Category: Foreign

By Paul Ejime

Sierra Leone’s former President Ernest Bai Koroma, accused of treason by the government of his country arrived in Nigeria Friday on exile, although the Sierra Leone government is presenting his departure as “a medical trip.”

(Sierra Leone ex-President Ernest Bai Koroma welcomed in Abuja on Friday by ECOWAS Commission President Oumar Alieu Touray & former VP ECOWAS Commission Madam Finda Koroma, among others.)

The journey on a Nigerian Airforce flight was originally planned for the 4th of January, but the government of President Julius Maada Bio went back on its earlier agreement with ECOWAS, apparently when the hawks in his ruling Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) questioned the plan under the erroneous impression that ECOWAS was trying to prevent Koroma from facing justice in his country.

The political tension in Sierra Leone following the disputed June 2023 presidential election had heightened with an alleged coup attempt reported on 26th November, which the government blamed on officials of the opposition All Progressive Congress (APC), including former President Koroma.

Koroma has denied any involvement in the alleged botched coup, but he was placed under house arrest and after days of interrogation by state security agencies, he was taken to court on January 3rd and charged with treason.

Meanwhile, during the ECOWAS end-of-year summit in December 2023, President Bio had requested the regional economic bloc to send a mediation mission to Sierra Leone.

Consequently, the Chairman of the ECOWAS Authority of Heads of State and Government and Nigerian President Bola Tinubu dispatched to Freetown, a high-level delegation made up of the presidents of Ghana Nana Akufo-Addo and Macky Sall of Senegal, accompanied by the ECOWAS Commission President Oumar Alieu Touray and Ambassador Abdel-Fatau Musah, ECOWAS Commissioner for Political Affairs, Peace, and Security.

Sources privy to the Freetown meetings explained that it was President Bio who insisted that for peace reign in Sierra Leone, former President Koroma must leave the country, just like he (Bio) was granted political asylum by the United States after handing over power to now-late President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah in 1996.

Former President Koroma was said to have rejected the Bio suggestion, but following persuasion by the ECOWAS delegation, the three parties (Koroma, ECOWAS, and Bio) eventually agreed to the exile plan with Nigeria as Koroma’s host country.

This was on the condition that the Sierra Leone government should drop all legal and administrative charges against Koroma, who should also retain his entitlements as former head of state.

Diplomatic sources in Freetown and Abuja agreed on Friday that “nothing has changed, it is the same plan initiated by President Bio that is being implemented.”

This means that the Sierra Leone government only introduced the “medical trip element to save face,” after creating the wrong impression that the plan was being imposed on Sierra Leone by ECOWAS.

It is unclear whether ECOWAS will still favourably consider President Bio’s other request for ECOWAS to send a stabilization Force to Sierra Leone given the air of uncertainty in the country following the alleged coup attempt and disaffection over the June election.

The government said 15 of Koroma’s serving and former bodyguards are implicated in the alleged coup attempt, while the former president insists on his innocence.

The trial of suspects in the alleged coup attempt will be watched with keen interest now that Koroma is out of Sierra Leone, which is steep in ethnic division and identity politics, and yet to fully recover from the devastation of an 11-year civil war that killed more than 50,000 people and rendered hundreds of thousands as refugees from 1991-2002. ##/Flowerbudnews

By Paul Ejime

If any country should be grateful to the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) for the sacrifices and immense contributions toward the relative national peace it enjoys today, Sierra Leone is one and Liberia is another.

This fact ought to be obvious to all political actors in Sierra Leone, particularly Ernest Bai Koroma, president for ten years until 2018, and sitting President Julius Maada Bio, a retired army brigadier, who ruled the country as a military dictator from January 1996 to March 1996, when he handed over to the democratically elected government of President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah.

However, it would appear that the present crop of politicians in the country has learned nothing and forgotten nothing!

This is most troubling coming from a country that evolved from the settlement of freed African slaves under the former British Empire, but which rose to become a citadel of learning for several independent African leaders through its renowned Fourah Bay College/University.
Somehow, Sierra Leone is still suffering the consequences of an 11-year civil war that killed more than 50,000 people and made hundreds of thousands of refugees from 1991-2002.

There is no love lost between Koroma, 70, leader of the opposition All Progressive Congress (APC), from the predominantly Temne ethnic group of the north, and Bio, 59, leader of the ruling Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP), who hails from the rival southeast Sherbro ethnic group.

To date, Koroma has not congratulated his successor Bio for winning the 2018 election and the political ambition, intolerance, and intransigence of the pair are now standing in the way of Sierra Leone’s progress and could degenerate into another avoidable bloody conflict unless drastic measures are taken.

The Electoral Commission for Sierra Leone declared Bio re-elected with 56% of the votes, against 41% for his rival Samura Kamara of the opposition APC in the June 2023 polls. The APC promptly rejected the results claiming that the election was rigged. But the party and its officials have also refused to challenge the results in court because according to them, the SLPP government controls the judiciary.

The post-election disaffection has fed into the country’s deep-rooted ethnic division and political intolerance with potentially dangerous implications.

In December 2023, Koroma was placed under house arrest after several days of interrogation by state security agencies. On the 3rd of January 2024, he was charged with treason over a reported attempted coup d’état on 26 November 2023, which the government claimed was masterminded by the opposition APC members.

During that second shootout within two months in Freetown following similar clashes in September after the June 2023 disputed polls, some 2,000 inmates were reportedly let out of a major prison in the nation’s capital Freetown, while at least 20 people were killed.

The Government alleges that 80 suspects including 15 of Koroma’s serving and former bodyguards are implicated in the coup attempt, but the former president has denied any involvement.

As part of a regional effort to douse the heightened political tensions in Sierra Leone, Nigeria’s President Bola Tinubu, Chairman of the ECOWAS Authority of Heads of State and Government dispatched to Freetown, an ECOWAS delegation, made up of the Presidents of Ghana Nana Akuffo-Addo and Macky Sall of Senegal, accompanied by the President of the ECOWAS Commission, Dr Oumar Alieu Touray and Amb. Abdel-Fatau Musah, ECOWAS Commissioner for Political Affairs, Peace, and Security.

The mission which was at the request of Sierra Leone’s government during the December 2023 ECOWAS Summit in Abuja, met separately, with President Bio and former President Koroma. As a mark of solidarity with Bio, the regional leaders at the Abuja summit, also agreed that an ECOWAS military stabilization force should be sent to Sierra Leone.

According to informed sources, it was President Bio who demanded during the Freetown meeting with the ECOWAS delegation that former President Koroma should leave the country, just as he (Bio) was granted asylum in the US after handing over to the now-late former President Kabbah in 1996. The sources explained that it took some persuasion by the ECOWAS delegation before Koroma could agree to his “temporary exile” plan in Nigeria.

This was based on conditions that – the Sierra Leone Government should discontinue all legal and administrative procedures against Koroma; continue disbursement of his benefits/entitlements as a former head of State; secure his residences in Sierra Leone and consider refunding his medical and travel expenses. Backend negotiations involving ECOWAS, the African Union, and the Commonwealth were also set in motion with government and opposition officials in Sierra Leone toward resolving the political disagreement.

But on the eve of Koroa’s planned travel to Nigeria on 4th January, President Bio was said to have received a letter from the ECOWAS Commission urging him to facilitate the process, but instead, observers were surprised to see Koroma in the dock, charged with treason by the Bio administration.

In the U-turn and utter embarrassment of ECOWAS, Sierra Leone Government officials were quoted as saying that Bio never agreed with ECOWAS that Koroma should leave the country. This narrative, canvassed mainly by hawks in Bio’s SLPP, is seen as the government’s ploy to further humiliate Koroma before granting him a presidential pardon and permission to leave the country.

Ordinarily, crime suspects should have their day in court, under the rule of law and a transparent process, but the way and manner the Bio administration is going about Koroma’s case smacks of political vendetta and a slap on the face of ECOWAS and Nigeria.

Instead of showing gratitude to ECOWAS for always supporting peace moves in Sierra Leone, Bio is in utter arrogance, behaving as if the region owes him and Sierra Leone a living.

It took ECOWAS’ principled stance plus resources and the sacrifice of the blood of men and women in the armed forces of member States to end the civil wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone.
From Liberia, the ECOWAS Ceasefire Monitoring Group (ECOMOG) Taskforce moved to Sierra Leone in 1997.

On the 12th of February 1998, that force led by Nigerian Commander, Col. Maxwell Kobe reinstated Sierra Leone’s government of elected President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah, which was sacked in 1997 by the Major Johnny Koroma-led Armed Forces Revolutionary Council and its rebel Revolutionary United Front (RUF) ally.

With much of Sierra Leone ravaged by the civil war, Kobe, who previously served as ECOMOG Taskforce Commander in Liberia in 1992/94, had to operate from Cape Sierra, the only functional hotel in the capital Freetown, where this writer as a War Correspondent first met Col. Kobe and his team in 1998, and witnessed first-hand how he and his team planned and executed military operations to mop-up remnants of Sierra Leone rebels.

A recipient of many awards for his gallantry, Kobe was later promoted to Brig.-General before he died on duty, serving as Sierra Leone’s Chief of Defence Staff (1998-2000).

To underscore the level of externalization of Sierra Leone’s conflict, Charles Taylor, Liberia’s former warlord president is currently serving a 50-year sentence in a UK prison for war crimes supporting Sierra Leone’s RUF, which started the civil war in 1991.

This chronology of events is deliberate to underscore the disappointment and outrage that Sierra Leonean political actors would be the ones pocking ECOWAS or Nigeria in the eye.

Unfortunately, Sierra Leone remains on the bottom rung of the UN Human Development Index, ranking 181 out of 195 nations, and perennially dependent on foreign assistance to finance its national budget.

The country’s sluggish economic growth is compounded by mounting local and foreign debts, rocketing inflation, and unemployment of largely uneducated youths, many of whom have been driven to drug abuse and other crimes. The government is also accused of corruption, nepotism, and mismanagement.

The proper approach for the Bio administration after a divisive and costly election is to encourage national cohesion, healing, and reconciliation.

The implementation of late President Kabbah’s Agenda for Change (AFC 2007) was truncated, just as his successor President Koroma’s Agena for Prosperity (AFP 2013) made little progress.

Yet, the issues highlighted in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Report of 2004, as the perennial root causes of conflicts in Sierra Leone, especially, successive years of bad governance, endemic corruption, and denial of basic human rights persist.

Apart from the opposition party’s complaints, local and international election observers also raised issues with the June 2023 electoral process, the 5th successive post-conflict polls, which had raised hopes for democratic consolidation in Sierra Leone.

The observers noted in their various mission reports that the result collation and management process lacked transparency, with some analysts pointing out that none of the presidential candidates could have scored the 56% vote threshold set by the constitution.

But assuming without conceding that Bio was re-elected fair and square, wisdom requires that he should be magnanimous in victory instead of engaging in a self-distractive witch-hunt.

ECOWAS should still engage with Sierra Leone political stakeholders, including President Bio and former President Koroma, who owe themselves, their country, and 400 million Community citizens an obligation and responsibility for peaceful, patriotic, and responsible conduct.

With the resurgence of military coups in the region and four of its 15 member States under military dictatorships, ECOWAS should recalibrate its intervention strategies to prioritize support and promotion of good governance and protection of community citizens in line with the vision of an ECOWAS of People, instead of an ECOWAS of States or ECOWAS of powerful and politically exposed persons.

No individual should be more powerful than the state, or above the law.
There should be no room for fraudulent military coups, but strict application of the “zero-tolerance” provision for unconstitutional change of government under ECOWAS protocols.

Deployment of regional military forces to prop undemocratic leaders will only promote tyranny and oppression!

**Paul Ejime, a former War Correspondent, is a Global Affairs Analyst and Consultant on Peace & Security and Governance Communications* (Flowerbudnews)

Our digital World with the accompanying advanced technology has unleashed innumerable benefits on humanity. Yet, our quest for justice and equity, satisfaction, good health, sound sleep, healing, peace, and happiness, remains insatiable and endless.

For many, the Year 2023 started with tribulations and anxiety, particularly from the reverberations of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, which is almost two years old and counting, with the attendant economic hardship even for countries that are thousands of kilometres away.

Yes, it is a digital age where information/news travels faster than ever and tasks are easily facilitated. However, conflicts, chaos, hypocrisy, perfidy, inconsistency, covetousness, trust deficit and cheating have also multiplied, no thanks to globalising liberalism, the collapse of multilateralism and the rise of multipolarities aggravated by wars and asymmetric threat vectors, such as terrorism, religious extremism, separatist agitations, cyber warfare, and social media.

The World had not fully recovered from the lingering impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic when Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. Even the year 2023 refused to be outdone with the 7th of October deadly and unprecedent raid on Israel by Hamas militants that left more than 1,000 Israelis dead and hundreds of others of various nationalities abducted.

Israel’s Defence Forces have responded with venom killing more than 20,000 Palestinians in a continuing carpet air, land, and sea onslaught by the 22nd of December 2023, according to Palestinian sources. Not even the United Nations, the organisation set up for World peace, has been able to negotiate a ceasefire, from numerous unbinding Resolutions.

Meanwhile, unrelenting conflicts, some deadlier than the Russia-Ukraine war and the Israel-Hamas fighting combined, in developing countries, especially in Africa, have attracted less international attention, perhaps, because Africa matters very little or is not a priority on the World agenda.

Apart from violent conflicts involving the use of kinetics, Africa is also awash with diseases, crimes as well as man-made and natural disasters.

But the tragic irony of international relations is that while a growing number of African countries such as Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia, Mozambique, the two Congos, Gabon, Chad, Mali, Guinea Conakry, Guinea Bissau, Burkina Faso, and Niger are battling existential crises, including a resurgence of military coups, the EU, and their American ally, are demanding Africa’s support in the Russia-Ukraine war.
From disheartening images of the carnage in the theatres of World conflicts, it is obvious that humanity has lost its soul and moral compass. Human life does not matter anymore.

It would appear that no useful lessons were drawn from previous misadventures in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, or Libya.
The interests and profits of Western defence and blue-chip industries appear to be the main triggers or drivers of World conflicts, with the secret agenda to “destroy and reconstruct later!’

The bottom line, my dear people, is that humanity is losing its fundamental values, the ingredients for human existence, and this can be traced to the collapse of the family system.
The family dysfunction has smeared the entire fabric of society from the individual to corporate levels and contaminated the national, regional, and global space. The rich are richer and the poor poorer.

Corporate executives are no longer answerable to their employees, nor are governments accountable to the people. Parents have abandoned their responsibilities to their children and wards, while the children and young people have lost respect for their parents and the elderly.

The falcon can no longer hear the falconer and things are desperately falling apart!
So, Ethiopia must teach its Tigray tribe the lesson of their lives, for daring to dream of self-determination; for invading Ukraine, Russia must be degraded militarily and economically, meanwhile, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya had been invaded in the past without consequences for the allied invaders. For daring to humiliate the once-feared Israeli defence system, Hamas must be annihilated, the massacre of innocent civilians is immaterial since in war, the use of disproportionate force is not an issue, as the World watches in conspiratorial silence.

Back in Africa, a young General Mahamat Idris Derby can seize power unconstitutionally and succeed his elected father President assassinated by rebels, and be treated as a celebrity, but soldiers in Mali, Guinea, and Burkina Faso must face sanctions for toppling elected governments.

Indeed, coup leaders in Niger, were to face the wrath of a regional military force, until reason finally prevailed.

It is rather unfortunate that humans have become too impatient, with many on the short-fuse, aggressive and trigger-happy, pursuing ruthless vengeance with an unforgiving spirit. Pacification, endurance, forgiveness, joy, happiness, generosity, and consideration for others have taken flight

Therefore, in this Special Season, my dear people, I wanted us to reflect on the virtues of forbearance, joy, and forgiveness as vehicles for healing the brokenness of our individual personalities, nations, and the World at large. Bad governance compounded by socio-economic hardship, injustices, disaffection, and frustrations have forced many into hopelessness and resort to self-help, resulting in high crime rates and suicide cases in many societies.

Religion, often considered as the “opium of the masses,” is no longer a panacea, because it has become an industry and practised more in breach without any depth of spirituality.

Still, for believers, Scripture injunctions remain sacred and sacrosanct. For instance, Christians are enjoined 365 times in the Holy Bible to “fear not” or “do not be afraid.” That is a divine assurance every day of the year!

This is also followed in Ephesians 5:20 and 1 Thessalonians 5:18 with another exhortation “to give thanks to God in all circumstances.” It might sound difficult, but that is the assured way of God, which is not that of man (or woman).

The verse “without me (God our Creature) (we) can do nothing,” which appears 27 times in the Holy Bible, including in John 15:5, requires us to believe and trust in God always.

In doing so, we cannot be too hard on ourselves or judgemental of others. Anger, self-defeat, greed, desperation, impatience or undue haste, intolerance and unforgiveness only trigger or reinforce hurt and pain in us and around us.
Forgiveness, joyfulness, compassion, consideration, and love for others will engender healing and internal happiness, which we are required to radiate and share with others.
Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and Happy New Year to Everyone! (Flowerbudnews)