By Mohamed Sankoh (One Drop)
Would-be events that are expected to unfold during the 2028 general elections have already started casting their shadows in 2025 with the ruling Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) exhibiting several dressed rehearsals and giving pointers of what the main opposition, the All People’s Congress (APC), should expect in those elections.
In my One Dropian dropping of 18 March 2025, titled: “SLPP Has Mastered The Art Of Failure”, I noted that, “…violence…has been persistently overshadowing the SLPP Lower Level elections because the SLPP and elections violence are Siamese twins—and they will always be!” Even between and among SLPP factions, the intra-party violence has been so intense and crude that President Julius Maada Bio has to axe two of his seemingly thuggish appointees (Mohamed Orman Bangura the former Youth Affairs Minister and Ahmed Saybom Kanu the former Managing Director of the Sierra Leone National Shipping Company) just to either save face or play to the Diplomatic gallery!
But in hindsight, the sackings of both Orman Bangura and Saybom Kanu raise some questions on President Bio’s “work ethics”. When the former Minister of Transport and Aviation, Kabineh Kallon, was shamelessly involved in election-related violence, which culminated in him being allegedly caught on camera snatching and destroying ballot boxes in a Parliamentary rerun by-election in Constituency 110 west of Freetown, he was never sacked for such an egregious and uncivilized act. He still remained one of Bio’s blue-eye men (“boys” would be inappropriate here) throughout the SLPP’s first five-year term. So, will it be logical to infer that Orman and Saybom were sacked for election-related violence simply because they are “Bangura” and “Kanu” respectively whilst Kabineh was not sacked for the same election-related violence because he is a “Kallon”?
Election-related violence appears to be in vogue under the watchful watch of President Bio and his SLPP. Whenever an election-related violence takes place anywhere in Sierra Leone, most of the time, either members of the ruling party are complicit in them or personnel from the security forces are said to have been involved allegedly “taking orders from above”. Lawlessness and the lack of democratic decency seem to have been legalized under the Bio-led administration to such an extent that even law-abiding citizens are beginning to feel out-of-place in present day Sierra Leone. And President Bio seems to be always giving implied nods to election-related violence by either doing nothing or keeping mum whenever they occur.
And last Saturday’s barbarized violence at the Radisson Blu (formerly Mammy Yoko Hotel at Aberdeen, west of Freetown), where the Sierra Leone Football Association (SLFA) was having its Extraordinary Congress, appeared to have followed the same template of the violence that marred the Sierra Leone Bar Association (SLBA) Annual General Meeting (AGM) in Kenema on 17-18 May 2024.
The slight adjustment to that apparently SLPP-ian template is the fact that while my good friend Francis Ben Kaifala, the anti-corruption czar, imposed himself on the SLBA Annual General Meeting just like how Josef Stalin’s Chief Prosecutor, Andrey Vyshinsky, dominated his boss’s Moscow “show trials” of 1936-1938; the SLFA President, Thomas Daddy Brima, suspended the Congress because thugs were having a field day with pepper spray and other tools of thuggery! And while Ben Kaifala appears to believe that the SLPP’s interest must always be above that of his follow learned colleagues; Daddy Brima believes that, “the lives of our football family comes first.”
But what concerns a landlocked country with the purchase of submarines? My readers may be tempted to ask. Well, the thread that appears to be running through every Association or Union’s elections in Sierra Leone, since the SLPP of President Bio came to power in 2018 to date, is the fingerprints of the hidden hand of the ruling party whose alleged “preferred” candidates should always hold sway with the aim of implementing a state capture agenda!
The ruling SLPP now appears to be a sort of a specialist in election-related violence. From students’ union elections in various universities and colleges to petty traders’ association elections to bike riders’ elections unto even “akara” sellers’ elections; the SLPP government always seems to be interfering with them.
That’s where the main opposition, the All People’s Congress (APC), should be hyper-vigilant. If they are still claiming that the SLPP of Bio “stole the 2023 general elections”; then coming events have already started casting their shadows. Commonsense dictates that if members of the SLPP can unleashed such unimaginable violence between and among themselves, as seen in their Lower Level elections coupled with the shameful manner in which the Sierra Leone Bar Association Annual General Meeting was conducted in Kenema in May last year, then the APC leadership after their 2026 National Delegates’ Conference should be prepared to democratically face the SLPP with whatever tactics that might be thrown at them in 2028—even if that will make the heavens fall!
I’m not in any way advocating for election-related violence come 2028 (Far from that because Heaven knows I have always been a pacifist!). I’m only stating the obvious fact that the APC should not expect political power to be handed over to them on a silver platter. And as I see it, both the current and would-be leadership of the APC must take note of SLPP-provoked violence in recent times.
It is on that note that I will end today’s One Dropian dropping with a memorable quote from Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart” that: “….If a man comes into my hut and defecates on the floor, what do I do? Do I shut my eyes? No! I take a stick and break his head. That is what a man does.” And I don’t think the APC should elect a man in a woman’s frock for the 2028 Presidential Election!
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