By Kabs Kanu in US (01/02/2023)
The COCORIOKO newsmagazine, Sierra Leone’s biggest and most widely read internet news portal, predicted it weeks ago and it has happened. The “Nearly Man”, the presidential pretender who just cannot be his own man, has decided to stop all the speculations and guesswork on his political direction and taken a definitive stand. He will leave the NGC and likely clamber into the bandwagon of President Maada Bio while continuing to weigh and prospect on his options. This was the bitter disappointment Kandeh Kolleh Yumkella (KKY) landed his myriad of followers this week, when in an astonishing address to his National Grand Coalition (NGC) partisans that many people condemned for being condescending and cheeky, KKY said he was leaving the party and he will continue consultations with President Maada Bio. (Photo: KKY and his late wife Philomena).
It had long been touted that KKY, after raising high the expectations of the nation had come to establish a needed strong and credible third force to break the duopoly of the ruling Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) and the opposition All People’s Congress (APC), was returning to the party he abandoned, the SLPP, to become the likely running mate for President Maada Bio in the forthcoming 2023 Presidential and General Elections. What a week of disappointment and anger it has been for many Sierra Leoneans who looked on Kandeh Yumkella as a God-sent redeemer to extricate the country from the stranglehold over Sierra Leone politics by the SLPP and the APC, whom a lot of Sierra Leoneans perceive as having failed the nation. And Sierra Leoneans have been venting their anger on Yumkella on social media while there are others who have demonstrated sympathetic understanding with Kandeh Yumkella, in view of the seeming dynamics that a third force has no chance to thrive in Sierra Leone.
Because the SLPP and the APC have established a strong grip on the nation and enjoy a giant’s share of the support of the populace, conveniently dividing support in the nation ethno-regionally and otherwise, with the SLPP enjoying a Southeastern dominance and the APC garnering much of its support from the Northwest. “There is no room for a third force in Sierra Leone”, argued one of KKY’s frenetic supporters on social media and he supported Yumkella’s decision to abandon the NGC, since Yumkella‘s overriding ambition has always been to become President of Sierra Leone, with eyes less on any ministerial or ambassadorial position. “Yumkella wants to be President and he cannot achieve it under the NGC because a third force will never win an election in Sierra Leone; therefore if he has to achieve his ambition, Yumkella has to return to his father’s party, the SLPP “, Musa Gbow argued fervently on social media.
But returning to the SLPP and using it as a route to achieve his presidential ambitions might open up new problems for both Kandeh Yumkella and the SLPP. Dr. Mohamed Juldeh Jalloh, the present Vice-President of the SLPP government, is a very popular decent, and lovable politician and he sits stoutly over the Fula votes, which helped Maada Bio gain power in 2018. Bio himself knows that it will not bode well for the SLPP if he replaced Korthor Juldeh with KKY as running mate, which will surely incur the wrath of the unforgiving Fulas, who have become one of the most economically and politically powerful ethnic groups now in Sierra Leone, (in fact the third largest after Mende and Temne. (Photo: Maada has failed the nation).
Assuming even that Bio might not strike against Juldeh right now and he might wait until 2028, if he wins a second term, to give Yumkella the green lights to succeed him as flagbearer of the SLPP, any snub on Juldeh now or in the future will jeopardize Fula support and votes, which the SLPP enjoy presently because many Fulas have not forgiven the APC for the treatment meted out to their people by the late President Siaka Stevens in the 1970s and 1980s as fully chronicled by Professor Alusine Jalloh, an academic of History, with no known political leanings, in his book, Muslim Fula Business Elites, and Politics in Sierra Leone (University of Rochester Press 2018).
Social media commentator, Lamrana Bah, vowed that the Fulas will not forgive Maada Bio too if he jettisons Dr. Juldeh Jalloh’s opportunity to become President of Sierra Leone, which Fulas now believe is their right. Within Paopa SLPP itself, there is a growing fanatical ethno-regional inclination not to support another non-Southeastern-born presidential aspirant under their party’s banner after what they complain that late President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah, an ethnic Mandingo, with Northern roots, did to the SLPP by ceding power to the APC in 2007 ( According to them). The Paopa faction of the SLPP, who fought Yumkella out of the SLPP in favour of Maada Bio, feel that President Kabbah deliberately abandoned the core values of their party, weakened its base, and caused the SLPP’s defeat in 2007.
They will definitely open the 2007 can of worms and kick against an ethnic Susu heading their party in 2028, should President Bio front Yumkella as flagbearer, especially if a popular and more trusted Southeasterner emerges as an aspirant. It could be seen from these dynamics that the Yumkella quagmire will not be easy to solve if he rejoins the SLPP to aspire for the presidency under the party’s ticket. Yumkella has disappointed the nation as the most likely politician to put paid to the dominance of the SLPP and the APC. And at the same time, not everybody will receive him with welcoming hands where it is believed he is heading. So, what do you do with an enigma called KKY?
