Dirty Politics!
Party Politics has been a thorn in the flesh of the political space; neither the ruling Sierra Leone Peoples Party (SLPP) nor the opposition All Peoples Congress (APC) party seems to cleanse themselves from the politics of intrigue and internal backstabbing and wrangling.
The generational gap continues to take its toll in the internal workings of these two major political parties sometimes pushing them to the brink of collapse. The magnitude of intra-partisan fighting among party officials coupled with inter-party nasty politics has most times swallowed the focus of party leaders both in the ruling and opposition parties much to the detriment of national development. The slogans of “a new APC” and “New Direction” brandished by the former President Ernest Bai Koroma and Julius Maada Bio respectively, have not paid any good dividend in the body polity; rancor, hatred and bitterness continue to be the mainstay of party politics.
This is manifested in the current state of affairs within the ruling SLPP, where the rift among some of the fundamentalists within the party is threatening its unity and cohesion. The trending attitude in the party is a recipe for chaos and deviation from its core tenet of “One People, One Country”; there is a sense of aggression that tend to spill, leading to friction between the young and the old generations vying for executive positions.
Drilling deep into the affairs of the party, the old school is reluctant to give way to a new generation. Historically, most members of the party had tasted tea from the snake kettle and failed the younger generation.
It is rather too early for certain members of the party to cry down their potential competitors for positions within the party structures. I hope the party leadership is doing what it takes to hold the party together; a new direction in life is of course essential.
Things are pretty much the same in the APC, where a band-wagon of litigations has almost crippled the very survival of the party. A group of reformers have drawn daggers with the old guards, calling for radical democratic reforms that will throw the latter out of the window.
This perennial political conundrum in the two political camps which have rulled the country since independence has led to break away factions and the formation of splinter parties as witnessed in the Peoples Movement for Democratic Change (PMDC) led by Legal Luminary and senior citizen, Charles Margai; the Coalition for Change (C4C) led by former Vice President Chief Alhaji Sam Sumana; the National Grand Coalition (NGC) lead by Hon Dr Kandeh Kolleh Yumkella and the Alliance Democratic Party (ADP) led by jailed leader, Mohamed Kamaraimba Kamara.
Indeed, a comparative analysis of the two biggest parties, the opposition All Peoples Congress and the ruling Sierra Leone Peoples Party suggests that there is very little difference that divides them.
By Abdul Kuyateh
Stay with Sierra Express Media, for your trusted place in news!
© 2021, https:. All rights reserved.
