By Kabs Kanu
I had a bitter and splenetic argument today with a colleague in the diplomatic field who is following closely what is happening in Sierra Leone. He has also been reading my articles in COCORIOKO and Facebook. He told me that in the light of what is happening in Sierra Leone presently, the power- sharing idea being mooted by the Bio government might be the best bet for the opposition APC.
I totally disagreed with him and we had a very stormy argument as usual that deteriorated almost into a screaming match between us. This was his argument :
The opposition looks very weak, disorganized , disunited and unserious , the media are compromised and he did not think there was even a civil society in the country . Bio has everything going for him, he said , and in the circumstances he doubted whether another election would deliver a decisive defeat for the government. He feared that the SLPP dominated the ECSL and the judiciary and that a victory for the opposition could be declared dead before even arrival.
I argued vigorously that Maada Bio would not dare to rig any election in Sierra Leone . I made it clear to him that the people were ready for him and even the international community would not allow Bio to rig another election. The diplomat agreed with me on that score and said that scenerio was possible in an ideal situation where all things were equal, but he feared that this was not the case in Sierra Leone. He said SLPP was not undefeatable . The APC could well trounce the SLPP in the next elections due to the disaffection within the populace. I was glad that he knew that.
But he warned me that History had shown that for a dictatorship to collapse, there must be an interplay of a variety of factors, and while an organized opposition can be a catalyst, In many cases, the end of a dictatorship is brought about by internal divisions, popular uprisings, coups and stakeholder intervention. Other than coups, there is no other to defeat a strong dictatorship .
And then, he added, when all is said and done, he said, the prerequisite for the downfall of a dictatorship is a well – structured opposition . There must be a strong opposition fighting the dictatorship.
He served in Liberia in the 1980s. He said that though Samuel Karyon Doe of Liberia was killed by a rebel army, his eventual defeat would not have been possible without a strong, vibrant, serious, committed opposition that laid the foundation by making Doe very unpopular within the country and to the international community .
He recalled the aftermath of the 1985 rigging of the elections by President Doe and the subsequent Quiwonkpa coup. Doe arrested the opposition leaders but Doe had to ultimately release them because the opposition had been very strong and ticking the right boxes. They had been making robust representations with Liberia’s international stakeholders . They were even talking to Liberia’s donors and partners- in- progress and even the CIA.
He said that the Charles Taylor invasion in 1989 got popular support from the people because the opposition had successfully hardened the hearts of the people against Samuel Doe. Though Taylor entered the country with only 23 serious fighters, the rebel ranks quickly swelled to hundreds , then thousands because the people were ready to fight for their own redemption. Regrettably, he did not see the same preparedness in the people of Sierra Leone.
Well, there you have it , my dear Sierra Leoneans. That is the opinion of a diplomat who served in Africa, the Middle East snd the Caribbean. I have said the same things over and over and it now sounds like a broken record.
The opposition needs to put aside its factional fightings and get cracking . The primary tesponsibility to defeat Bio and his oligarchy rests with the APC and the people. Maada Bio is not unbeatable. I still have great hopes in the APC and I believe that the APC National Delegations Convention next year might deliver a redemption but that lazy, weak and compromised executive in Freetown must go and give us back our political party .
The APC has the grassroots support. Maada Bio did not defeat the APC in 2018 and 2023. The victory was given to him in 2018 on a silver platter and in 2023 he stole the elections in broad daylight. Bio will never defeat a united APC. Let us all resolve to preach peace and unity within the APC. Let us fight to unite our party and reach out to the people. We need to mobilize the people against the SLPP. Together, we can redeem Sierra Leone from the dictatorial, anarchic , tribalistic, regionalistic, corrupt, manipulative and destructive hands of Maada Bio and the SLPP.