By Mohamed Sankoh (One Drop)
Majority of Sierra Leoneans have fasted, prayed, and held year-round all-night services in their churches and mosques for the Almighty God to give them a good compassionate leader who could personify national cohesion; but they are given President Julius Maada Bio as their Head of State in the end. They should know by now that prayers alone are not the panaceas to Sierra Leone’s political and economic problems!
That’s why when the National Secretary General of the All People’s Congress (APC), lawyer Lansana Dumbuya, issued a press release dated 12 October 2023, asking his fellow APC comrades to pray on the eve of the dialogue with the ruling Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) and some international “moral guarantors” in relation to the unresolved electoral issues with the Electoral Commission for Sierra Leone (ECSL); I convinced myself once again that the APC was still infested with a leadership that was not only chicken-hearted but hopelessly hopeless in the present circumstances.
In my opinionated opinion, at a time like this, the APC doesn’t need chicken-hearted, brainless, and sell-outs at its higher hierarchy. What the APC badly needs are leaders who are readily ready to doggedly shepherd the party’s faithful to confront electoral fraud, injustices, and all the negative “isms” which have been the defining traits of the Bio-led administration. Prayers, alone, would be pointlessly pointless if they are not backed by human efforts to compliment what is being prayed for.
The APC cannot, and will never, change anything in Sierra Leone if it only depends on the Krio adage of “we lef we case gee God”. This saying has never solved anything in Sierra Leone. Instead, it has always emboldened the cheaters, the crooks, the oppressors, the human rights violators, and bad leaders to continue doing immoral and unconstitutional things at the detriment of the citizenry generally. And besides, I’m yet to know of any Law School in the world where the Almighty God was once a pupil!
If you come to your house unexpectedly in the afternoon and chanced upon a thief trying to steal one of your prized possessions; will you clasp your hands and close your eyes and pray for the redemption of the thief’s soul? No. A man with functional scrotums will take a baseball bat and break the thief’s head! You won’t leave everything to God while the thief is strolling out of your house with one of your prized possessions.
It is because the current APC leadership seems to believe in “we lef we case gee God” that’s why the Electoral Commission for Sierra Leone (ECSL) is still treating them like the contents at “Bormeh”! If the current APC leaders had showed an iota of manliness on the eve of the June 24 general elections; Mohamed Konneh, the Chief Electoral Commissioner, would not have had the audacious audacity to do what he did. Maybe, just maybe, Mr Konneh might have thought of the APC leadership as a group of wailing kindergartens and knew that they would only scream blue murder and nothing would come out of their screaming if the elections were stolen!
And indeed, the APC leadership has been screaming blue murder for over three months now and has ended up asking its faithful to pray for political salvation instead of rallying them to seek from the government what is due them. Even when the final Report of the European Union Election Observation Mission (2023) has clearly inferred that what Mr Konneh announced on 27 June 2023 as the final Presidential election results didn’t reflect the wish of majority of Sierra Leoneans; the APC leadership is meekly asking its faithful to pray instead of taking the bull by the horns.
Surprisingly, the current APC leadership has been leading its faithful as if they are sheep being led to the slaughter. And the Bio-led administration has always been willing to be the custodian of the abattoir!
And what is ludicrously ludicrous is for the APC National Secretary General to ask the Inter-religious Council of Sierra Leone (IRCSL) to “…intercede for guidance and direction as the country will be entering such a crucial juncture of its political development…” And more ridiculous is for him to also request from that faith-based body that it informs its associates to ensure that, “…Muslim prayers be offered in mosques on Friday (Juma) 13 October 2023 and that Christian prayers be offered in churches on Sunday 15 October 2023….” Let lawyer Lansana Dumbuya keep his religiosity in the closet at his law firm in Freetown. Asking IRCSL to “intercede for guidance and direction” in an issue in which it also stands accused of complicity through willful silence is like asking an accomplice to a murder to be the custodian of the evidence to that murder!
But my question is: where was this same Inter-Religious Council after innocent citizens were killed in Makeni, Lunsar, Mile-91, Tombo, and the Pademba Road Correctional Centre in Freetown? Where was this Inter-Religious Council just after the ECSL created the current “electoral coup”? And where was this same Inter-Religious Council when the Bio-led administration was treating supporters of the APC as third-class citizens in their own country? As far as I am concerned; the hypocrisy of the IRCSL is one of the reasons why the country is in its current mess.
As a nation, we have fasted and prayed year-in and year-out for worldly salvation; yet things generally remain the same or even worse economically and politically. We now have to realise that God maybe no longer interested in our prayers which most Sierra Leoneans offer insincerely. We need to sort ourselves out realistically because the problems facing Sierra Leone today are not created by God but Sierra Leoneans themselves due to dishonesty and partisan interests.
What the APC needs now are not prayers. What that party needs are leaders with strategic thinking, hearts of steel, honesty, and commitment to the party’s original ideology. Its leaders must stop playing Dr Jekyll in the day and Mr Hyde at night. They just need to be honest with themselves and their supporters.
And besides, God maybe too busy with the current Israel-Palestine conflict to give APC supporters a listening ear.
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