (Oxford or Cambridge English). So the SLPP is most of the time out of tune with the masses in Sierra Leone who are largely illiterate. But that is another basket of fish; let’s return to the Supreme Court fiasco.
SLPP leaders and delegates blundered mightily when they selected Mr. Julius Maada Bio as their flagbearer for the 2012 elections. Now, Bio, as he is normally called, would have been a reasonable contestant to face the incumbent President Ernest Koroma (known as World’s Best) if he had not joined the army or had not participated in 1992 NPRC military coup that took the lives of a lot of Sierra Leoneans: Military officers, policemen and civilians, from almost all the districts in the country especially the north and Western Area. It (the NPRC) was a dark chapter in the history of our country that led to serious divisions within the populace that persist even today. So the moment the SLPP chose Bio as their flagbearer most political analysts immediately knew they (SLPP) had lost the elections. How how can they expect to get any significant number of votes from the north and the West with the face of one of one of the men that killed a huge number of the voters’ fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters,sons and daughters on the ballot? What was the SLPP thinking?
Was the SLPP saying the thousands of international observers from all over the world that monitored the elections (let’s forget Christiana Thorpe the electoral commissioner) did not know what they were doing?
Another major blunder: They were late to file their petition which even a non-lawyer like me knows destroyed everything; they should have backed off at that point. No they went on, making more procedural blunders along the way.
Is it any surprise the matter got thrown out of court? I admire the patience of the judges who sat through all those arguments knowing all along it’s all a waste of their valuable time. Yes, they may be saying to themselves, justice must not only be done, but should be seen to be done.
As for my friend, he called me and said the Supreme Court should impose a heavy fine on the SLPP for wasting their time. I disagreed, saying the court should have pity on them; the SLPP as a party has suffered enough since Bio came and sat on their necks and refused to release them.
Photo: Former SLPP Flagbearer Julius Maada Bio.
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