By Titus B. Thomson, London
Coming events cast their shadows and so the saying goes that what is to come is in itself offered to us by signs and premonition. The die has been cast. The Fisher verdict is not to be considered a spanner in the works but should be seen for what it is. This is a parody of the mismanagement that has plagued the APC all these years to the extent that it had to take one man, brave enough to stand up and show that enough is enough.
The judgement is robustly legalistic and yet simple in its elucidation. What Fisher has done in a nutshell is to offer the APC a chance to rebuild and more so to rebuild its structures better than what it was before.
I for one do not fault him but turn the lens squarely on those who have led this party for the past 20 years, distasteful of the greed and avarice of some to the extent that they could not even think beyond the existence of the Party Chairman as if on his bowing out, the APC shall fall? Yet at the onset of his stated intention to retire from front line politics, those who were fanning the flames of discord were the erstwhile Chairman to vacate became the first to rise, prematurely to take his place.
The hypocrisy of it all and the bellicose marauding of power thirsty tendencies clouded the better judgement of men like Osman Foday Yansaneh. His rush to declare interest for the Chairmanship of the Party was tainted with desperation and showed an intrusive nature of avarice yet unsurpassed. Now that this verdict has come out, it would not be surprising if he does not lead a barrage of self-interest idioramuses to ask for an appeal that he knows would surely hurt the Party more than it would benefit him.
It is indeed sad that as National Secretary General, Osman Yansaneh should have been planning how the Party would celebrate or otherwise mark the end of tenure of Ernest Bai Koroma even before we go to the next convention, to put together a compendium of the achievements of the APC under his governance and to sketch for eternity, a concise record of his personal sacrifice and dedication, success in bringing the Party back to power and serving as President for two consecutive terms. None of these occupied him but a botched attempt to lay the ground for him to ascend to the position when he himself knows that this was not the time for him to have been engaged in such melodramatics.
In a nutshell, Osman Yansaneh has failed this party and has allowed the party to look like a bunch of power-hungry hustlers without a vision or mission. It is shameful and degrading, that it had to take a court order to bring it to the attention of these miscreants that their actions were unlawful and ultra vires of the very governing document we were all supposed to be ascribed to.
The revolving door corruption was too endemic as was the egregious criminality that underpinned that corrupt sequence of events that saw ill matched persons selected to man positions in the Party, the absence of law and order and a complete disregard for legality led to the removal of symbols from many who held second citizenships only for that to be determined that such was not sufficient to deny any person who is Sierra Leonean by birth to be eligible for elective office.
It is a shame that this landmark interpretation of the Constitution was the result of a case brought by the APC, yet the NSG who should have had full oversight of that matter dropped the ball and had even asked that the matter be vacated without a proper deliberation of its merits.
It was Yansaneh’s fault for misleading the Party on the issue of Kandeh Yumkella on account of some filial ambiguity in much the same way as he proposed and hedged his bets on Nfa Alie to be made Electoral Commissioner over a much loyal and professional alternative in the person of Miatta French. It was also Yansaneh vitriolic vendetta against Alhaji Samuel Sam Sumana that engendered his dismissal from the Party and the persecutions of Kainday Bangura and others on prevaricated charges of “anti- party activities” that caused the gaping divide in the APC in Kono District. Once we lost the ball on those issues, and our vacuous disengagement with many of our loyal supporters across the spectrum, the APC became disentangled from its mainstay and left to drift and dislodge from its support base.
Now that we have an order against the illegal National Secretary General, one wonders what records he will have to hand over as he vacates the Party Office in less than two weeks’ time. Will he rouse the spirits of the Task Force to rebel against the new interim administration that will take over or will he now sign the hundreds of membership card applications that he was refusing to sign because he was busy finding ways to corrupt the Chairmanship elections with his own delegates?
In a way, many, including those who lay about at the Party office would not be sad to see him go. Yansaneh was not a giving but a receiving politician. He was ways embroiled in deals and arrangements that were in their entirety dismissive of proper administration of his office. He has scant records of how the Party is organized because his sole purpose was self-preservation. There is hardly any mention of a deputy NSG or what role he was allowed to play in the Secretariat because nothing gets done unless Yansaneh puts his hands to it. That has always been a bad way of managing the affairs of an institution and in his own inimitable way, Yansaneh did that to perfection that has now resulted in the dismantling of his empire.
This is not the end of the APC. It is heartening that many are now seeing that if Yansaneh and his cohorts can be given the boot out of Marine House, then there will be a chance to start the process of rebuilding the Party.
The APC is bigger than all of its parts but at the same time, it is important that we all play our role to help make it better. This Party has a strength that goes beyond its membership.
We must draw on that strength and make this a party that can regain State House in 2023. Leaving Yansaneh in charge of such a challenge would be doomed to failure. So for that, I say thank you Justice Adrian Fisher, you have given the APC a lifeline.
Now is the time for us to rebuild better!
