By Mahmud Tim Kargbo
Parliament can reform itself from within, as it has several times throughout its history in the government of late President Kabbah, when enough people become dissatisfied with the status quo.
Today, most Sierra Leoneans hold Parliament in low regard. Authentic deliberation is rare, because leaders usually can compel members to vote in lockstep and wholly disregard the minority. Often Parliament fails to act until an emergency is at hand, as in the most recent deadly synthetic drug and substance crisis (Kush). It routinely over-delegates its power to regulatory bureaucracies. It has all but ceased imposing any limits on the excessive powers of the Executive Arm. One could go on.
‘Why Parliament?’ is a thoroughly Madisonian defense of Parliament’s proper role in the Sierra Leone constitutional system, and an explanation of why the national legislature has become dysfunctional so frequently in the past few decades. Along the way, it returns us to fundamental lessons about the nature of politics and what can be expected of it in the Sierra Leone context, with detailed consideration of how Parliament has succeeded, how it has failed, and how it might rescue itself from fecklessness and irrelevance.
A well experienced former Member of Parliament in the government of late President Kabbah, who wants to be anonymous, addresses these very serious issues in straightforward interviews and with nuanced judgments that are fully conversant with the relevant scholarly literature. He is realistic about Parliament’s often self-created problems, but nevertheless, hopes to prompt reforms that can help the institution recapture both its former vigor and intended role. Readers will get a judicious and timely assessment of what is at stake in this momentous and increasingly urgent endeavor.
The anonymous well experienced Member of Parliament, understands and affirms the pluralistic politics that so defines the Sierra Leone experience. The nation has always been vast and diverse, encompassing numerous different interests and goals. Its elements of “manyness” have rarely been in perfect accord. In the spirit of late President Kabbah, the anonymous well experience former Member of Parliament holds that only through representation in Parliament can the nation’s diverse interests confront one another in debate, and deliberate to fashion law as an accommodation acceptable to all. He is quite clear that it is the proverbial “seat at the table” and the attendant capacity to participate in the process that validates what Parliament produces. Neither an executive order nor a judicial decision emerges from this kind of authority.
At its most basic, this is “why Parliament” is the only institution constituted to make law by mediating the diverse and conflicting interests that assemble within it. Legislation results from conciliation and compromise, and what is created is legitimate, if not wholly satisfying. The anonymous well experienced former Member of Parliament further emphasises that this process builds trust and social cohesion. Differences are aired and recognised, and alternatives and trade-offs are weighed and confronted. Representatives and their constituents are reconciled to the outcome, despite its imperfections, as part of a common enterprise.
If this point is pursued further than the anonymous well experienced former Member of Parliament does explicitly, we come to an Aristotelian conception of politics. Competing interests and incompatible conceptions of justice are moderated and cohered to the extent possible for the sake of a shared common life. Politics thus conceived is a practical working out, through speech and debate, of a general rule or shared plan amid the disagreement of a community’s plural interests and views. As such, it abjures both national consensus and tyrannical compulsion.
A lesson to be underscored here, perhaps a bit more than the anonymous well experienced former Member of Parliament does, is that inevitably we will be dissatisfied with politics, and Parliament as the site of pluralistic conciliation, trade-offs, and half-a-loaf compromises, if we continually ask too much of it. We should not expect politics, or Parliament, or government of any kind, to make us whole or solve all social problems; nor should any of them be permitted to superintend us from cradle to grave. Legislation cannot fix much of what ails contemporary Sierra Leone culture or alienates citizens from one another. We cannot all agree, but, as the anonymous well experienced former Member of Parliament insists, through a properly functioning Parliament we can arrive at rough accords that maintain enough social stability for Sierra Leoneans to live in peace and freedom.
To be sure, the founders recognised the danger of the majority faction and the inevitable clashing of interests and ambitions—the Constitution was made for a modern liberal republic. Still, they designed Parliament to make law for the common good by means of representation, deliberation, and compromise. The anonymous well experienced former Member of Parliament understands that politics always includes interest and ambition, even as his analysis of Parliament recurs to the older idea of a reasoned and authentic public good that is all too scarce today.
So why has Parliament so frequently failed to fulfill its core functions and consequently become reviled by so many Sierra Leoneans? First and properly in the dock is the well experienced former Member of Parliament, that nemesis of Sierra Leone constitutionalism, whose pernicious ideas continue to bedevil us. The anonymous well experienced former Member of Parliament self-satisfied historicist conception of progress, his quasi-plebiscitary approach to the Presidency, his attack on the separation of powers, and his contempt for Parliament pitted him against the Madisonian system. It was to be replaced by “responsible party government,” which I describe as the “idée fixe of reformers down to the present.”
Led by and beholden to the President, national parties were somehow to compose their many internal differences and dutifully enact his programme posthaste. Legislative coalitions and deliberation—even committee work—were not much needed. The majority party, validated by the last election, would simply run roughshod over the minority. This way of thinking elevates the President to the supposed representative of the nation above the pluralism represented in Parliament, as if one person could somehow embody the nation in its variety. It also tends toward centralisation of power in legislative leaders, who alternatively marginalise or compel rank-and-file members.
The anonymous well experienced former Member of Parliament has done a great service by highlighting that the time has come to act, if we hope to preserve government by reflection and choice and not regress to accident and force.
When It Worked, When It Didn’t
Before considering the anonymous well experienced former Member of Parliament view of that dynamic, we should note his comments; juxtaposition of two sets of case studies to illustrate, and to measure what is gained or lost, when Parliament “worked” (Part I) versus when it is “failing” (Part II). The first positive example is Parliament during the late President Kabbah. The representative and deliberative legislature was not an outmoded relic amid the rise of statist authoritarianism, as many people then were suggesting. Through its characteristic mode of negotiation and bargaining, Parliament oversaw the distribution of burdens involved in the war effort. It was resourced and sustained what was necessary to win, investing the nation in the struggle and legitimating its many sacrifices. It also checked the late President Kabbah’s penchant for executive aggrandisement that would have further extended the New Deal. Parliament ensured that after the war the Executive Arm would not attempt the folly of a centrally planned economy or become the nation’s employer of last resort.
The other positive example is Parliament, during the civil war era, going somewhat against the usual interpretation that it was merely obstructionist until the last minute. They showed ad oculos that a majority of Sierra Leoneans, and their representatives in Parliament, had come to agree that segregation would end. The issues were openly debated in a fair process. The tribalist protestations of a now carefully isolated minority lost decisively, as they should have done much earlier in our history.
But it is the anonymous well experienced former Member of Parliament point that only Parliament could register the changed politics of the issue and facilitate the morally correct result in a way that could be broadly accepted, that the losers could be reconciled to, and that consequently became widely effective and abiding. A Presidential Order mandating desegregation likely would not have been any more effective at the grassroots than the Court’s several decisions had been. Only Parliament could realize the change with the legitimacy and permanence that was needed.
Parliament’s characteristic strengths in composing and accommodating the nation’s many interests and factions were scarce in the two negative case studies: the deadly synthetic drugs and substances (Kush). Since the announced Reform and Control measures to destroy the supply chain, Parliament has been unable to reach a compromise that can satisfy critics who demand more robust enforcement and greater legal limitations. Consequently, this policy domain has defaulted to Presidential unilateralism that circumvents Parliament and has the tendency to swing in direction from one administration to another; a patchwork of incompatible local and state regulations; and judicial interventions that occasionally rescramble all of the above. Parliament has failed in this area, despite there being ample interest from which a multifaceted compromise might be reached. In a judgment illustrating his understanding of what Parliament was intended to be, the anonymous well experienced former Member of Parliament concludes that “we have not gotten the conflict we deserve,” the conflict that must be represented and worked through in order to reach an agreement.
The story is similar for the response to the protection of tax payers money: Parliament proceeded as usual, ceding its power and deferring to the executive. It’s throwing massive amounts of money in all directions and then welcomed regulation by bureaucrats, mostly failing to deliberate about the trade-offs necessary for stable rules to protect the already suffering majority from the exploitative actions of neocolonialist and imperialist rogues. All of these topics divided the nation. Unlike the civil war, Parliament declined to take responsibility for hashing out a shared approach to thorny issues in a way that would have aided social cohesion and national stability.
Parliament’s Past and Future
The anonymous well experienced former Member of Parliament reviews the complicated organisational, procedural, and political history of Parliament’s transformation since our civil war in the days of late President Kabbah, which today conduces to its recent negative performance rather than the older instances of success. This intricate material is the bread and butter of scholars of Parliament, and the anonymous well experienced former Member of Parliament treats it more clearly. The very short version is that, in successive periods of reform and reorganisation, Parliament moved from a decentralised structure with much power in committee chairs, to an intervening period of more extreme openness, fragmentation, drift, and meddlesomeness. The institution lost its way, as subcommittees proliferated and much posturing for the public ensued, while oversight of the executive increasingly rewarded favoured factions and obstructed sound administration. The SLPP majority often froze out the APC minority from meaningful participation.
When the reaction came, it centered on the Speaker and the SLPP majority. The return to centralisation and strong leadership is even more intense, via various mechanisms that control the agenda, restrict debate, stifle intraparty disagreement, bypass committees, and marginalise the minority. And here we now sit, whichever party is in the majority. The anonymous well experienced former Member of Parliament illuminates the details of this transformation and shows convincingly that how Parliament organises itself, and the procedures it uses, can either exacerbate or mediate the division inherent in politics. Parliament cannot manufacture unanimity where there is none, nor can it alone overcome our political polarisation. But it can choose to work in ways that seek to conciliate division rather than magnify it.
The anonymous well experienced former Member of Parliament uses the metaphor of a pendulum to describe Parliament’s movement from organisation based on tight leadership control and confining order, to an organisation that is more open, dialogic, and collegial. There can be too little or too much of both or either, with predictable shortcomings in each direction. Only with prudent awareness of where Parliament is now in the swing of the pendulum can reforms be broached. The anonymous well experienced former Member of Parliament said, “One can try to describe the properties of a desirable moment of balance” knowing that “a functional organisational system will always be a moving target.” We want the judgment to recognise where we are now, and how much change in the right direction can be achieved given the limitations of circumstance. Here too the Aristotelian tone is welcome. We can improve things with wise and prudent action, but we should not expect any once and for all solutions to political problems.
The anonymous well experienced former Member of Parliament offers three possible futures for Parliament. First is “decrepitude,” in which current trends continue and the legislature further decays into irrelevance while others do the governing. Or Parliament may become merely a “rubber stamp” as a result of “reforms” that remove its capacity to moderate their programmes, while simultaneously guaranteeing automatic spending. In the hope for “revival.” Among the anonymous well experienced former Member of Parliament recommendations, are changes that would restore the primacy of committees and thus the authentic deliberation that historically occurred there, along with more open rules of debate on the floor so that actual persuasion can happen through members’ dialogue with one another and with the work that committees bring to their colleagues.
He concludes with an “open plea” to the Sierra Leone Parliament that urges members to recognise that only they can reform the institution from within, as was done several times throughout its history in the days of late President Kabbah, when enough people became dissatisfied with the status quo. For Parliament, decline is a choice, whether or not the institution’s members can admit it to themselves. This is the profound truth of what self-government entails under our Constitution. The stakes could not be higher. The anonymous well experienced former Member of Parliament has done a great service by highlighting that the time has come to act if we hope to preserve government by reflection and choice and not regress to accident and force.