On Thursday morning, the lead story on most Newspapers was not why the Speaker of the Parliament of Sierra Leone refused to debate Constitutional Instruments Numbers 64 and 65 of 2018 entitled: โโThe Commission of Inquiry (Examination, Inquiry and Investigation) at least in the interest of justice and as a mark of respect for our Constitution? Instead via the Clerk of Parliament, the House okay the mentioned instrument to a law without discussing it in Parliament.
On their face, any discussion on the said instrument which theyโve now turned law is not important. The Speaker simply avoid debating the said instrument because it distracts attention from a revelation that makes Bio SLPP โpaopaโ led government look bad. But dig deeper not debating such an important instrument before it became law in the House of Parliament and the proposed Commission of Inquiry meant to prosecute alleged corrupt State officials of the past regime the two stories are connected: They represent competing notions of what corruption is.
Speakerโs action highlights one of the enduring riddles of the Bio era. Bioโs supporters are now saying they care about corruption. In his pronouncement for a Commission of Inquiry for alleged corrupt officials of the past regime , they cheered his vow to โdrain the swampโ in Sierra Leone. When you talk to any of them to explain why they dislike Ernest Bai Koroma and his former APC regime, the first-most-common answer is that he was โcorrupt.โ And yet, Bio supporters appear largely unfazed by the mounting evidence that Bio administration is also in the list of the least ethical regime in modern Sierra Leone history in terms of disrespecting our laws. When asked last whether they considered Bio corrupt, only very few among the current regime said yes. Even the Speakerโs action to disrespect Sections 170(7) and 86 (2) of the 1991 Constitution is unlikely to change that.
THE SWAMP ISNโT EASY TO DRAIN
The answer may lie in how Bio and his supporters define corruption. In his book titled How Fascism Works, the Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley makes an intriguing claim. โCorruption, to the fascist politician,โ he suggests, โis really about the corruption of purity rather than of the law. Officially, the fascist politicianโs denunciations of corruption sound like a denunciation of political corruption. But such talk is intended to evoke corruption in the sense of the usurpation of the traditional order.โ
Speakerโs decision to focus on turning the instrument to a law rather than debating the said instrument before it became law illustrates Stanleyโs point. In the eyes of many SLPP โpaopaโ supporters and members, I suspect, the network hidden agenda isnโt ignoring corruption so much as highlighting the kind that really matters. When Speaker skilfully avoid to debate the mentioned instrument before it became law, he may have been violating the law. But he was upholding traditional โpaopaโand class hierarchies like the former โtolongboโ Speaker was doing. Since time immemorial, powerful men in our social positions of trust have been cheating on our people and using their power to evade the consequences.
Perfecting the instrument to law, by contrast, signifies the inversionโthe corruptionโof that โtraditional paopa order.โ Throughout Sierra Leonean history, few people have been as sacrosanct as the belief that the Executive must be protected from other Arms of government. By murdering the debate on the instrument, Speaker did not merely violate the law. He did something more subversive: He polluted Sierra Leoneโs modern days battle to fight against corruption with a sense of nationalistic purpose to genuinely win international and national admirations and attract genuine investors in the country.
Bioโs Supporters honour the Establishment Tradition of Discrimination:
Once you grasp that for Bio and many of his supporters, corruption means less the violation of law than the violation of established hierarchies, their behaviour makes more sense. In all his speeches, Bio has employed the phrase rule of law. Most of them refer to the illegal means of amassing wealth.
Why were Bioโs supporters so convinced that Ernest was the more corrupt president even as reporters uncovered far more damning evidence about Bioโs regime disrespecting our laws within few months in office than they did about Ernestโs? Likely because Ernestโs threatened and kill all economic growth with his regime as a one man show government which Bio isnโt an exemption. For many Sierra Leonenas, disrespecting the laws to specifically satisfy the Executive Arm โespecially with an intention to satisfy a political party hidden agendaโin and of itself represents a form of corruption.
Refusing to debate the instrument before it turned to law makes it harder for SLPP โpaopaโ supporters to claim that Speaker didnโt violate the law. But it doesnโt really matter. For many โpaopasโ, Bio and his administration remain uncorruptโindeed, anticorruptโbecause what they fear most isnโt the corruption of Sierra Leone law; itโs the corruption of โpaopaโ hidden agenda. And in the struggle against that form of corruptionโthe kind embodied by nearly all of themโBio isnโt the problem. Heโs the solution.
SLPP
