By Mohamed Sankoh (One Drop)
Despite Dr John Rogers, a former Southern Regional Young Generation Leader of the ruling Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP), has recently hinted in an article that Chief Minister, David Moinina Sengeh, appears to be a prototype of Waiyaki, the protagonist in Ngugi Wa Thiongo’s novel, The River Between, of the fates of those who “rise before their time”; the SLPP is still tilting towards a young and fresh leadership for the 2028 General Elections—by all indications at present.
And whatever the eventual eventuality of the SLPP’s Flagbearer race in the not too distant future; it is very likely that their presidential candidate for the 2028 Presidential Election might be someone who was not yet born before Sierra Leone’s independence in 1961. So, if the All People’s Congress (APC) intends to match up the SLPP strategy for strategy; it should also be thinking now of a young and fresh leadership for the 2028 General Elections!
In my One Dropian dropping of 9 July 2024, titled “APC Must Reform Now Or Die!”, I stated that the APC needed to take a genuine and careful look at what seemed to be a deliberate Bombali-Karene-zation (in my One Dropian coinage) of its Presidential Candidates (The late Eddie Turay in 1996 was from Bombali, Ernest Bai Koroma in 2007 and 2012 is from Bombali, and Dr Samura Kamara in 2018 and 2023 is also from Bombali-Karene District. And if I should add Joseph Saidu Momoh also, as a postscript, he too was from Bombali District). And I also put forward that if the APC was really serious about wrestling political power from the SLPP; then its 2028 Presidential Candidate must come from any other part of the country other than those two (Bombali and Karene) Districts—which, to all intends and purposes, are Siamese twins!
And I still hold on to that view because as it stands now, the APC appears to have been intentionally downgraded to a Bombali-Karene-Kamakwei entity! Its leadership, definitely, has to have a national outlook going forward. As my “Freetong” Krio relatives would say: “Apart from St George’s Cathedral; there are other churches in Sierra Leone”! So true—in fact, truly true! With its current Bombali-Karene-Kamakwei outlook, is the APC telling its rank and file that sons and daughters of (and from) Freetown, Port Loko, Kambia, Tonkolili, Koinadugu, Falaba, Kono, Kenema, Kailahun, Bo, Pujehun, Moyamba and Bonthe Districts are not worthy of being APC presidential candidates? Is the Flagbearership of the APC exclusively reserved for citizens from Bombali-Karene-Kamakwei?
Or is the APC cloudily saying that sons and daughters from other parts of the country are destined to only play second fiddle to sons and daughters from Bombali-Karene-Kamakwei when it comes to choosing its presidential candidates? For me, the APC has to move from this seemingly Flagbearership Apartheid in its next National Delegates Convention if it wants to be taken seriously as a “government-in-waiting”! For it will be hypocritical for members of the APC to accuse the SLPP of being engaged in Flagbearership Apartheid when it, too, is guiltily guilty of such!
What the APC needs now is a leadership that will be open-minded to engage in genuine reconciliations, political decency devoid of mammy-cussing, and courteousness in the internal discourses aimed at comprehensive reforms within the party. And I, strongly, believe that a young and fresh leadership will be able to achieve this feat because the “old guards” appear to be so factionalized that in the event that any faction gets the Flagbearership eventually; the other factions might feel humiliated and fight tooth and nail to sabotage the victor as it was allegedly alleged in post-2018 and post-2023 General Elections!
There seems to be so much hurt, bitterness, and over-bloated egos among pre-2018 and pre-2023 Flagbearer contenders that the only thing which might pacify some of them, or give them the feel good goodness, is the denial of the Flagbearership to any of them. Most of them would grudgingly accept a fresh face at the helm than see one of their former competitors steering the APC ship towards the 2028 General Elections. And, methinks, some of the pre-2018 and pre-2023 APC Flagbearer contenders no longer have the stamina to confront the SLPP in any national competition. It is as if they know that President Julius Maada Bio and his SLPP hold both the yam and knife (to borrow from Achebe) to their presidential ambitions!
This is where a young and fresh leadership for the 2028 General Elections comes into play. The APC needs a leadership that will be politically stainless, a leadership that is incapable of being blackmailed or prone to blackmail by the Bio-led administration, a leadership that will be trusted by both the old guards and the younger generation of APC comrades, and a leadership that will be able to show Dr Prince Harding, the current SLPP Chairman, that the APC is not full of “mad men”. And most importantly, at its next National Delegates Convention, the APC must choose a crop of young leaders who have repeatedly shown the insatiable thirst and hunger for political power going to 2028!
It is on that note that I will end today’s One Dropian dropping with a quote from Achebe’s book, “There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra”, which I ended with in my op-ed of 9 July 2024 that says: “Every generation must recognize and embrace the task it is peculiarly designed by history and by providence to perform.”
Now is the time for the old guards in the APC to recognize and embrace the task of handing over the baton of leadership to a younger generation of thinkers and strategists! Hope no mammy-cussing will be hurled at me for genuinely asking the APC to accept these home truths from a home boy?
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