By Mohamed Sankoh (One Drop)
I have decided that today’s One Dropian dropping should be premised on the just concluded Liberian presidential run-off election simply because that neighbouring country shares some similarities with Sierra Leone—albeit it is now ahead of my country in terms of democratic decency.
Like Sierra Leone; Liberia was founded for freed slaves. “Liberia” is a Latin word which means “Land of the Free”; the opening stanza of Sierra Leone’s National Anthem has “Realm of the Free” which is the same as “Land of the Free”. According to Liberia’s Constitution, you have to be Black to be a citizen; also in Sierra Leone one has to be of “Negroid” (what my Krio relatives would call “Blackie doo doo”) origin to be an unadulterated (not naturalized) citizen who can run for Parliamentary and Presidential elections.
And like Sierra Leone; Liberia has several “firsts” in her history. Sierra Leone had the first college (Fourah Bay College) in West Africa and the first country in sub-Saharan Africa where the opposition (All People’s Congress of Siaka Stevens) unseated a ruling party (Sierra Leone People’s Party of Sir Albert Margai) in March 1967. And Liberia has “produced the only African to win the FIFA Best Player of the Year [George Weah], and also produced “the first woman [Ellen Johnson Sirleaf] to be elected Head of State in an African country”.
What happened in Liberia, in which a sitting President was voted-out of power in his first inning by the opposition and conceded defeat without even a grumble, would have first happened in Sierra Leone, on June 24, if only the leadership of the main opposition, the All People’s Congress (APC), had shown an iota of balls-fullness and the will to win!
The defeat of the ruling party in Liberia (the Coalition for Democratic Change), by the opposition (Unity Party), should give APC supporters and its current leadership enough time for introspection. As far as I am concerned; the APC won the June 2023 multi-tier elections but lost the will to govern due to cowardice. If its leadership doesn’t have the will to jump over a puddle for its own political cause why does it think members of the International Community will cross the Atlantic Ocean for them? If you are seriously unserious about your own political cause; why would you expect someone else to be more serious about your unseriousness?
Let’s forget about the fact that the ruling SLPP of President Julius Maada Bio made it a paramount tactic of preventing the APC from campaigning in its south-eastern strongholds. We can even pretend that APC supporters were not consistently given death threats and some of their houses were not burnt down prior to and during the June 24 elections. And we can even feign forgetfulness that our First Lady, Fatima Bio, did not insinuate that south-easterners should not allow the APC to establish offices in the southern and eastern parts of the country. But what cannot be pretended about, or feigned forgetfulness of, is the truth that the APC leadership missed a lot of opportunities, through what appeared to be willful inertia, which would have consigned President Bio to the dustbin of one-timer presidents like George Weah.
There are several lessons which the APC should learn from the opposition (UP), now the ruling party-elect, in Liberia. One of those lessons is that national elections are serious businesses of which every opposition leadership must take them seriously without indulging in children’s plays at critical moments.
Another lesson is that an opposition that is fragmented due to intra-party squabbles, internal sabotages, and with a leadership that doesn’t seem to have any clue about how to confront the ruling party man-to-man doesn’t have any chance of winning an election (or elections).
And the third lesson, which the APC should learn from the just concluded run-off election in Liberia, is that spewing foul language repeatedly will not attract well-mannered voters. It will always be a put-off to sympathetic sit-on-the-fencers who believe that politics should be all about decent discourses and the presentation of alternative policies and programmes!
What the APC should know is that modern political warfare is being fought with doable strategies; the marshalling of the best brains within a political party, and the ability to adjust and redefine original strategies at short notice. No political party can win an election, or elections, by recycling failed strategies against an opponent which seems to be moving with the tide. For example, a political party cannot have someone as its Communications Director who cannot even qualify as a Cub Reporter, in a gutter newspaper, and expect to match-up the propagandistic arsenal of a ruling party with strong coffers and some of the best media brains.
One of the reasons why, I believe, the Liberian opposition succeeded where the APC failed was its ability to read, correctly, the ruling party’s tricks and foil some of them as they were being hatched. The Unity Party’s leadership didn’t rely mainly on some imaginary International Community or foreign organizations to win the elections; but mainly on its local strengths and networks.
And accepted that the APC is always regarded as a “grassroots” party by even some grasses that don’t have roots; but I believe that the party’s grassroots-ness should not be seen in the actual running of the party’s structures or in national campaigns. Even in modern communist and socialist states, their politburos are not being run by peasants; they are being administered by intellectuals and professionals. Have you ever seen, in modern politics or governance, any country in the world where the leader of a Labour Party is a half-baked party ideologue or pseudo-intellectual? You cannot be putting square pegs in triangles just because you want to fill some holes!
And coming back to the issue of how the then opposition, now the ruling party-elect, in Liberia outflanked former President George Weah’s party; I will write this with spiteful pleasure: Joseph Boakai allowed the Dr Samura Kamara in him to die! He showed clarity of purpose and courage to face a monster that was holding majority of the citizenry in economic bondage. At no point in his campaign did he show any form of cowardice because he had, and still has, functional balls!
What I think the APC should now be weary of are those party ideologues who are still holding on to the fallacious belief that the party was bequeathed to them by Siaka Stevens; so if they are not at its rudder, the party should not function. And it must also be weary of those sticks-in-the-mud who are quick to parrot about “institutional memory of the APC” whenever their political stamina and usefulness are questioned.
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