The whereabouts of former Member of the 5th Parliament of the Republic of Sierra Leone, Hon. Issa Oye Koroma is in doubt and has become worrisome and a serious concern for relatives and his former Constituents of Constituency 073 in the Port Loko District in Northern Sierra Leone.
No conclusion has been reached yet as to whether the worse has happened to him and his family, but the police are saying that he mysteriously escaped from their custody in one of their detention centers in the capital in the mid of 2023 following his arrest by some plain-clothes police detectives for alleged inflammatory statements against the President and Parliament for forcing the ratification of the Proportional Representation System (PR) for the June 2023 elections against the will of the opposition and the vast majority of Sierra Leoneans.
This move had a very strong support of incumbent President, Julius Maada Bio was staunchly opposed by Issa Oye Koroma from the day the Bill was introduced in Parliament onto elections in June 2023 with Koroma accusing the ruling Sierra Leone Peoples Party (SLPP) and President of plotting against the democratic will of the people as the move to impose the PR system on the electorates using the Parliament was sheer maneuvering and manipulation of the people’s democratic freedoms. Oye continued his campaign against the election’s outcome in his fight for electoral justice. The Criminal Investigations Department (CID), a department of the Sierra Leone Police, is mostly manipulated by a government in power to get at their opponents to the extent of silence them in worse case scenarios.
The CID it is reported, was planning to raid the home of Oye and arrest him on charges of aligned in the Cyber Crime Act of 2021 when he reportedly disappeared.
Issa Oye Koroma is a member of the opposition APC in Sierra Leone and was elected to the 5th Parliament of Sierra Leone in 2022, amidst violence and intimidation perpetuated by the incumbent SLPP administration. Oye was very steadfast in ensuring his victory against his SLPP rival, which ultimately became a source for him being targeted by the incumbent administration, subjecting him and his family to all sorts of threats and intimidation. He stood stoutly against blatant moves by the ruling SLPP that had through the election managers, devised all draconian measures aimed at ensuring that he loses the election. A clear case in point was an observation by election monitors that seals affixed to some of the ballot boxes in which ballots had been cast in the Constituency for which Oye was contesting had been changed to a Kailahun District records in which a bye-election was being held simultaneously. Kailahun District is a stronghold of the ruling SLPP. Issa Oye Koroma, in the midst of all these attempts at manipulating the election he had contested in under his All Peoples Congress (APC) party, ended securing 3, 936 votes, accounting for 58.7% against his immediate SLPP rival, who secured 2, 711 votes accounting for 40.5%. Hon. Issa Oye Koroma took the oath of office as Member of Parliament of the 5th Parliament on 5th April, 2022.
Since the disappearance of Oye and his family, no trace has been established as at yet, regarding their whereabouts, even with such reports being made to the Sierra Leone Police. Neighbours of Oye said there were several times when plain-clothes men will drive into their neighborhood and will dash to the house of Oye. Several times, had Oye, according to the neighbors, escaped by jumping over the fence of his house. His wife and children over the period had developed traumatic mental conditions that resulted in paranoid-always afraid of associating with people. It as a result of these worrying scenarios that the neighbors are concerned that in the course of hiding, especially his wife and children, they may have gotten into the ambush of his trailing security personnel and the worse may have happened. There has been no trace of the Koroma family since Oye last escaped from his marauding assailing police officers in June 2024.
The latest radicalization of Issa Oye Koroma during the 2023 elections campaign according to his neighbors is a sure reason for his mysterious disappearance as he campaigned across the country agitating for a rise up for election justice. He took up the campaign in order to raise awareness of especially the youth across the country on the illegitimacy of the President Bio-led government and also raised the consciousness of citizens about their fundamental and constitutional rights, their obligations and the social responsibility of Government to ensure the free, fair and equitable elections.
He educated the masses about the Social Contract Theory, which empowered his compatriots with the knowledge of the obligations of their Government in ensuring the actualization of their rights for example, rights to education, medical care, water, freedom of speech, a free and fair justice system and equal rights, among several human rights issues including their freedom from arbitrary arrests, which is a common phenomenon in Sierra Leone especially of citizens perceived by Government and its agencies as non-conformists.
So Oye fell out with the entire system, which had rendered the security of him and family very precarious. Some senior police officers and senior SLPP faithful had started accusing him of brewing another rebellion because of his activities in these vulnerable communities which gave an indication that he was mobilizing the people to rise up against the Government.
He was arrested and detained a couple of times and would be released without charge. But the situation about his safety reached a crushing point in May 2016. His unfriendly encounters with the police became frequent and very threatening to his wellbeing. He was arrested in January of that year and detained for a month without charge. His colleagues, fearing the increased tension and reprisals directed at their Movement, abandoned the program and when Abubakar was released later on, he had no one to work with.
But he didn’t give up. He continued his one-man campaign. He was again arrested for causing a group of youths in a village about 25 miles from Freetown to obstruct the police from arresting their colleague without an arrest warrant, thanks to Abubakar’s basic education and awareness raising on their basic rights.
Abubakar was arrested in connection with that incident and threatened with a charge of plotting an insurrection for which, if convicted, he would have gone down for life imprisonment. He was under police lock and key awaiting to be be charged when on 30th May, 2016 his family was informed by the police that Abubakar Sidique Bah has mysteriously disappeared from their custody.
The family are still worried and concerned about Abubakar’s safety if he should surface again in Sierra Leone giving that he already has a pending police charge against him.
Oye’s neighbors say his house remains constant surveillance by the police who is obliged to ensure the safety and protection of citizens. By this and all indications, it would appear that the life of Issa Oye Koroma is never again safe in Sierra Leone as long as this current SLPP is in power because they have been able to make the country inhabitable and unsafe for him and his family. The police that is constitutionally mandated to provide protection and safety for citizens including Issa Oye Koroma, is the very police now hunting him like a hunter will go into forest to hunt an animal.