The AU and ECOWAS could do more for Good Governance and Human rights in Africa, writes Amb Wilfred Leeroy Kabs-kanu
Cornelius Hamelberg
The AU and ECOWAS could do more for Good Governance and Human rights in Africa, writes Amb Wilfred Leeroy Kabs-kanu
Over the years, Sierra Leone has seen her own unfair share of coups, followed by an eleven years long civil war.
He who feels it knows. Here is a concrete, perhaps more frontal view by Leeroy Wilfred Kabs Kanu
https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=5251865308181235&set=a.187713017929848
Shame:
AU and ECOWAS give more premium to keeping bad leaders in office than
ensuring good governance and human rights in Africa
By
KABS KANU
Imposing sanctions on and suspending member
states where military coups have been staged is a great effort and a
laudable move to discourage unconstitutional changes of government in
Africa. Nobody will fault the African Union ( AU) and the Economic
Community of West African States ( ECOWAS ) for their hard line
against military takeovers. The constitution and the ballot box must
remain sacrosanct.
However AU and ECOWAS have accrued
universal condemnation from Africans for their seeming premium to be
concerned only in stopping coups and keeping bad leaders in office,
while showing no equal concern for good governance, respect for the
constitution and the Rule of Law and human rights by sitting
governments in Africa.
If the AU and ECOWAS had ensured
that they shared the same venom and disapproval for military coups
with respect for good governance , observance of democracy ,
fundamental human rights and economic probity by African leaders ,
the continent would have been the better for it. But this is not the
case. AU and ECOWAS are much more concerned for the survival of
serving African leaders than making sure that they rule their
subjects constitutionally and with respect for the law and human
rights.
It is a shame that when it comes to defending the
rights of the ordinary African who cry everyday under the weight of
bad, wicked, callous, inefficient, human-rights abusing, lawless and
irredeemably corrupt leaders and governments, the AU and ECOWAS have
failed woefully. You never hear them condemn acts of bad governance,
human rights abuses , elections rigging and corruption by African
leaders. As far as the AU and ECOWAS are concerned, these despotic ,
cruel , inefficient and corrupt African leaders can do whatever they
want, with impunity. There is nothing wrong. But the moment the army
leaves the barracks to seize power with the expressed desires to
right the wrongs and crimes of the malevolent African leaders, they
are condemned, ostracized, vilified and harsh sanctions are imposed
on them.
The AU and ECOWAS must realize that much as we
all detest and condemn military coups, army takeovers never happen
without a reason. The soldiers may not be the right alternatives
themselves, but most times the reasons given by them for staging
coups are justified. In many cases, African leaders and governments
provoke the soldiers to strike when all other alternate measures for
change have been exhausted. At times, military coups are the last
resort . Cue Guinea where the President refused to leave after
completing his mandated two terms and criminally tinkered with the
constitution to give himself an illegal third term. What did the AU
and ECOWAS do to stop Professor Alpha Conde ? Nothing > Yet, when
he was overthrown, they moved against the military leaders and
imposed harsh sanctions against them. Is that not hypocrisy and
double standards that stink to the high heavens ?
All over
Africa, people are displeased with their governments and are
complaining bitterly against their misrule, abuse of power,
unconstitutional and lawless acts, horrific human rights abuses,
incompetence , elections rigging and corruption but the AU and ECOWAS
are deaf to their cries like puffadders.
During their most
recent summit in Accra, Ghana, ECOWAS leaders resolved to send a
stabilization force to help stabilize the security situation in
Guinea-Bissau. ECOWAS Commission President Jean-Claude Kassi Brou
told the press that “This is something that we will do very rapidly
to ensure that this type of attempt of take-over power by force does
not take place. ” So, in essence, ECOWAS will seek to prevent
future coups , which is a noble idea, but what will they do to
address the ills that provoke these coups in the first place ?
Right
now, Sierra Leone is edging towards chaos and another war because of
the reprehensible tribalism, exclusion of other ethnic groups ,
lawlessness , unconstitutional behavior, illegal use of the judiciary
against the opposition , defiance of the international community,
human rights abuses and grand theft and corruption of the President
Maada Bio and Sierra Leone People’s Party ( SLPP) government .
Sierra Leoneans are very bitter against the President and his
government . Unless he is stopped, President Bio is on the verge of
conducting a bogus presidential election in 2023 . With only a year
to the election, the opposition has still not been allowed to hold
its delegates convention and elect its presidential flagbearer–though
the SLPP had long had their’s— through subtle and tacit
government-orchestrated court cases that the judiciary keeps
inexplicably subjecting to long adjustments .
Given the
opportunity , Sierra Leoneans would want to change their present
government at the ballot box in 2023, but unless there is
international intervention, the despotic and care-less President Bio
would do everything down right dirty, lawless and unconstitutional to
prevent it from happening. The signs are glaring . When African
leaders make meaningful changes impossible, what do the AU and ECOWAS
want Africans to do ? Continue to fold their hands and wallow in the
mire and suffering ?
Sad to say, the AU and ECOWAS must be
warned that there would be more military coups in Africa. The people
of Africa and their military have realized once again that the
international community does not care for them and unless they take
matters into their own hands, they will not be able to change
totalitarian , corrupt and despotic governments at the ballot
box.
Unless and until the AU and ECOWAS revisit their
priorities and give more premium to good governance , democracy,
constitutional rule and respect for fundamental human rights , free
and fair elections and economic transparency and accountability, the
menace of power-grabbing by the men in jackboots has come back to
stay.
Cornelius Hamelberg
Since I was last in Sierra Leone and only for ten days (25th April – 4th April 1970) and then back to Ghana, I cannot speak from the vantage point of actually speaking from there in the midst of the suffering masses but I have a good idea about what’s going on and would like to alert the whole world about the plight of Mohamed Kamarainba Mansaray who is ill and still languishing in prison, on some trumped up charges...
Periodically, Rev. Kabs Kanu and his paper Cocorioko have raised some very worrisome issues. Should the current Sierra Leone Government want to perpetuate their stay in power and are hell-bent on rigging the next General Elections they would start where they have started: by inflating the census figures for the areas that are identifiable as their ethnic bases, and secondly they will be doing what they deem necessary with voter registration, to their own advantage, facilitated of course by the national treasury as the main stay of their campaign war chest, not to mention the state run radio and television...
The required understanding is that “The beginning of wisdom is fear of the Almighty”
“A wicked man ruling over a poor people is like a roaring lion and a growling bear. “(Mishlei – Proverbs – Chapter 28: 15)
A wicked man ruling over a poor people, and a wicked man surrounding himself with wicked advisers, ethnic jingoists, psychopaths and sycophants, might erroneously begin to believe that he himself is the omnipotent “Almighty”, when nothing about his sorry, earthly mortality could be further from the truth, or respect for the rule of law.
The motto of the ruling SLPP, is “One Country, One People”. The “One Country” of course, is Sierra Leone, and ideally, the “One People” was supposedly meant to mean all the people of Sierra Leone, all the various ethnic group – united as the “One People”; but if we are to go by the non-stop Sierra Leone Newspaper and other Sierra Leone Media reports, it’s unprecedented that by “One People” the current dispensation under Bio,“One People” means “The Mende People Only”, “The One and Only Mende People” who are statistically speaking, the second largest ethnic group in Sierra Leone. Sadly, their most oppressed intellectual rivals the Creoles are currently and have always been less than 2% of the population….
At the moment, given the ethnic composition of the nation’s military, the prospect of a military coup in Sierra Leone is virtually zero percent. Moreover, Julius Maada Bio himself an ex-military junta man (subordinate under Captain Valentine Strasser who he later deposed) has already made some of the necessary overtures to Guinea Conakry’s new leadership (wisely, because that is where support for any opposition guerrilla forces would be likely to come from as happened when John Amadu Bangura was there back in circa 1967, training guerillas, after the first coup in Sierra Leone when Brigadier David Lansana (the then Prime Minister Margai's brother-in-law) declared martial law, suspended the Sierra Leone Constitution and placed Sierra Leone's Governor- General, Sir Henry Lightfoot Boston under House arrest moments after Sir Henry had appointed Siaka Stevens as Prime Minister on the basis of Stevens having won the 1967 General elections and therefore in a position to command a majority in the Sierra Leone Parliament and to form a government (without Margai’s bogus unconstitutional talk about any so called “House of Chiefs” that should assist in determining the parliamentary majority…
Qualified/ unqualified SLPP magicians should please feel free to represent his clan here...
Cornelius Hamelberg
Corrections
1. The ten days = 25th April – 4th May 1970 = the latest period of time I spent in Sierra Leone.
2. Yesterday, I wrote that “At the moment, given the ethnic composition of the nation’s military, the prospect of a military coup in Sierra Leone is virtually zero percent”
I myself have never prayed for the demise of the enemy, because in my own personal experience God fulfils prayers sometimes with alacrity and one never knows when the enemy of God – the habitual slanderer could be a member of one’s own family. For that reason I am reluctant to say the 12th Blessing of the Amidah.
Does Bio think that he is “doing God’s will”?
Of course, he doesn’t think so and of course, he isn’t. If it’s not God’s will that he’s executing, then, some logic called for here, who does he think he is serving? God’s enemy? The people of Sierra Leone?
Therefore, I had better revise that zero percent estimate since there’s no telling what’s going to happen next when from dusk to dawn millions of Sierra Leone's long suffering people among them congregations of bishops, archbishops, nuns, priests, Muslim prayer leaders and the Muslim Faithful are praying, fervently petitioning the Almighty for change - any which way – and the oppressors like the Pharaoh of yore or the one in Sierra Leone known as “Paopa “must know just as the Buddha-nature knows, that nothing is permanent, that God is not blind – God is a witness of all the evil deeds of the current Sierra Leone Government, and God is not deaf, God can hear and in the fullness of time God will respond to the peoples cries of woe, and God the All-Powerful moves in His mysterious ways, His Wonders to perform; so we can’t discount the mysteriously abrupt or sudden & peaceful removal/ sweeping away of anyone from “power”.
Just as the bard chimed,
“And
don’t speak too soon
For
the wheel’s still in spin
And
there’s no tellin’ who that it’s namin’
For
the loser now will be later to win
For
the times they are a-changin’”
Bio has this much on his plate .
The best way forward: Repentance. Turn a new leaf
Lastly, and this is personal, Bio had better be very extra careful with his harassment of Yvonne Aki Sawyerr
God resists and humbles the arrogant.
Loonta
Cornelius Hamelberg
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
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