Titus Boye-Thompson Communications Expert
Significantly, it has been the ordinary supporters of the All Peoples Congress Party, those we call the grassroots that have felt the repercussions of the APC loss of the 2018 elections more. Their way of life has come under threat for many reasons and their even meagre survival in urban conglomerations of poverty and want are now under threat of further deterioration as economic circumstances dip and the prospect for raising their standard of life become even more grim than they would have expected under the worst of any APC government. The people have been deceived and they have easily identified the cause of their deceit, the rationale of their miscalculations and many now ask themselves, “if ar bin know?”
The immediate threat to the survival of the new political middle classes do not augur well for State continuity as an imminent but very biased war against corruption tends to focus on those who are perceived to have done well under the last government so for now, the true focus of the resilience of the APC and its survival as a political party must be on the chances of its core supporters, the ordinary people who have always been the backbone of the Party. The arguments abound about seeking political cover for individual acts of wrongdoing as not excusable nor does it make sense for politicians who have misused their authority and acted with impunity be granted immunity under a Party umbrella at these times and in the name of fighting against an attack on political ideology unless the thrust of such an attack is clearly seen as a campaign of calumny and an unbridled attack against the very survival of the tenets of our shared political ideological standpoint.
Firstly, where the ramifications of power changing hands is now expressed in such ethnic and regional terms, the urge to hypnotize the entire public and international community that the forces that exist in Sierra Leone are of two types, basically characterized by such epoch making moralistic standards of good and evil, rich and poor, corrupt and not and in the wave of this whole fanfare we recognize a strategy to project a wretchedness of the APC Party to be perceived as an evil, corrupt regime full of thieves and people of low moral and ethical standards.
As in animal Farm, two legs (APC) bad and four legs (SLPP) good, but the most horrible alignment with George Orwell’s epic is that of the realization and acceptance of political reality that while all four legs are equal, some are more equal than others and that alludes to the creeping differentiation between peoples of the South East and the emergence of a ruling class and a master class depicted by a trajectory forcing Chief Minister and his cohorts of intelligentsia and literati class of educated and professional cadre surrounding the paragons of power while the many who were the actual foot soldiers suffer for their attachment to a fundamentalist principle and fighting the cause of the poor and dispossessed who make up the bulk of the clamouring campaign for change, “Paopa.”
While it was relatively easy for the SLPP “campaign” against corruption to gain traction it soon became easily identified with a parallel campaign at ethnic cleansing and tribal substitution never before experienced in this country. In the realization of this diabolical plan to usurp the right of existence of the APC as a political party has come a resilient party support structure underpinned by its grassroots to circumvent the SLPP onslaught on the democratic principles and the frameworks for peace and stability that this APC government has helped to build. With a swift overturn of events, the SLPP machinery became unsustainable as the harsh realities of their methods and actions show a drastic strategy to raise the Mende hegemony above all other considerations of natural justice and balance. Since coming to power, the move towards ethnic cleansing of the civil and diplomatic services have gone on unabated, even in the face of widespread condemnation of the creeping substitution and supplanting of tribesmen of the South Eastern dominated Mende speaking peoples of the country.
