By Mohamed Sankoh (One Drop)
I’m still wondering which rational investor will go to any country where the Foreign Affairs Minister tells the world that hundreds of thousands of their citizens are capable of carrying out “premeditated, well-financed, organized, violent terrorist insurrection[s].”
Even when supporters of former President Donald Trump committed the most egregious sacrilege on American democracy, by violently storming and occupying the Capitol, the Biden administration did not refer to them as “terrorists” or “insurrectionists”. They, and some sections of the American media, simply reported of “a mob of Trump loyalists” or “Several groups of extremists”! But it appears as if the Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) government has cultivated the habit of using phrases that have far-reaching ramifications for national cohesion and foreign investments.
I still hold the view that the killings of innocent citizens and the destruction of property on 10 August 2022, in some parts of the country, should be condemned in their entirety by every peace-loving Sierra Leonean. But calling protesters “terrorists” might scare away potential foreign investors who might think Sierra Leone is not a safe country to do business because she has citizens who are capable of carrying out “violent terrorist insurrection[s]”.
Whether it was a smokescreen or not, some of the protesters of 10 August 2022, according to footages seen on social media, said they were protesting against the high cost of living; unemployment; bad governance; corruption, and all the “isms” which appear to have characterized the SLPP government. These are concerns that the Bio-led administration should look into and try to address without giving them partisan undertones.
But instead of addressing the issues which some of the protesters said brought them to the streets the SLPP so-called communications specialists are now engaged in chauvinistic arrogance and finger-pointing. And worst of all, they appear to be painting Democracy with a broad autocratic brush.
You and I know that Politics is all about give-and-take; it is about giving attentive ears to dissenting voices; it is about allowing the tenets of Democracy to be nurtured so that they would flourish, and it is about creating an atmosphere wherein every citizen can feel that s/he belongs to one nation. But in situations where democratic avenues appear to be bulwarked; aggrieved citizens might look for shortcuts to air their views on certain issues.
Added to that, in any country where the Rule of Law seems to be in the dustbin; where Justice is selectively selective; where the ruling party strongly believes that opposition parties should be treated like enemies of the state; where the government is not thinking of how to improve the lot of its citizens but how to rig the next elections, and in a country where the ruling elite appear to be exhibiting extreme supremacist tendencies; things are sure to go haywire!
I’m not in any way trying to justify the actions of some of the protesters. I believe that violence and lawlessness, in any forms, should not be tolerated. But the events of last Wednesday in Sierra Leone appeared to be the releases of pent-up angers from youths who feel they are being marginalized by a government that seems pitiless. Those angers seemed to be the indicators that a large chunk of the citizenry now holds the belief that President Julius Maada Bio is not up to the task for which he was elected in 2018 and, therefore, still conjecturing that he should not be the Commander-in-Chief after the 2023 Presidential Election.
And President Bio seems to be playing into the hands of those citizens who believe that he is a divisive figure. Having kept mum for so long, due to his untiring private-official foreign trips to lure investors, he was expected to thaw the political ice in his “National Broadcast” of 12 August 2022. But his non-denial denials of some of the reasons adduced by some of the protesters for their protests appeared to be below-the-belt punches. And his use of confrontational words like “insurrection” and “insurrectionists” gave the impression that the door had already been shut to any would-be dialogue whenever the “faceless organisers of the protest” would have faces. As I see it, his August 12 “National Broadcast” looks like a rewritten version of his speech of 8 May 2020 in which he accused the national APC leadership of being silent “on the active participation of their members and executive members in these acts of terrorist violence”.
And the All People’s Congress (APC) has replied with equal confrontation. In its press release of 13 August 2022 it noted that, “The President and his government should stop blaming the APC for the ‘faceless demonstration’ and learn to take responsibility by addressing the cries of citizens…Our expectation of the Presidential address [of 12 August 2022] was a message that would empathize with victims, calm the heightened tensions in the country in the midst of acute hunger, financial hardship and suffering”.
With such open hostilities between the two majority political parties, Sierra Leone might go back to square one as August 10 will always be August 10 to both parties. Albeit President Bio has promised a “full investigation into the deaths of ordinary citizens”; it will be safe to conjecture that the outcome of that investigation is already known. He seems to have unequivocally proclaimed the guilty verdicts, in his “National Broadcast” of 12 August 2022, and it will be left to the would-be accused persons to prove their innocence later!
And although President Bio acknowledges that “The [1991] Constitution and laws of our Republic… guarantee the right to free speech and peaceful protest[s]”; but if the “applicable restrictions” (borrowing his words) to those “rights” are seen by some sections of the citizenry as deliberate attempts to suppress their constitutional rights, then the tomb of August 10 might be opened in the future!
It is on that note that I will end today’s One Dropian dropping with a Sudanese proverb that says, “Do not call to a dog with a whip in your hand”. Indeed, the SLPP government should not be talking about the Peace and National Cohesion Commission and in the same breath referring to citizens as “terrorists” and “insurrectionists”. It is like a Nigerian breaking a coconut on his head and trying to partake in the eating of it (Was it Tai Solarin?)!
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