Poor Zainab!
As I listened to the BBC Network Africa interview with Sierra Leone’s Foreign Minister yesterday morning, I could feel the discomfiture of the lady; I could almost see sweat running down her back. I said quietly that the lady must be wishing her interviewer was the BBC’s pro APC Hassan Arouni.
The Minister was being questioned about the spate of election related violence in Sierra Leone. Let me remind readers that one of the oft repeated APC evidences of stability in our country is the widely acclaimed Parliamentary and Presidential elections of 2007 which were described as peaceful, free and fair. What the APC never add to that is the fact that those elections were conducted under the aegis of the SLPP government. For that reason we’ve never criticized their conduct.
On the contrary what we have continued to decry is the conspiracy, the manner in which we lost the result. Now compare that with the advent of events since the APC came to power, from Parliamentary to local government elections; they have all been accompanied by violence, with the APC determined to stifle opposition or any threat to their hold on power. Â On one occasion it was so intense that NEC was forced to cancel the particular election. When it was resumed some weeks later a thoroughly intimidated and roughed-up population stayed away and the APC had a field day. Who could have missed the way in which they and their pro newspapers gloated that the APC had at last put a foothold in an SLPP stronghold?
They tried the same tactic in a Tongo local government bye election and again in Blama, which this time coincided with the Pujehun election. They were rebuffed by determined SLPP supporters and their mission failed woefully. Readers who did not read or see the photographs in yesterday’s edition of the Awoko newspaper are advised to obtain copies and see for themselves. I wonder whether the editors of the African Champion and the Exclusive newspapers attended the news conference of the National Electoral Commission on the just concluded Pujejun elections?
There was specific reference to Moijue Kaikai the deputy labour minister; there are the incriminating photographs of vehicles and armed thugs in the Awoko publication which leave no one in any doubt as to who they belonged.
And there was the Foreign Minister struggling with such phrases as territorial turfs and areas of influence as if they did not exist in 2007. When the security of Presidential candidates Ernest Bai Koroma now our President and Charles Margai created that mayhem in Segbwema, the same newspapers continue to describe the affair as an SLPP attack on the APC Presidential candidate. How many such newspapers have dared to report the Pujehun elections as they happened?
Somebody in faraway Washington who the African Champion describes as an SLPP supporter laments that I have gloated over the Pujehun results and both it and the Exclusive make it front page stories. The poor fellow hails the APC figures in Pujehun as a great achievement. What miserable logic.
As for the Foreign minister, she ought to be honest enough to admit that all this election violence is APC induced and provoked and she must only have impressed herself with that BBC interview.Â
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