By Malcolm Egugiama
He is famously quoted as saying for many years that he’s NOT a politician. He has served every government (APC & SLPP) in this country since the 1980s when he first became a research officer at the central bank. His elevation in the APC party to become the flag bearer and later the presidential candidate surprised many people including Samura Kamara himself. So the current crisis in the APC party should come as no surprise at all. Many in the party will be scratching their heads as to what direction Samura Kamara -one of this country’s longest-serving senior civil servants want to take the APC party.
Never in its recent political history has the APC party faced such a crisis as it is today where elected members are denied their constitutional right and pressured by their leaders not to take their seats in parliament neither served in any position within government. How can the party explain this irrational and foolish decision to the general membership of the APC that campaigned to see their members elected? Shouldn’t Samura Kamara and others have devised some other means to ‘punish’ the MPs? Parliament is the place for healthy debates and regular interactions by elected members of parliament from all political parties. To censor their elected MPs from taking their seats in the House, the APC has suddenly become nothing but a party merely talking to itself. It is possible that many of the elected APC MPs may have taken bank loans, overdrafts to finance their campaign to parliament, expecting to repay once taking their seats in the House. How is the party now going to reimburse the MPs when the party itself is broke and cannot fund its own political campaign during the elections? Nor are the fat cats in the party in the position to surrender the money many had corruptly amassed over the ten years the APC was in power. If the boycott of the APC to parliament was intended to embarrass President Bio and the SLPP government, it has spectacular backfired and surely not worked. It is self-defeating and makes the APC leadership looks like a party of buffoon and selfish fools. This is not politics at all!
This country remained a democratic state with a multi-party system of government. Gone are the days when we were forced into a one-party system of government because Prime Minister Siaka Stevens, the APC dictator at the time was averse to opposition and dissent. If Samura Kamara and his hapless secretary general had been educated in the communist Soviet Union, the decision by the party might be understandable and perhaps try to compare it with the old communist system of government. But even that in itself was never so abrupt, heavy-handed, and insensitive. Communism carried a lot of responsibility; the priority was serving the masses. So what exactly is the political game plan for the technocrat millionaire Samura Kamara? Sit it out for the next five years. Will this crass decision not deprive the membership of the part of their elected representatives? I repeat, what exactly is the APC party political game plan? The idea of calling for a fresh election or overturning the results of the June 24 election again broadly demonstrates Samura Kamara’s political ignorance and lack of experience. Something ought to give and the APC party should seriously consider what to do next: it can either sit it out in the rains or sack the current national executive and call for an election to elect a more progressive leadership.
