(1)     Guest Writer

The Dilemma of Ernest Koroma

By Boozable

Incumbency has an uncanny way of sending people’s memory on vacation thereby putting them out of touch with the reality. Before the 2007 elections, Ernest Koroma promised Sierra Leoneans heaven and earth and vouched to eradicate all those vices that had plagued the country’s vicious political cycle for several decades. He sounded cunningly convincing and to some extent lured some people into voting for him. But his performance especially in terms of keeping to his many promises has been suspect, not least admirable.

Ernest Koroma rode on the crest wave of vague promises and tremendous support from the People’s Movement for Democratic Change (PMDC) and was catapulted to State House when he least expected it. But he continues to show naivety and arrogance and seems to pull the rug under him which will cause him to fall with astonishing rapidity. Even his physical looks are a sharp contrast from what he looked like prior to 2007. He appears every bit a worried man but with a Spartan heart to endure the pain and stress of the office without letting too much out. If he is a worried man as it is increasingly unfolding to be, he has himself to blame. Like most African leaders past and present, Ernest Bai Koroma shot himself in the leg within the first 12 months of his reign and has not recovered yet from those blunders. Time is not on his side to rectify the damage he has done to himself-a situation that is giving him sleepless nights even if his pen pushers are sweeping that under the carpet and painting a false impression that all is well and that his second term is as assured as daybreak and nightfall.

There are some realities that he should bear in mind as the November 17 election approaches, which his praise-singers have not told him. Ernest Koroma and APC did not win the 2007 elections out rightly. For all his purported popularity and grassroots support, he did not even get 45% of the votes cast first round in 2007. Even with his northwestern support base, he still could not poll 45%. He needed the support of Charles Francis Margai and PMDC-a southeastern based party-to cross the 50% threshold needed to clinch victory in the second round. The PMDC is an off-shoot of the SLPP and drew most if not all of its support in 2007 from the same basket the SLPP feeds from. Margai succeeded in chopping about 255,000 votes with about 80% of that coming from the southeast.

His first political miscalculation is the treatment he meted to Charles Margai and PMDC by disregarding them completely, poaching some of the lesser known members and using them to insult him and maintain the little infiltration of the southeast. Ernest Koroma’s tribal and regional tilt of the distribution of offices under his control and his dismissal of the southeast as irrelevant to his second term bid has become his Achilles heel and would just hunt him come November. There is absolutely no way he can win out rightly in November without some significant infiltration of the southeast as it happened in 2007 when he had the backing of Margai. But he has made that task onerous if not virtually impossible for him with his tribalism and regionalism which have become an unfortunate hallmark of his administration. By ignoring Margai and his people in the southeast who gave him the increased votes he desperately needed in 2007, Ernest Bai Koroma has bitten the finger that fed him and will be starved of that support this time round. His failure to suppress his tribal and regional instincts and be all embracing has sharpened tribalism in the country and pushed the ones on the ignored side of the political divide to bulk and be united again with his APC as the purpose of that unification exercise ahead of 2012.

Instead of maintaining that support he so easily enjoyed in 2007, Ernest Koroma has deployed a strategy that will not give him the needed support from the southeast, in employing the poaching method which has seen him fish some PMDC members whose political teeth were cut by Margai. Intriguingly, he does not know that the collective voice of those he has poached from PMDC cannot match CF Margai’s singular voice in that part of the country. Margai remains a political icon and heavyweight in Sierra Leone and can easily influence at least 100,000 votes to swing the way he wants amidst his waning popularity as claimed in some ruling party quarters.

Another dilemma which of his making but perhaps is unaware of is his position in the minds of the political elite. Ernest Koroma has positioned himself as donor president who spares no dime in his pocket to achieve his political goal. Armed with this knowledge the so called defections are so many that by now, if they were really genuine with him and the APC, Ernest Koroma would not be canvassing for votes all over the country to the extent that even the start of the registration process had to be preceded by a launching program that turned out to be a campaign for votes. If these are not signs of jitters then they are certainly an indication of uncertainty and worry. If Ernest was smart, and I cannot vouch for that, he would be suspicious of some of these defectors and will deal with them at arms-length. He does not need to be a genius to know that some are spent political forces whose sole aim of leaning towards him is to milk him dry and abandon him when the time comes. Everyday we read of defections to the ruling party especially in the southeast of the country, but whenever elections are held in that part of the country they are trounced heavily. Is this not enough to prick the mind of a smart president that some of those defectors really do not matter to his cause and that they are not genuine? But that’s what a sharp one does and not a dim-witted one who does read between the lines to plot his strategies very well.

Consequently, Ernest Koroma has resorted to the use or shall I say silence of the media as an instrument to cover for his policy frailties. The media are eerily quiet on the many bad policies of this government and have instead been busy propagating the façade of infrastructure and electricity, even when the economy is going awry and the country’s peace and security going banana. All of this rumour says for some crumbs that fall from the tables of State House.     

There is also the small matter of a certain Brigadier (Rtd) Julius Maada Bio, the presidential candidate of the main opposition SLPP. This is the man that has ruffled APC and Ernest Koroma’s feathers since he was elected by a most transparent democratic process on August 1^st 2011. Prior to the convention Ernest launched a project behind closed doors-stop Bio from clinching it-but failed woefully to achieve his objective. Resources were pumped on some cheap media practitioners to do everything possible to smear him and repel delegates from him but that did not work. When it was clear the Youngman was going to win the SLPP flag bearer contest, Ernest and his APC cohorts played the bravado and pretended he was going to be an easy ride for them. I read in some quarters that Ernest Koroma would go on vacation in the Bahamas and that he would not even canvass if Maada Bio was elected SLPP flag bearer. But less than 24 hours after his convention victory we read he was rushed to Germany on what was tagged as a routine medical check-up but in reality was treatment from the shock he got when the news filtered that Bio was going to be his chief tormentor. Since the Youngman was elected by SLPP, Ernest Koroma has covered more blades of grass campaigning and wasted more state resources poaching and cajoling that he is growing older by the day. In fairness to Ernest Koroma, he has every reason to be in quandary over Bio’s candidacy, unlike the dismissive approach of some of his hired pen pushers, because there is hardly anything he can say that Bio cannot boast of. Don’t talk of looks; Bio has it more than him. In fact Ernest is growing older by the day whilst Bio looks younger than his age. Bio has occupied the office he now occupies, is also equally experienced as him, is a household name in the country as well, has strong support in the southeast and parts of the western area and is far carefully educated than him. Why won’t he be in a dilemma?