SLPP Needs Deliverance
The main opposition Sierra Leone Peoples Party (SLPP) bears the credit of bringing peace to this nation after a decade long rebel war but, ironically, this is the party that has now won the championship of internal wars.
Just after ushering in peace and, subsequently, losing power to the ruling All Peoples Congress (APC) in 2007, the peace party has been embroiled in a succession of internal quarrels that seem to worsening day after day with no sign of a permanent solution. It appears the party is under a demonic spell that can never allow it to unite. Some forces of darkness seem to be bewitching the main opposition party.
If the SLPP is not suffering from satanic invisible forces, why should the party be plagued with palavers? And why do pride, greed, ego, deceit and other vices keep the party in permanent disarray?
Sometime ago, the old and erudite columnist, Sama Banya, who is one of the party’s godfathers, was invoking the party’s ancestral spirits to intervene. Sama might have resorted to invoking the ancestors after realizing that the diseases plaguing the party were beyond human solution.
SLPP elders seem to have lost control over the party as they cannot easily unite the membership on sensitive matters the border on the survival of the party.
Most of the party elders have been putting their own selfish interest above that of the party. Almost every party elder wants to be flag bearer. Small wonder the party had 18 contenders for the 2012 flag bearer position. That was a visible sign of disunity though a democratic best practice.
Since the notoriously controversial Makeni Convention which resulted in the secession of Charles Margai and his disciples, the SLPP has been locked in leadership struggles which have torn the once intact party into camps.
The party office in Freetown has become a scene a scene of sporadic violence. Police officers now monitor the party office and, worse of it, supervise party conventions-during the Bo Convention last year, there were more police officers than the delegates who elected Somano Kapen as Leader of the party.
Having followed the succession of palavers and struggles bedeviling SLPP over the years, I am tempted to believe that only divine intervention can deliver the SLPP from the bondage of disunity. May God help the SLPP and may our young democracy live long.
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