By Hoccas Siwel
It was the late great American civil rights activist Dr Martin Luther King Jr. that said, “Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”
He said that in reference to the fear that had long sanitised African Americans from speaking up against centuries of systemic denial of their full rights to citizenship, which was accompanied by swift and almost always lethal force for which perpetrators rarely face justice.
That call for active participation by all members of the public in addressing issues long swept under the carpet or made to disappear from the public space only to reoccur in much grander scales or fashion culminated in the civil rights marches, protests, sit-ins and other forms of peaceful civil disobedience that ended with the Civil Rights Bill that finally acknowledged the full rights of African hence other minority Americans to participate in and benefit from the American Dream.
Today, Sierra Leone is at such a crossroads.
Unfortunately the current culture of keeping quiet when an obvious wrong is being done is making us miss out on yet another moment to strike the hammer while the iron is hot. This culture of keeping quiet when issues that affect our national development, safety, and security are trending is in effect denying their existence. And successive leaders from both leading parties have counted on us being quiet to continue their reprehensible actions that also define and smear us as a country.
Barely a week goes by without a damning accusation or revelation, or a convenient explanation hence denial of the issue actually having occurred, and that by watchdog and other agencies meant to look into such issues. Time and again without failure civil servants behave in ways that are not conducive to our civic harmony and welfare as a nation state, yet time and time again our people keep quiet as these actions are conveniently explained by the perpetrators, going as far as blaming the whistle-blower/s who are further intimidated by smear campaigns aimed at discrediting them.
At such a juncture one would ask why are civil society and human rights organisations, the media, and artists so quiet? A cursory glance at the majority of newspapers, radio and TV stations, and online media would disclose a scarcity of editorials, opinions, and commentaries that critically analyse the plethora of corruption and violence currently taking place across Sierra Leone. Listening to music on radio or TV one would think our artists and poets lack enough material for songs that praise or denounce actions that build or tear down the fabric of society. Instead all we see are young women, even leading female artists, made to dance almost naked twerking, while their male counterparts are fully clothed in a society where women are viewed as men’s properties and considered sex objects, before anything else.
While it is an open secret that civil society activism is dead in Sierra Leone, one could easily qualify that with evidence of their activities during the Ernest Bai Koroma years. Then human rights organisations were actively speaking up against any and all actions seen as oppressive. But after the arrest, detention, and summary release of a popular activist in 2018, civil activism tended to shy away from public scrutiny of public officials, with the current state of emergency without procedures/regulations not helping. The allegation is that with civil society and human rights activists given confortable positions in governance, most of them were and still are in it for the jobs, knowing that such jobs are meant for life, as they are never replaced by ensuing regimes, all in an effort to keep them well fed hence inactive. These men and women go on to form the core of long serving civil servants accused of knowing every loophole to exploit to thwart the good ideas/intentions of sitting ministers and presidents.
This culture of failing to speak up when our elected leaders go against the grain of accepted norms and procedures is blamed on the same fear African Americans were subjected to that kept them in the same position for centuries. It is a culture that soon forgets those that are made to suffer injustice as they waste away in detention and or holding cells or jails. What happened to the young men and women arrested during the Lunsar, Tombo, and Makeni riots? They have in effect become political prisoners as their cases have died or quieted down yet they are still being held in pre-trial and other detentions in deplorable conditions, further adding to overcrowding in prison facilities.
This culture of keeping quiet by both sides of the political divide is a killer of the whistle-blower culture that is very necessary in societies as corrupt as ours. When whistle-blowers including watchdog agencies are attacked by those accused of stealing from us in obvious smear campaigns to discredit them, the people are quiet, going as far as siding with the accused because of tribal, regional, and or political affiliations, thereby sending a clear message to potential whistle-blowers that such is not okay in Sierra Leone.
What is the outcome of continued denial or keeping quiet when wrongs are being perpetrated by those who should know better? The proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. But conventional wisdom would advise against such a time as they almost always presage something so drastic that lives, properties, and infrastructure are lost in the ensuing rumpus. Case in point; the devastating and unnecessary Sierra Leone Civil War that pushed us back over a century, which resulting issues we are still grappling with today. But conditions are worse today than they were before that fratricidal war.
Sierra Leoneans, stop this culture of denial of the obvious. If a member of your party does something wrong, don’t support him or her in the interest of the state. Speak up! The presidency belongs to the people; its occupants are those we put there for a period of time. Our allegiance should be to the truth. It is time for all of us to lend our voices to the rallying call, and stop being complicit in our own underdevelopment while the rest of the world is progressing. Let us not allow the current issues at play to become yet another moment missed, another opportunity lost to once and for all start actively dealing with issues that continue to hold back our progress as a nation. Surely political parties and presidents come and go, what remains is ‘we the people’. Let us not claim to say ‘Land that we love’ yet do everything that says ‘party or president that we love’ all to the detriment of Mama Salone, who sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity are slowly killing.