By Karamoh Kabba
Like many or all protestant christian denominations from the Catholic Church, surviving political parties in the existing multi-party democracy in Sierra Leone are mostly products of protestations against the Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) and later the All Peoples Congress (APC) party.
The APC being the earliest splinter party from the SLPP in 1960, rode on the back of trade unionism and transactional politics with smaller groups [Creole, Kissi and Kono] in the western and eastern regions to outnumber its parent party [SLPP] to win an election for prime minister in 1967 just seven years after its formation.
Since then, many more splinter parties mushroomed mostly because of political disagreement in both the SLPP and the APC. None of them has, however, been able to achieve the feat of taking up the mantle of governance of the country as the APC did.
The United National People’s Party (UNPP), led by Dr. John Karefa-Smart, one of the founding fathers of the SLPP, actually came very close to governing the country in 1996.
Dr Karefa-Smart actually succeeded if the popular opinion that the presidential election was rigged and Maadia Bio’s recent insinuation that he rigged the elections when he was the junta ruler in favour of the SLPP hold for truth.
Some political pundits espoused the decadence of the APC under President Dr. Saidu Momoh’s pre- and civil wartime eras as one of the causes of the UNPP’s success. And indeed, the 1996 elections were conducted right around that time when the APC was picking up and dusting off itself from that decadence.
And it was that fledgling and war wearied APC group, hoping to fight another day, that entered the presidential race only to end up supporting and thereby assisting to tilt the political scale in favour of the SLPP in the 1996 presidential election.
An eminent operative of the APC told me that the APC had a genuine fear that Dr Karefa-Smart’s influence in the north could have caused the UNPP to subsume the APC party if he had won that election to become president.
Indeed, born in Rutifunk, Moyamba district in the southern region, Dr Karefa-Smart’s smart politics had given meaning to the phrase; ‘too down south is north’, and Moyamba’s extensive border with Tonkolili District in the north provided him a good chance with cross-regional politics in the south and the north of the country that had provided him the impetus to represent the Tonkolili people during post-colonial era under Sir Milton Margai.
By any estimation, it was under the leadership of Dr Karefa-Smart that Sierra Leone came very close to forming a unity government; the greatest opportunity that evaded the people to close the great southeast/northwest political divide in the opinion of many political analysts.
Late president Ahmed Tejan Kabba was announced the winner of that presidential election in 1996 and went on to win a reelection for his second and final term amidst major hiccups that allowed him to govern for eleven years, a year more than the constitutional allowance.
And the People’s Movement for Democratic Change (PMDC) was founded on 19th January 2006 by Charles Francis Margai (Esq), upon losing his flag bearer bid to Vice President Solomon Berewa at the SLPP national convention in Makeni under controversial circumstances that caused much disenchantment amongst a good number of SLPP members mainly from the southeast.
These were the disgruntled and disenchanted SLPP elements that would culminate into the breakaway group that followed Charles Margai to form the PMDC. The PMDC claimed political and social liberalism as its ideology, a centre right movement, that actualised its ambition of a ‘third force’ by siding with the APC in the 2007 run-off presidential election to engender the much-needed change of governance.
Dr Siaka Steven’s attempt to unite the country through the one-party democracy in the 80s would lead to civil unrests and armed conflicts. And besides the failed attempt by Dr Karefa-Smart to bridge the political divide later in 1996, the SLPP and the APC main political parties have perpetually failed in their campaign strategies and governance style to unite the country. Instead, each one of them focuses on its stronghold and the pockets and parcels of support base they manage to garner in each other’s stronghold.
In this northwest/southeast political divide, the Kono district has been the main power broker according to many political analysts. It is where the APC derives its most southeastern votes. And the SLPP always wins the presidency when the APC fails to secure winning in Kono.
The relationship between the APC and Kono started in 1967 when a small parochial political party in Kono called the Kono People’s Union (KPU), consisting of self-determined people in an SLPP stronghold, with the tendency to swing, sided with the APC to win the prime minister election that year.
Siaka Steven saw a great opportunity of staying in power in that newfound alliance with the Kono people then. In the transactional politics between the APC and the Kono people that followed, Siaka Steven maintained an honest and sincere relationship with them and they in return supported Siaka Steven’s unquenchable thirst for power for the APC.
Evidently, the Kono people swayed a few times in the second republic and tilted the political scale in favour of the SLPP. But when a Kono running mate became the choice of Ernest Bai Koroma in 2007, they returned the highest vote for the APC in the southeast and deprived Solomon Berewa of the threshold for a first-round victory.
Indeed, the Kono people scaled up their votes in the run-off election for the APC to win the presidency. In 2012, in the face of the challenge for Chief Samsumana reappointment as running mate, Ernest Bai Koroma grudgingly settled on him, and the Kono people proved their loyalty to a Kono leadership to secure victory for the APC.
In 2018, due to disenchantment of the Kono people, and under the leadership of Chief Samsumana, the Coalition for Change (C4C) denied the APC its fair share of the votes in Kono, and the APC failed to secure a clear victory that gave chance to that much talked about SLPP controversial victory.
In the seeming absence of a well-defined APC leadership in Kono, the SLPP is enjoying a field day; they are hard at work in their pockets of support bases in the APC stronghold and pounding Kono very hard. And if the APC must fight back to win 24th June 2023 elections, the Party must take its southeast support oasis very seriously and see the need to pound Kono harder than any other time before.
Divisive politics, callous political comments against southeasterners and incendiary remarks will not cut it.
