Let us stop lying to and deceiving our grassroots supporters

By Kabs Kanu

When we do not tell our people the truth, we are deceiving them . Deceit and falsehood to supporters must not  become the political strategy within a political party.

Politicians should have the supreme interests of their political parties and supporters at heart and they must demonstrate this commitment by telling them the truth.

Before we feed our supporters any information or build certaim  hopes nto them about anything or oncoming events, we must be very  cautious  and remember many facts.

However big the lies and false hopes we give our party, the truth will always be manifest at the end . It however seems that we no longer care for the end’game. It seems that we no longer have shame or care for our integrity. Letting our innocent people wallow in false expectations while a phase of the political drama lasts is all that we care for. As soon as that melodrama wastes itself out, we begin to look out for something else to hitch the hopes of our grassroots upon. Meanwhile, our opponent continues to march on and consolidate its power. Weare being left far, far behind because we have abandoned the agendas of our party to follow factional leaders.

If we love our siimple- minded supporters and our party,  information we feed them must be fully authenticated to be true . They deserve it. They do not deserve our lies.  Let us know that the truth will come out, however long it takes and once the vaulting expectations we build in our people turn out to be false, it would come back to haunt us . Trust and credibility begin to suffer.

We must know that most of our grassroots members and rank and file of our political parties are gullible, emotional, subject to passions and reliant heavily on us who  disseminate information.  They are susceptible to the error of believing what we write . We must therefore ensure that we do not make them believe in wrong information, wrong expectations  and false hopes, because when the hopes we falsely build in them become apparent, it could spark chaos. We are lucky that we have very patient and enduring grassroots supporters.  They are yet in the mode of easy- believism and not quickly inclined to think  that we always seek to  deliberately  fool them. But any sensible man will ask himself this question : For how long will our grassroots supporters continue to bear with us as one spectacular hope after the other turns out to be misleading ?

Since things fell apart in Sierra Leone after the rigged 2023 elections,  we have been made to believe in many things on which we depended to turn the tables on President Maada Bio but  everything turned out to be a mirage. And our opponents keep laughing at us . Have we no shame for the way we are making ourselves clowns to our opponent ?

We must learn never to trust the international community implicitly. They have lied to us and fooled us, yet we never learn.

Let us learn also how to decode the diplomatic nuances and statements of our international development partners and stakeholders correctly. This is where all the problems emanate. We are too naive and quick to snap on catchy phases, sentences, words and  statements and build into them what we want  to believe, however outlandish,  and once we have carved out certain beliefs from statements, we do not care if they are realistic,  false or impossible . We start peddling them boldly  and we want our party to build its future around them and for  everybody to join us to articulate and disseminate them. Those who are circumspect or constrained to join us are unnecessarily and needlessly persecuted, stigmatized, lied upon, antagonized and demonized. This is the psychodrama that is presently tearing our party apart and making villains of honest and committed members. This is not the way to run a political party. This is not the APC we knew.

Let us learn also that in this media- saturated, technological and infomedia savvy  world, people are no longer zombies, except they want to be. We can no longer force anybody to believe what we want them to believe. We can antagonize,  stereotype and defame them all we want.. We can heap all the vile and nasty Mammy cuss on them.  We cannot lead them by the nose anymore. This warning is especially for the criminal in London masquerading as a journalist, Abu Shaw of the Organizer blog.

Let us put love for our party over sectional, cabalist, clannish and selfish ends for this is the root of most of our problems. If we are open- minded, neutral and divorced from cabals, clans,  camps and personality worship within our political parties, we will never allow ourselves to be led down the pathways of deceit by anybody, however learned , as they think,  or dogmatic.