By Mohamed Salieu Kamara: UK-Based Human Rights Activist Campaigning for Democracy and Human Rights
30th May 2024
If a huge number of people call for change, the government will have to react. If we want to avoid uprisings, or demonstrations, we need to respond to the peoples desperate need for change. Youths are the lifeblood of any nation; they are the future leaders. They need to be heard and have to be involved. Everybody knows that unelected President Bio did not win the June 24th 2023 multi-tier elections; the APC know it, the SLPP know it; the International Community knows it; and above all, the people of Sierra Leone know it.
Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the Republic of Sierra Leone where men, women and children were free from torture, killing, arbitrary arrest, unlawful detention, oppression and prosecution.
It takes no compromise to give people their rights; it takes no money to respect the individual. It takes no political deal to give people freedom. It takes no survey to remove repression. Being a Sierra Leonean is about having the right to be who you are. Sometimes that doesn’t happen since 2018 to date. History, in general about the SLPP Paopa undemocratic government, only informs us what bad government is. We in Sierra Leone do not have a government by the majority. We have had a government by the minority who participate in our democracy to kill democracy in Sierra Leone since 1967 to date.
Victims ‘want no amnesty’ for the unelected President Julius Maada Bio. To deny people their human rights is to challenge their very humanity. Our country will not stand for any political plan that includes amnesty for insurgents this time. We take the Constitution very seriously. The biggest problems that we’re facing right now have to do with the unelected President trying to bring more and more power into the executive branch and not go through Parliament at all. And that’s what we intend to reverse when Dr Samura M Kamara becomes the President of the Republic of Sierra Leone after June 19th 2024.
Let the world know the hypocrisy that’s practiced over here. Let it be the ballot or the bullet. Let him know that it must be the ballot or the bullet. When you take your case to the International Community or the Economic Community, West African States (ECOWAS), African Union, and the United States, you’re taking it to the criminal who’s responsible; it’s like running from the wolf to the fox. You don’t have a revolution in which you love your enemy. And you don’t have a revolution in which you are begging the system of exploitation to integrate you into it. Revolutions overturn systems. Revolutions destroy systems.
And we intend to expand it from the level of civil rights/human rights to the level of human rights/fundamental rights. As long as we fight it on the level of civil rights/civil liberty, we’re under Maada Bio’s jurisdiction. We’re going to his court expecting him to correct the problem. He created the problem. He’s a criminal! We don’t take your case to the criminal court of Sierra Leone; you take your criminal to court. And when I speak, I don’t speak as an APC or a SLPP, or a Sierra Leonean. I speak as a victim of Sierra Leone’s so-called democracy under the leadership of the unelected shameless President Bio. You and I have never seen democracy; all we’ve seen is hypocrisy.
I’m not the kind of person who comes here to say what you like. I’m going to tell you the truth whether you like it or not. So our next move is to take the entire civil rights struggle, the problem, into the United Nations and let the world see that Maada Bio is guilty of violating the human rights of 8 million Sierra Leoneans right down to the year of 1996 and still has the audacity or the nerve to stand up and represent himself as the leader of the Sierra Leone People’s Party SLPP Paopa undemocratic government led by the unelected President of Sierra Leone.
