By Mohamed Sankoh (One Drop)
Dr Abdulai O. Conteh, Joseph Fitzgerald Kamara aka JFK, and Ady Macauley; these three lawyers will go down in the history of legal practice in Sierra Leone as few of the handful of Sierra Leonean legal heavyweights who have fearlessly tested the independence of our Judiciary—leaving it, or making right-thinking Sierra Leoneans to now regard it, like the proverbial king without kingly robes!
Though their arguments at the Supreme Court of Sierra Leone were sound; their respect for the dispensation of the Principles of Natural Justice .sacrosanct; their trust in the Justices of the Supreme Court trustful, yet the judgment delivered by that cardinal court in the land “that we love”, on Friday 27 January 2023, appeared to have had all the colourations of sleights of the gavel than the true interpretation of the Law as the Law ought to have been interpreted.
Once again, our “learned” Justices of the Supreme Court of Sierra Leone have delivered a judgment which seems to un-learned Sierra Leoneans as one that appears to be illogical and devoid of commonsensical common sense! This assumption is not lost on human rights lawyer Augustine Sorie-Sengbe Marrah who, in reaction to that Supreme Court judgment, tweeted: “The Supreme Court today delivered a judgment confirming the PR electoral system. As a legal scholar, I was looking forward to concurring/dissenting opinions. Doesn’t look good that all 5 judges would agree to every letter, syllable and reasoning of such ‘historic’ judgment!”
“Historic judgment” indeed! I’m no spring chicken or not someone who is still wet behind the ears; so what I deduced from that tweet above, in my layman un-learned interpretation of an interpreted Law, is that before that judgment was delivered; it appears as if a semblance of comparing-of-notes might have taken place amongst the “learned” Justices. Because if, according to Augustine Sorie-Sengbe Marrah, “all 5 judges would agree to every letter, syllable and reasoning” then if they were sitting to the West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE) their results ought to have been seized! For how could five students answer a question the same way with all the same punctuation marks and the same word counts (And even using the same number of Answer Sheets!)?
Again, that “historic judgment” by the Supreme Court of Sierra Leone reminds me of the bedtime fable of “The Pied Piper of Hamelin” and his employer. It gives me the nauseating feeling that the Law in Sierra Leone appears to be a tethered horse only meant for a sitting government to ride! The “learned” in, and the learners of, the Law should forgive my un-learned-ness (don’t dash for your dictionaries for this is another One Dropian dropped word) because I could still not comprehend why almost all the cases that go to the Supreme Court for interpretations are most of the times ruled in favour of the sitting government? The case of the dismissal of former Vice President Samsumana by the Ernest Bai Koroma-led government and the recently recent Proportional Representation (PR) electoral system riddle are just two examples of the many examples for me to assume that one hardly wins a case against a sitting government at the Supreme Court.
Well, if it is a truism that every lawyer should know his/her Magistrate or Judge for the wheel of justice to be lubricated; then it appears as if every sitting government in Sierra Leone seems to know the Supreme Court very, very, very well!
And that judgment delivered by the Supreme Court of Sierra Leone, on Friday 27 January 2023, will have far-reaching ramifications for the political wellness of the country. Now that it has ruled that there will be no more constituencies at the end of the life of the current parliament, then what are the implications of this judgment for political parties which are still conducting their internal elections for executive positions in constituencies? No doubt, that judgment has stripped citizens of their right to choose their Members of Parliament. And that right has now been solely handed over to party elites who might sell their party’s symbols to the highest bidders. It also appears, as I see it, that the Supreme Court has silenced the silent majority in the electoral processes.
But how does all this come about? For starters, on 28 November 2022, JKF and Partners of No. 42 Bathurst Street in Freetown filed an “Originating Notice of Motion”, at the Supreme Court of Sierra Leone, on behalf of Hon. Abdul Kargbo and Councillor Hakiratu Maxwell-Caulker both members of the All People’s Congress (APC).
In that “Originating Notice of Motion”, the plaintiffs argued that, “…the Directive by the President [of the Republic of Sierra Leone] to the Electoral Commission of Sierra Leone (ECSL) to hold any public elections for ordinary Members of Parliament by the Proportional Representation System where there are extant and subsisting constituencies, is ultra vires [to]” the 1991 Constitution as amended. They also argued that, “…the current parliament was itself elected on a constituency basis as provided for in sections 38 (1), (2) and (3), and that these constituencies are still extant and subsisting.” Apart from other arguments submitted; they had wanted the Supreme Court to restrain “the second Defendant [which was the Electoral Commission of Sierra Leone], its agents, servants, privies or howsoever from taking any steps aimed at conducting the June 2023 multi-tier public elections on a Proportional Representation basis.”
The plaintiffs were represented by Dr Abdulai O. Conteh, Joseph Fitzgerald Kamara aka JFK, and Ady Macauley; whilst the two defendants: the Attorney General and Minister of Justice and the Electoral Commission, were represented by the Solicitor General, Robert B. Kowa, with a motley of lawyers from the Law Officers’ Department and Dr Emmanuel Saffa Abdulai (for the second defendant) respectively.
And after what seemed to be a show hearing reminiscent of either Stalin’s Show Trials or the Nuremburg Trials, with rolling cameras being rolled in the court’s chamber for members of the public to witness the spectacle; the Chief of the four Justices, His Lordship Justice Desmond Babatunde Edwards delivered the 53-page judgment with the aura of Zeus sitting at the Olympian throne deciding the fates of lesser gods!
And I will quote His Lordship Justice Edwards’s cliffhanger for its beautiful constrained irony: “In any election, the most important thing is the right of citizens to vote. That right has not been affected and it will not be affected by any form- whether by district block representation or constituency based system.” In disrobed language: the Supreme Court upheld President Julius Maada Bio’s announcement for the PR electoral system to be used in conducting the June 24 multi-tier elections.
And the main opposition, the APC, is peeved about that judgment—albeit not surprised! And it is not surprising that Dr Abdulai O. Conteh, the lead counsel, reportedly told the court that the ruling “…is full of promise and pregnant with possibilities.” A sort of disguised and decent manner of expressing sarcasm mixed with disdain.
But I would have been surprised if the Supreme Court of Sierra Leone would have surprised me with a contrary judgment than the one delivered last Friday. It seems to me that the judgment appeared to have been preordained just like the verdicts in Stalin’s Show Trials or the Nuremburg Trials! Except that in this case, there was no soviet state prosecutor in the person of Andrei Vyshinsky or Allied Forces prosecutors to complete the charade.
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