By Kabs Kanu
Do not let the bloggers and errant people fool you. Start getting tired of being fooled. Every day, new lies are conceived to continue giving our gullible grassroots supporters’ false hopes. We have remained in it and we have wasted one whole year.
The ECOMOG troops are not coming to change the government. That claim is laughable. They do not have the mandate. Sierra Leone is a sovereign state to the extent that everything is going on peacefully in the country and the opposition inadvertently accepted the rigged 2023 elections result by cooperating with the SLPP in a sham tripartite exercise.
The 2023 elections were decided the day APC called off their boycott, went back to Parliament, accepted the terms of reference of the Tripartite, joined SLPP in the one- sided exercise and to add insults to injury agree on 80 recommendations.
I cannot understand why some of our people are so steadfast in not reading between the lines that we, our own selves, took SLPP off the hook. If we really wanted electoral justice, we would have stood our ground and not listened to Maada Bio, the hypocritical USA and EU, the duplicitous ECOWAS and other stakeholders. We should have refused all overtures to return to governance. We should have staged massive demonstrations and made it difficult on the SLPP to hold on to their stolen mandate. The MPs and Mayors should not have returned.
I wholeheartedly support electoral justice. I am angrier than most people for what SLPP did to us in 2023 and my articles speak for themselves. But let us face reality. We are too cowardly to challenge and stand up to Maada Bio. We even go to the point of condemning protests and demonstrations. The golden opportunity given us — The Tripartite— we blundered throughout the process. We do not want to mobilize the people and fight Maada Bio for electoral justice. So, how do we want to get this electoral justice? Sadly enough, we have decided to do it by lying persistently your people and giving them false hopes.
We goofed badly at the Tripartite and it is very annoying. But even after all the mistakes; at the last resort the situation could have still been redressed. We should have rejected the 80 recommendations for not having what we want and boycotted the presentation of the recommendations to Maada Bio. Dr. David Moinina Sengeh, C- Bah and every Bio spokesman or woman were confidently drumming it home that there was no rerun in the recommendations and that whatever was recommended was about future elections. APC should have taken the cue and insisted that the area of divergence —the rerun issue— should have been included in the recommendations so that there would have been 81 recommendations. But we were plodding on senselessly and blindly, and cooperating with the SLPP in everything, even with all these harsh facts slapping us in the face that the Tripartite was not going our way.
I even learn that some APC members of the Tripartite strongly advised against accepting the 80 recommendations and joining the criminal Emmanuel Gaima and others in presenting them to Bio. If we were serious about electoral justice, that was where we would have flexed our muscles but we didn’t. We were not working as a team.
Do people know that we are bungling our goodwill and the sympathies we once enjoyed from America and the International community by now turning around (After we had accepted the 80 recommendations that had nothing about a rerun) and now insisting that we are still fighting for electoral justice? We have to be careful that we do not play into the SLPP narrative to the international community that we, APC, are the problem in Sierra Leone.
The only good that will come from the ECOMOG arrival is that SLPP might not be able to rig elections again and kill innocent protesters because ECOMOG will stand between the SLPP and the people and intervene.
The Sierra Leone military and police do not know that they are about to lose the ruthless power they have over our people. ECOMOG will not sit down and see Bio’s army and police killing innocent protesters in Sierra Leone. Count that as one of the good things of the ECOMOG deployment.
The next good thing from the ECOMOG deployment is that if APC win in 2028, they will benefit more from ECOMOG than SLPP because ECOMOG will protect the government from being overthrown by this warmongering SLPP Maada Bio has deviously created. Trust that the present SLPP will not accept the nonsense APC have accepted from Maada Bio. They will try to make it impossible for the APC to govern and without ECOMOG, the next APC Government, whether good or bad, would have been short-lived once we continue to be cowardly and run by people mesmerized by the SLPP. But, with ECOMOG in place, SLPP will not be able to take advantage of our weakness.
ECOMOG told Samuel Doe to leave in 1990, though they were not the Supreme Court of Liberia, because Doe had lost his authority through war, as the NPFL and INPFL rebels had taken most of the country, except the Executive Mansion. There was no longer a government in power and Liberia had lost control of its borders and its sovereignty. Therefore, ECOMOG decided to overstep its mandate to ask Doe to leave so that a neutral interim government would be imposed as it was the only way peace would have been restored. Doe refused and a plot was hatched to lure him to the Freeport of Liberia, the ECOMOG headquarters, where he was captured and disposed of.
The big mistake APC made was to return to Parliament and governance, participate in the sham Tripartite and accept and join SLPP to present to Maada Bio the 80 recommendations. Bio and America outsmarted and fooled us. It is a painful fact to bear. It is a bitter pill to swallow but we have to move our party forward. They outsmarted us with our own connivance. Nothing else will l be gained continuing this fight.
I want electoral justice more than you who might misunderstand this article. BUT YOU CAN’T EAT YOUR CAKE AND HAVE IT. Let us be honest. We have blown it. Let us therefore move on and concentrate on returning to power in 2028.
If we refuse to move on, fail to restructure our party, solidify our bases and put the right people and structures in place to win the 2028 elections, it will be heartbreak in four years. If by our own negligence to do the needful and we lose the 2028 elections, we will get no support even from the international community who failed us even when we were cheated in 2023.
Let us unite and start preparing for 2028. We must stop giving our people false hopes with every swing of the pendulum, while time is going. Each time we give them false hopes, they do not come true at the end.
This newspaper is concerned with this new narrative we have latched into that ECOMOG is coming to remove Maada Bio and install Samura Kamara. We know it is not possible, so why not tell our people the truth and stop wasting their time? Are we going to be on this until 2028 sneaks on us?
ECOMOG is not coming with a mandate to remove Maada Bio. Let our people know this instead of setting them up for more frustration when it does not happen.
Without people’s power, we cannot have electoral justice so let us put our backs to the wheel and begin preparing for 2028. It is painful but we have no choice.
