By Oumar Farouk Sesay
Every nation is shaped as much by what it remembers as by what it chooses to forget. Some grow by accumulation – layer upon layer of effort, error, correction, and endurance.
Others, more tragically, grow by erasure. They mistake amnesia for freshness, rupture for reform, and repetition for movement. Sierra Leone belongs, perilously, to the latter category.
Our national malaise is not the absence of ideas, visions, or plans. It is an addiction to beginning again.
We have perfected the theatre of the reset. Each electoral cycle arrives like a hard reboot: screens go dark, memory wiped, progress unsaved. What came before is dismissed as contaminated.
What follows is announced as unprecedented. In this choreography of forgetting, governance is reduced to spectacle – origins endlessly proclaimed, arrivals perpetually deferred.
It is in this context that Zainab Bangura’s recent remarks on Truth Media acquire their weight. Calling on the political elite to agree on a national development blueprint – broad enough to carry the whole country, binding enough to outlive individual administrations – she named, with rare clarity, the disease beneath the symptoms Her intervention sounded modest. It was, in truth, insurgent.
To speak against perpetual reset is to challenge one of our most deeply ingrained political reflexes: the conviction that power confers authorship over history itself.
For decades, Sierra Leone has been trapped inside this loop. Roads stall mid-sentence because another voice first uttered them. Hospitals are renamed as though care were partisan. Education reforms are dismantled not for failure but for ancestry.
Policies are launched with fanfare and abandoned with indifference. Each incoming administration performs a ritual cleansing of the slate, as though governance was an act of erasure rather than stewardship.
The result is not progress but vertigo. We move constantly, yet remain suspiciously close to where we began.
Perpetual reset flatters authority. It allows each government to posture as origin rather than custodian, to privilege visibility over value, novelty over depth. It keeps the state unburdened -free from the weight of unfinished promises, unaccountable to continuity.
But no nation matures on amnesia. A country that disowns its yesterday at every turn quietly mortgages its tomorrow.
What Bangura gestures toward is not another manifesto to be marketed at election time. It is a refusal of the reset itself. A call for a People’s Manifesto – not as a campaign document, but as a covenant.
A shared national agreement on direction that survives victory speeches and outlasts defeat. Not a script for who governs next, but a collective memory the state is forbidden to delete.
Such a covenant would not weaken democracy; it would discipline it. It would insist that elections be contests of execution rather than auditions for reinvention. Governments would still change – as they must – but the national trajectory would remain legible, cumulative, held. Power would rotate, but purpose would endure.
Perpetual reset has trained us to celebrate beginnings while neglecting arrivals. We lay foundations with passion, only to abandon the doorway. We rehearse futures we never inhabit.
And in this endless restarting, we have paid dearly with time, with trust, with the slow withdrawal of citizens who no longer expect promises to ripen into institutions.
To break this cycle is not to cling nostalgically to the past. It is to stop setting it on fire. It is to accept that progress requires memory, that development demands patience, that nations are not built by those who announce starts, but by those who honour what has already been set in motion.
Bangura’s intervention matters because it names the loop and points, quietly but firmly, toward the exit. It reminds us that the deeper crisis is not who governs, but how often governance is forced to forget itself.
Perhaps the most radical act available to us now is not another bold beginning but a sober commitment to continuity.
The question facing Sierra Leone is no longer which party deserves another chance to begin again. It is whether we are prepared, at last, to save our progress, exit the loop, and live inside the future we keep reopening.
A nation does not become whole by restarting endlessly. It becomes whole on the day it decides that its history is not a file to be erased, but a structure to be finished—and finally inhabited.
Happy New Year.
