The 2010 Paramount Chieftaincy Elections

The fallout from the recent Paramount Chieftaincy elections conducted under the APC government continues. As of now there are still 11 vacancies that remain to be filled and this for no other reason than the open or covert political interference in the proceedings. It would be tempting to conclude that to have barely eleven left out of a total of forty election exercises speaks a lot for the procedure; but that would be a wrong picture and a wrong conclusion. In none of the successful ones was the exercise either before or during free or left to the Provincial Secretary and the Accessor chiefs on the one hand and to NEC which conducted the ballot. National Election Watch, NEW which monitored every process came out with a scathing condemnation of the role of the APC government or of its party functionaries either overtly or covertly. Many of the incidents had raised their head at the Declaration of Rights and that is where the ministry of Local government if it was sincere, should have stepped in. but it did nothing, not even in cases where either APC members of Parliament as in Debia chiefdom, a former minister as in Kissi Teng, or a Party official and councilor as in Kholifa. (Photo: Dr. Sama Banya)

In response to NEW’s accusations, the Local government minister made an unsuccessful effort to deny the allegations over UN radio by merely stating the ministry’s position of non interference rather than stating what positive steps were taken to stop the malpractices. The sad thing about it all is that as soon as Parliament had enacted the new laws governing the conduct of the chieftaincy elections, many of us expressed strong reservations about the implementation of the law without favour; but they fell on deaf ears because they had come from the opposition.  Nothing that has emerged from the whole exercise would confound skeptics like me.

To make matters worse there was a report in yesterday’s edition of the Global Times newspaper from the minister’s own chiefdom of Tonko Limba where instructions were allegedly given to the Provincial Secretary to disqualify the legitimate candidacy of two aspirants in order to improve the chances of his preferred candidate. I am waiting to hear my friend Dauda Kamara’s response to the story. What business had one of his deputies in the Kissi Teng chiefdom in telling the people of the confidence of the President in the sacked minister who has also featured very negatively in the NEW report? Either the same or another deputy minister was mentioned in the Maforki Chiefdom of Port Loko district. The local government minister would do well to put measures in place that would ensure that the proceedings in the remaining eleven chiefdoms would be completely devoid of such blatant abuses. He simply cannot deny responsibility with such bland statements as, “it is the policy of my ministry etc. etc.”

I have read with some interest the comments by Joseph Dumbuya living in the United Kingdom under the heading “Dr. Sama Banya and Zainab Bangura.” On the whole I believe that his comments have been fair and impartial. I would however call attention to one of two areas with which I disagree because they are not a true account of what transpired. “The two had clashed publicly over the Lotto management which would grab a slice of profit over the target set for it by some complicit criminal dim. The said ridiculous target was so easily available that the management was raking millions at the expense of the people….” In the first place Zainab Bangura and I had never clashed publicly over the Lotto management or any other matter. In the second place, Joseph Dumbuya has unfortunately joined certain sections of the press of the time in very wrongly assuming that the Lotto management was corrupt, an allegation that even Zainab’s own selected auditors could neither highlight let alone prove. Lotto management were never set targets; on the contrary they took an almost moribund company that was on the verge of bankruptcy to one of profitability, which paid increasing yearly dividends to its sole shareholder, the government. I WAS A MEMBER OF THAT NEW BOARD, and not an adviser to President Kabbah. Joseph Dumbuya may find it informative if he were to lay hands on my response to the for di people newspaper’ s innuendo about “Sama Banya and the lotto mafia.”            

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