By Sayoh Kamara
The recent outburst by the National Chairman of the ruling Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP), Sahr Jimmy Batilo Songa, in the increasingly intense debate over the party’s 2028 presidential succession appears to be an act that has defiled the sacredness of choosing President Julius Maada Wornie Bio’s successor and has opened an inadvertent political Pandora’s box within the party. With this act, it is very evident that the party, through its Chairman and those who could be behind the hedged plan are surreptitiously digging an underground cellar into which the SLPP would be incarcerated for the next ten or more years as an opposition. Records stand to this testament!
Speaking to a gathering of SLPP District Chairmen and Women’s Leaders, Chairman Songa reportedly cautioned party officials against taking sides with any of the emerging flagbearer aspirants; and more controversially, he is said to have invoked the party’s Constitution to argue that the responsibility of determining who succeeds President Julius Maada Bio rests with the Leader of the Party, who incidentally happens to be the outgoing President, urging that party officials to wait until he makes his pronouncement.
That statement deserves far more than casual political commentary. It raises a fundamental question: Is the SLPP preparing to choose a flagbearer through democratic party processes or is it preparing to receive a successor from above and subsequently give that choice a democratic seal? The distinction is not semantic. It goes to the very heart of internal party democracy.
Chairman Songa’s intervention is striking because it appears to elevate the personal political preference of the incumbent Leader above the collective political will of the party’s membership.
If the Leader’s constitutional role is being interpreted as giving him the exclusive right to choose the next flagbearer, then the SLPP membership, delegates and organs would effectively be reduced from decision-makers to endorsers. That would be a profound transformation in the meaning of a political party convention, and would question the democratic credentials some of its members are all over the place propagating.
A party convention is supposed to be where competing political visions are tested, candidates are evaluated and the membership exercises its sovereign political choice. It cannot logically be both a democratic selection process and a ceremonial gathering summoned to endorse a decision already made elsewhere. Chairman Songa’s outburst appears to confirm this assertion.
Meanwhile, recent public debates over the SLPP Constitution itself demonstrate that the succession question is far from settled. Public reporting on the party’s current constitutional provisions indicates that the Leader/Flagbearer arrangement has generated considerable controversy over who actually possesses the authority to determine the next presidential candidate.
Chairman Songa may therefore have opened cankerworms within the constitution itself that have brought out different interpretations that could be much bigger than the perhaps the debaters intended.
THE KABBAH PRECEDENT:
This is where history becomes particularly uncomfortable for the SLPP. When President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah approached the end of his constitutional tenure, he had a preferred successor: his Vice President, Solomon Ekuma Berewa. Former President Kabbah did not hide his preference. Berewa had become the de facto political heir of the Kabbah administration and, by 2005, was widely regarded as Kabbah’s preferred successor. Media reports and dissenting voices within the SLPP at the time even accused Kabbah of helping Berewa gain an early political advantage.
But there was a crucial difference. Berewa still had to go before the party and its elected delegates. At the SLPP National Convention in Makeni on 3–4 September 2005, Berewa was formally elected as the party’s Leader and 2007 Presidential Candidate. He received 291 votes, while Charles Margai received 34, Julius Maada Bio 33 and John Bandagbla Dauda 28.
In other words, Kabbah could have had a preferred successor, but the party Convention remained the mechanism through which that preference acquired the formal legitimacy of the SLPP. That distinction is enormously important today; even though some official reports have it that it was manipulated and the delegates coerced psychologically by the overbearing presence of the sitting President and Leader of the party throughout the voting process.
KABBAH SHOWED HIS PREFERENCE. DOES BIO HAS A “SACRED RIGHT”?
Nobody should pretend that political leaders do not influence succession, and no one should think either that what Chairman Batilo Songa has brought to the fore so nakedly is the first ever in the SLPP.
Political leaders do and for the SLPP, former President Kabbah did and President Bio will undoubtedly do.
Indeed, it would be politically naïve to believe that an incumbent party leader who has spent years building a political coalition will have no opinion about who should inherit the political machinery he has constructed.
The issue, therefore, is not whether President Bio should have a preferred candidate. Of course he may.
The issue is whether his preference is supposed to become an instruction. There is a world of difference between saying that: “I have a candidate whom I believe can carry the SLPP forward,” and saying: “I alone will determine who that candidate shall be.” The first is political leadership and the second risks becoming political proprietorship or as it is popularly put, a political dictatorship.
SONGA’S DANGEROUS LOGIC OF “WAIT UNTIL THE LEADER SPEAKS”:
Chairman Songa’s reported instruction that District Chairmen and Women’s Leaders should wait until they hear from President Bio may sound like a call for discipline and unity. But it can also be interpreted as something much more troubling and premeditated.
It could create a political environment in which party officials become afraid to express their legitimate preferences until they know which candidate enjoys the blessing of State Lodge.
That is precisely how a political party can gradually transform from a membership-driven institution into a patronage-driven organisation.
If a District Chairman believes Candidate A is the best person to lead the SLPP, must he suppress that opinion because President Bio has not yet spoken? If a Women’s Leader believes Candidate B possesses superior political credentials, must she remain silent? If delegates have already begun forming opinions, must they suspend their political judgment until the Leader gives them a signal?
And if everybody must “wait for the Leader,” and the “thou shall be” from Mr. Chairman who has the ears and lips of the Leader, what exactly is the purpose of the competitive flagbearer process and a Delegates Convention?
THE IRONY OF THE SLPP HISTORY:
There is a delicious irony here. The SLPP of 2005 was able to accommodate multiple powerful personalities. Charles Margai contested. Julius Maada Bio contested. Joseph Bandagbla Dauda contested, and Solomon Ekuma Berewa contested among others, and it was Berewa who won.
The Convention therefore provided the democratic mechanism through which the party’s preferred successor was determined. Whatever was the outcome of that election is a story for another day.
Today, however, Chairman Songa appears to be suggesting that party officials should not even publicly align themselves with aspirants because the ultimate decision belongs to the Leader. The Commandment must come from the Holy Sea, which is a much more centralized conception of party succession.
And the irony is that President Bio himself once participated in precisely the kind of competitive flagbearer politics that this new interpretation could potentially contaminate.
Bio was among the contenders when Berewa was elected in 2005. He later became the SLPP’s presidential candidate in 2012 and again in 2018, ultimately winning the presidency in 2018. Would President Bio have welcomed a message in 2005 telling SLPP members and delegates that they should wait for President Kabbah to announce whom they should support?
That is the question Chairman Songa’s statement has inevitably provoked.
There is another philosophical issue that Sierra Leoneans should not ignore, which is, a political party belongs to its membership of which the President may be its Leader, the Chairman may be its administrative head, and the National Executive may be its principal governing organ; but none of these positions should transform the party into a personal estate.
The language of “sacred responsibility” is therefore particularly problematic when applied to political succession. Political succession is not a sacred inheritance, it is a democratic responsibility.
A President therefore, cannot own a political party simply because he currently leads it, neither can a National Chairman transform constitutional provisions into a doctrine of political inheritance without inviting scrutiny from the very membership whose political future is at stake.
THE SLPP 2007 LESSON:
The ultimate lesson of the Kabbah-Berewa episode is perhaps even more instructive. Kabbah backed Berewa. Berewa became the SLPP candidate, but Berewa ultimately lost the presidency to Ernest Bai Koroma of the All People’s Congress (APC) party.
The lesson here is simple: A President can choose his preferred successor. He cannot choose the electorates, and even inside a party, political endorsement does not automatically translate into electoral legitimacy. The party may be tempted to believe that political discipline guarantees electoral victory. History, however, says otherwise.
THE QUESTION BATILO SONGA HAS UNWITTINGLY CREATED:
Chairman Songa may have intended to bring order to the succession debate, instead, he has raised one of the most consequential questions confronting the SLPP: Does the party choose the Leader—or does the Leader choose the party’s future?
The answer will tell Sierra Leoneans much about the political character of the SLPP going into 2028.
The Kabbah precedent demonstrated that an incumbent President can have, and openly exercise a preference for a successor. But history also has demonstrated that Berewa ultimately had to pass through the party’s formal selection process. That is the balance the SLPP under Batilo Songo wants to desecrate under the pretext of loyalty.