Tuesday October 12, 2005
Mr. Mohamed Tunis , the Chairman of the New York Branch of the SLPP, has appealed to Mr. Charles Margai and other dissident members , who have left the party to bury the past and return to help develop it and seek the good of the Sierra Leonean people. Mr. Tunis made the appeal during an exclusive interview with COCORIOKO yesterday
Mr .Tunis also called on them to accept the new leader of the party, Vice-President Solomon Berewa , and work along with him for the betterment of Sierra Leone. He described the SLPP as a mass national party that was diversified and was home to all the tribes in Sierra Leone.
Mr. Tunis said it would be very difficult for any party to just come in and defeat such an established political entity like the SLPP. He asserted that while he believed that Charles Margai had many supporters from the new and old vanguard, he felt that they would succeed in electing him as a person , but not the party. “Charles has supporters but it is only Charles they are supporting, not the new party. An individual does not own a whole party .A party is a diversified body and one man cannot be a political party”, Tunis philosophied.
Continuing, Mr. Tunis stated : “If you want to be a leader, it does not mean that you must leave the main party and form your own party to be able to become a leader. I am appealing to my brother, Charles Margai, not to form his own party but stay within the party and wait for his time ” . He described Margai as a good, progressive and astute person who still has a place in the SLPP , but he warned that forming his own party was not the best solution for him. He challenged Margai to return to the SLPP so that the party’s rivals would not defeat it in 2007.
About the members who are defecting from the party, Mr. Tunis said that he was working round the clock to talk to dissatisfied members .He informed COCORIOKO that he spends a lot of time on the phone talking to disaffected members in Sierra Leone.
Philosophysing once again, Mr. Tunis intimated that the wounds were still fresh and when a wound is fresh , it does not start responding to a cure immediately. He said it will take some time but that peace will be restored in the SLPP.
Mr. Tunis told COCORIOKO that since he became the New York Branch Chairman he had worked very hard to unite the other chapters.
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