By Titus Boye-Thompson, London
“Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown.” The basic principle of leadership in any institution is an ideal to reflect on the question of “who benefits,” as a measure of focus that the leader brings to the effort to achieve the stated objectives of his team. While considering that leadership ignites the concept of teamwork and numbers, it also raises the vexed question of who stand to gain if things go right or for that matter, who is to blame if things go wrong. So leadership of itself is not a self-defining term nor is it meant to be self-serving in its execution. The leader works to ensure that the team gets the best results from its efforts and anything less is undeserving.
In the All People’s Congress (APC), leadership is currently a misnomer and the now unduly extravagant attempts to self-define the term within the ambit of the APC party is causing a problem that is at risk of taking the party on a whirlwind of internal struggles and self-destruction. In such a scenario, it would be difficult to see everyone wining when all are fighting to the end point of self-destruction. This will eventually become an implosion.
To explain things further, the term “self-definition” here refers to the abhorrent situation wherein a bounty of stakeholders lay claim to leadership of the APC, mostly by membership of various bodies viz executive, NAC, former flagbearers, Big Six, Team A, etc. In all of the destructive contagion that has categorized the APC “leadership” in the most recent past, none is more virulent as the tendency to impose faceless armies of so-called “social media bloggers” to lead a campaign of calumny based on disinformation and misinformation as a foundation for manipulating the entire political landscape, to defile and malign the names and characters of those who may have done so much more to raise the game while others simply rely on veiled immoral misconstructions and misconceptions in order to waylay the body politic.
These observations are being highlighted here so that one can throw light on the intractable reasons why the APC Executive has failed on its mandate to secure and hold power by democratic means. It has failed to lead from the front, to protect the interests of democracy that the people who voted it into office in 2022 had been assured, it failed to secure the votes of the people which said votes were not properly tallied and accounted for during the 2023 elections, it failed to provide a robust strategy to hold the Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) and its government to account after the events of the 2023 elections, it has failed to provide comprehensive leverage to the Agreement for National Unity (ANU) superintended by the Commonwealth Secretariat together with the International Community of Moral Guarantors led by the ECOWAS, AU, UNOWAS, and signed by the erstwhile flagbearer of the APC and the Chief Minister of the SLPP Government and which agreement gave assurances of certain rights and freedoms such as ending politically motivated trials of APC Members, the right of APC operatives to return, free from undue harassment and political intimidation, and the release of political prisoners.
Furthermore the APC executive has failed to censure the SLPP Government for the disappearance of its members on the list of political prisoners; and it is now failing woefully to uphold the call for “electoral justice” that the flagbearer of the party, Dr Samura Kamara, has identified as the next steps after the report of the Committee on Electoral Systems and Management Bodies Review (the Tripartite Report) has been published.
These failures can only be put to an end by the pursuit of an accountable leadership and not by seeking the pecuniary interests of a few. To paraphrase an old dictum, “The heights of great men, reached and kept, were not attained by sudden flight!”