Sierra Leone is corruption of the Spanish “Sierra Leona”, meaning mountains of lions or lion mountains. We don’t know whether it was a Spanish trade post at one time. History records it that when the British Parliament abolished the Slave Trade in 1830, the government went searching for a place where to resettle the freed slaves. That was how this tiny country in West Africa was founded. Mountains of Lions!
The lions, June 24, roared across the sierra and the outside world took notice. They were not real lions, but actual men and women, 2.8 million voters who poured out of their homes to elect a new president, parliamentarians, regional governors and city council officials. Of course, the presidency was the jewel everybody wanted.
The race was between the incumbent president, Julius Maada Bio, 59 ( a former this, a former that!), who was gunning for a second term of a 10-year tenure and 13 opposition candidates who knew, individually, they stood no chance against the power of incumbency, yet couldn’t come together on a single ticket. An unyielding personal ambition is the plague that has blighted the political opposition in Africa. It is either I become the president or nobody else does! Joseph Conrad puts it thus: “*Sometimes it seems to me that man has come where he is not wanted, where there is no place for him; for if not why should he want all the (power)?… He wants to be a saint, and wants to be devil- and every time he shuts his eyes he sees himself as a very fine fellow- so fine he can never be. … In a dream. ….” Ambition (and dream), Shakespeare says, “should be made of sterner stuff”. This sterner stuff should include knowing that you stand a better chance of winning, fighting the enemy together than doing so individually.
Well, in the June 24 presidential vote, the opposition candidates lost, expectedly. But they cried foul, alleging “daylight robbery”. Samura Kamara, 72, the man who came second and had lost against the same Bio before, said the vote tallying was not transparent but he had taken the official result under the chin. Bio was sworn into office on Tuesday, June 26th, a day after the electoral body confirmed his victory, saying he had won by 56 percent – the constitutional threshold required to be declared winner on the first ballot.
Meanwhile, The West African Elders Forum (WAEF) and other international observer missions in Sierra Leone have called for calm in the country. The missions, headed by former Nigerian presidentfor Goodluck Jonathan for WAEF; Ethiopia’s Hailemariam Dasalegn Boshe for the African Union, and Mohamed Ibn Chambas for ECOWAS said in a statement that they were urging citizens to desist from inflammatory rhetoric capable of jeopardising the peace or undermining democratic process of the country.
The missions expressed concerns over inflammatory language circulating on social media and appealed to the citizens of Sierra Leone to continue to exercise restraint concerning the outcome of the elections.”The Heads of Missions urge all Sierra Leonians within and outside the country to refrain from any inflammatory language that could lead to violence, loss of lives and destruction of the country,” the statement said.
Whether the calls for calm will be well received by the protagonists and antagonists alike, we wait to see. Meanwhile, there are some savoury endings we must note. One, Sierra Leone has proved that it’s possible to hold all elections in one day. Spacing elections is proving too costly as the Nigerian case has proved. Forget the argument that one country is large while the other is small. Technology has made nonsense the spatial hurdle that requires people to travel long distances over several days to collate and announce election outcomes. People who object to electronic election result transmission are self serving, because they cannot bear to to know they are losing the vote. We who want a more open electoral system must resist this small clique of power mongers.
Second and more importantly, the elections in Ghana, Liberia, The Gambia, Nigeria and now Sierra Leone have turned the direction of the wind of democratic change in way of English speaking West Africa. In the last one year plus, the military has overthrown civil authorities in Mali, Chad, Burkina Faso and Guinea. Today, Senegal, once considered the subregion’s most stable democracy, is seething with discontent and risks implosion in the manner of its neighbours. We in the English speaking portion of ECOWAS must not let slip the baton in the democratisation race. Not that our people are economically better off but it is far better to be in want and be free than being in plenty and be shackled.
