By Kabs Kanu
She has started doing her job again after a long period of deafening silence, even while Sierra Leone was burning.
British High Commissioner Lisa Chesney has started talking again after the removal of Foreign Secretary James Cleverly. Yet SLPP political psychotics will continue to deny that Cleverly was the albatross around the neck of British Foreign policy since he visited his motherland in Bo last April ( His mother, Suna Cleverly was a Sierra Leonean South Easterner ).
Well, Lisa is back and she has raised the prospect that the Bio coup attempt has not derailed the forthcoming tripartite investigations into the rigged 2023 elections after all. Whoever thought that the tripartite investigations and recommendations had been scuppered must have been dreaming.
My diplomatic source at the UN told me yesterday that, with all respects to the SLPP government’s posturing and conflicting versions of the so- called coup attempt and the investigations going on, the international community also have their own team on the ground in Freetown and they will put all their facts together and determine whether it was a genuine coup attempt or a stage-managed one. I know this because I work with the diplomatic community in my new capacity as an international elections observer.
However, one thing I can say as Senior Adviser of the All People’s Congress ( APC ) is that the party has nothing to do with Sunday’s heavy shooting in Freetown and Maada Bio ‘s devilish attempts to implicate the party is a further demonstration that Sierra Leoneans who are snug in the belief that it was a stage- managed coup to get rid of APC leaders and obliterate the party may have some points.
APC can never be party to such a risky and dangerous misadventure , first of all because we eschew violence and illegal power seizures and secondly we know that the likelihood of failure or the coup being reversed by the international community was always going to be great. We have seen the hands-on involvement of the international community in the efforts to preserve peace and stability in Sierra Leone . Why would anybody think that they would have accepted the coup?
What is more, we had the ears and the sympathy of the international community in the wake of the rigged 2023 elections and the blood -stained record of this Maada Bio government. We would not risk bungling the goodwill we enjoy from the international community by being parties to any unlawful seizure of power in Sierra Leone.
To me personally, if it turns out that this was a genuine coup attempt, those who planned and executed it must be given accolades in stupidity . How would anybody believe that, without a civil revolt , the possibility of international assistance and a steady supply of arms and ammunition from abroad, they would have succeeded in staging and sustaining a coup in Sierra Leone when Bio controls the army after stacking it top and bottom with his tribesmen , and when he would certainly receive military support from neighboring Liberia and ECOWAS, and even the United States ? The dynamics in Sierra Leone are different from what obtains in the West African countries where successful coups were staged. The cache of ammunition stolen from the Wilberforce armory would not have been enough to sustain the coup.
The whole coup attempt ( If It could be called that ) was adventuristic to me, if indeed it was a real coup attempt. Some fools just decided to endanger their own lives and the lives and liberties of other innocent people, knowing the brutality of the Bio government.
Thank God that the dialogue and tripartite investigations would continue, after all . At least, we can start breathing hopes again that Maada Bio will be unmasked spectacularly by resolutions 3 and 4 of the signed communique , and even if we do not have early elections, structures would be put in place to forestall another bold – faced elections robbery by the SLPP. It will take time but the time of the people will surely come in Sierra Leone.
