It is barely five years down the line since FORUM NEWS has been pontificating regular commentaries on the winner takes all democratic dictatorship governance fashion of Julius Maada Bio’s.
No remedy was provided to that until when it resulted to the ugly outcome of the June 24 presidential election that declared Bio and the SLPP winners.
The winner takes all phenomenon under Bio is being largely characterised by selfish desires, greed, divisiveness, bad governance and state sponsored public sector corruption.
A political administration wherein the incumbent is always of the perception that much as they have been declared winners of any election, everything belongs to them, which is actually not democracy as required, and that must be discouraged moving forward with developing democracies like Sierra Leone’s.
It should be discouraged in the body politic of Sierra Leone because lessons learnt from winner takes all is not good for the growth and progress of the country.
This is due to the fact that with the winner takes all, divisiveness might creep in with intolerance, disunity, and ethno-regional politics across the board as it is now among Sierra Leoneans, at home and everywhere else, as long as there are Sierra Leoneans there. This must be a clamour with dissenting sentiments against these so called winners who want everything for themselves.
The winner takes all democracy is therefore certainly not good for a nation like Sierra Leone. Inclusive democratic cultural values must therefore be fully inculcated to take the highest precedents to get everybody together as people of one nation.
For all we know democracy does not belong to one set of community but an entire society that is why it is called democracy for all not just for few winners, which the dialogue mediators should remind the Bio government and the Samura Kamara led opposition APC of. They should be mindful of the facts that government now and in future is not their personal property but that of the government and people of Sierra Leone, and they must therefore be accountable to the populace.
So both APC and the SLPP should do away with their winner takes all political traditions for the good and progress of Sierra Leone’s democracy.
As a matter of point to note, Sierra Leone under the current political leadership spanning from April 2018 to date, has been on the wrong path of democratic governance with their winner takes all dictatorship rule under the guise of democracy. It is under this very disguise that this nation has seen drastic reversals of gains made by the past two political administrations, which deserve restoration.
Democratic and national development progresses are no longer visible. In fact, gains recorded by the late former President Alhaji Dr Ahmed Tejan Kabbah and ex-president Dr Ernest Bai Koroma in the areas of nation building, democratic consolidation, national cohesion, peace and security, good governance, the eradication of public sector corruption and host of other democratic governance values have long been eroded in the last five years by President Bio.
This is because of the winner takes all manner of democratic governance, as they aptly formed part of reasons responsible for the poorly managed June 24 election by the new electoral management body that was controversially instituted by the Bio regime.
So don’t ask why the head of the election commission Mohamed K. Konneh is only answerable to President Bio alone, on grounds that the process was fully funded by the Government of Sierra Leone and was therefore expected to perform against international best practices, with an outcome that redrew global media attention to Sierra Leone since after the COVID-19 pandemic and the EBOLA outbreak in 2014-2016.
Government must position Sierra Leone on the global stage for the good reasons, not just for electoral fraud in the interest of maintaining the incumbents.
As the nation anxiously awaits both parties to engage in the dialogue process, it is also highly anticipated that the missing links highlighted earlier will be fairly and transparently restored in the best interests of firmly consolidating Sierra Leone’s growing democracy in such a manner that the outcome of the whole engagement will reflect the ultimate will of the people.
The truth be told, as it has already been fully realised by president Bio that something actually went wrong, for which he instituted a committee that has looked into the problems associated with the credibility of the outcome of the June 24 poll, the nation expects restitution moving forward, and it being given where it is due to ease the tension and finally bring an end to the problem.
With that being done there are also anticipations that democracy will be surely given the needful respite to speak loud and clear without any room for doubt. It is because there are doubts and suspicions, is why the parties are on the table with moral guarantors and mediators.
So we crave the indulgence of the Commonwealth, the African Union and the Economic Community of West African States –ECOWAS and the Independent Commission for Peace and National Cohesion -ICPNC to be much patient with parties especially the minority groups and get to the bottom of the problems and address them once and for all.
We trust the sound reputations and credibility of the mediation team – the Commonwealth, the AU, ECOWAS, and the ICPNC. Sierra Leoneans hope that they will get to the crux of the matter, provide a permanent solution to it and forestall such in future by getting both leaders fully committed to a memorandum of understanding – MoU that never again would such be allowed to happen in Sierra Leone’s multiparty democracy.
