Yet another third force bites the dust

THIRTEEN presidential candidates are vying for the top job in Sierra Leone on June 24. But 11 of them are just making up the numbers. They will never have a look-in.

The battle for supremacy will be between the incumbent, Julius Maada Bio, representing the ruling Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP), and Samura Kamara, the opposition All People’s Congress (APC) candidate.

Bio is going for a second term, while Kamara is running for the second time, having lost in 2018. For the other candidates, they will only become relevant when they are approached to trade votes if the presidential election goes to a second round, which will inevitably be between Bio and Kamara.

The parties that keep sprouting up over the last 30 years are just peripheral. Mere irritants that have always been swept aside, in the end, by either the SLPP or APC even though they might try to muddy the waters for a while.

Since leading Sierra Leone to independence from Britain on April 27, 1961, the SLPP, which was formed in 1951, has held power, intermittently over the years. But the APC, whose members split from the SLPP in 1960, has held power longer over various periods as it swapped positions with the SLPP. Three military regimes have made up the rest of the time when politics WAS side-lined.

The SLPP was in power from 1961 until 1967 when it lost the election to the APC – the very first time in independent Africa that an opposition party had defeated the government in power. But then the army made its first intervention in politics in the country, and after a one-year military interregnum, power was handed to the APC’s Siaka Stevens in 1968.

The APC has had a longer stay in power because of the strong-arm tactics it regularly employed against political opponents in the 1970s. During the 1973 election, the SLPP was cowed into submission by the APC’s violence.

The SLPP withdrew all its candidates, leaving the APC as the sole party in parliament. But four years later, the SLPP met force with force in its Southern Province stronghold, capturing 10 seats, rattling the APC.

Thus, sufficiently rattled, Stevens, who had become president in 1971, contrived to get the Constitution amended to make Sierra Leone a one-party state in 1978, with the APC the sole party. All but one of the SLPP MPs were swallowed up by the APC.

So, from 1968, the APC ruled the roost until 1992 when young army officers, led by Captain Valentine Strasser, and including one Lieutenant Julius Maada Bio, overthrew the APC government under Joseph Momoh, who had stepped down as Army Commander to become president when Stevens retired in 1985.

So, from 1992, and in the midst of a civil war, the young Turks were in power until, in a palace coup, Bio ousted Strasser in January 1996. When he became Chairman of the National Provisional Ruling Council (NPRC), Bio tried to extend his stay in power by arguing that there should be peace before a return to democratic rule.

Sierra Leoneans did not buy Bio’s argument and after several public wranglings, the NPRC agreed to organise elections. Dr Ahmad Tejan Kabbah, representing the SLPP became president in 1996 after defeating Dr John Karefa-Smart of the United National People’s Party (UNPP) in the second round. For once, the APC could not provide a formidable challenge to the SLPP.

The party had splintered after an APC stalwart, Thaimu Bangura, formed the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), which weakened the APC. The NPRC had tried to find a way of hanging on to power by backing the formation of the National Unity Party (NUP), which failed woefully in the 1996 presidential election. Less than a year in power, in May 1997, Kabbah was overthrown by another military takeover, this time led by Major Johnny Paul Koroma.

In February 1998, Koroma’s Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) was ejected from power by Nigerian troops under the aegis of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) Monitoring Group (ECOMOG). Kabbah resumed power, and when he stepped down after two five-year terms, the APC returned to power under Ernest Koroma in 2007.

Solomon Berewa, who was Kabbah’s Vice President, stood for the presidency in 2007. But, once again, another split, this time within the SLPP, scuppered Berewa’s ambitions. Charles Margai, scion of the country’s second Prime Minister, Sir Albert Margai, felt he should be the presidential candidate of a party that had been headed by, first, his uncle, Dr Milton Margai, who led Sierra Leone to independence, And then by his father.

This was not to be, and he left to form the People’s Movement for Democratic Change (PMDC). Naturally, his supporters within the SLPP followed him, and this caused a drop in the party’s vote, not to mention the suspicious cancellation of a number of crucial SLPP votes by the Electoral Commission, thus paving the way for the return to power of the APC.

In 2018, it was the turn of the National Grand Coalition (NGC) to fail to remove the continued stranglehold that the SLPP and APC have on power in the country. The formation of the NGC came about when a former Director-General of the UN Industrial Organisation (UNIDO), Dr Kandeh Kolleh Yumkella, who had stepped down from the body in 2013 after two terms in office, decided that politics was for him.

On a whistle-stop tour of Europe and the US, Yumkella told his burgeoning support base among Sierra Leoneans in the diaspora that he planned to be one of those contesting to become the presidential candidate of the SLPP to take on the APC aspirant in 2018. By May 2014 the Kandeh Kolleh Yumkella (KKY) Movement, made up predominantly of SLPP supporters, emerged in the UK to urge him to enter politics.

He contended that it was easy for him to go for the SLPP because his father was a founder-member of the party in 1951. He told a rally in South London then: “In our country people present themselves for leadership. I did not have to do that. It was a convergence of circumstances that got the KKY Movement going.”

But when Yumkella eventually challenged for the SLPP presidential candidate position, he lost to Bio whose supporters used strong-arm tactics to get their man on the ballot. Bio defeated Samura Kamara of the APC after Yumkella left the SLPP in a huff and became leader of the nascent NGC.

His detractors argued that his father did not abandon the SLPP in the 1960s when he did not become leader of the party. When I interviewed Yumkella for the Ghana News Agency in November 2017, he told me that he left the SLPP because it had deviated from its founding principles based on inclusivity.

“The party has become devoid of these core values, so I decided to move on. Some within the party wanted me to hang on but there is too much corruption within the leadership,” Yumkella said.” If the leaders are so corrupt, what will they do when they get to power?”

When I asked him what the NGC would offer Sierra Leoneans, he said: “The NGC will follow a results-based policy whereby contractors will be policed by the people to deliver on development projects. There are too many contracts that have been awarded without the projects being finished.

“With my experience in development, I will give a timetable of what can be delivered and what can’t in the first five years of our government. Development is incremental.

“We have to start adding value to our natural resources. For example, we are sitting on huge reserves of iron ore, so we can have steel plants,” Yumkella added.

To Sierra Leoneans this now sounds like cant. They were hoping that Yumkella would serve his political apprenticeship over the last five years to come up with a party that could eventually break the political mould in the country. But he has disappointed them by returning to the SLPP for the June 24 presidential and parliamentary elections, destroying the chances of the NGC.

Yet again, a third political force has failed to make the grade in a perennial twohorse race in politics in Sierra Leone.