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FREETOWN: MEMUNATU SHERIFF: Two Sierra Leonean academics, A.B. Zack-Williams and Osman Gbla, recently contributed the third chapter - The Conduct of the Elections: Challenges of Peace building and Democratization - of a new book published by NORDISKA AFRIKAINS INSTITUTET, UPPSALA 2008 titled The Search for Sustainable Democracy, Development and Peace: The Sierra Leone 2007 Elections. This book is very important because it is probably the first if not the first few that will go in history as a publication for posterity to refer to when making authentic reference to the Sierra Leone’s parliamentary and presidential elections in August 2007 and presidential run-off elections in September 2007.

To start with, the title of the book itself presupposes that its content would focus scrupulously on the prospects and challenges the 2007 parliamentary and presidential elections would pose to sustainable democracy, development and peace in Sierra Leone.

In many respects, the publication fails to meet this expectation. Given the conflicting signals that emerged in both the media and academia after the 2007 elections that the election process and conduct were on the one hand satisfactorily flawless and other hand unsatisfactorily flawed, one would have expected Zack-Williams and Osman Gbla to at least include in their analyses voices that reflect the views of both ends of the polemics and dilate on issues advanced from the two vantage points before rendering their value judgment after a sufficient analysis of the situation. Unfortunately, they did not and their book is sadly passing off unchallenged. The third chapter which is the kernel of the book is all about how the elections process was flawless and its conduct satisfactory with justifications and selective allusions to past political processes.

Here, objectivity as a hallmark of academia was not only betrayed by Zack-Williams and Osman Gbla’s failure to consider the other side of the picture, but also by their devotion of far less time and space to reporting all the views and contrary views on the election conduct and process in favour of judging the conduct and process by themselves [see pages 73 to 84].

Their judgment is implicitly rooted in the premise that the 2007 elections entirely reflected the expression of franchise by the electorate who voted and whose votes constituted the legitimization of Ernest Bai Koroma as President and Samuel Sam Sumana as Vice President respectively and the legitimization of parliamentarians as well. In both the August 11 and the September 8 elections, there are abounding evidences of flaws perpetrated at highest levels of the National Elections Commission (NEC) that no objective publication on the 2007 elections can afford to omit. In academia, there is indictment for not only commission but omission as well.

Important omissions in the book about the reasons for the resignation of the South and Eastern Regions’ Elections Commissioners on September 17, the failure of Christiana Thorpe to substantiate her claims of over voting at 477 cancelled polling stations, recent media reports on the winning of a legal battle by an SLPP parliamentary candidate from Pujehun District after the elections, and the report on the overall 2007 election conduct by the National Elections Watch (NEW) are so alarming that one would wonder whether Zack-Williams and Osman Gbla did not simply lay hands on materials reflecting any such diverse views or were simply prejudiced in these omissions during the research for their book. Without any doubt, it is obvious that Zack-Williams and Osman Gbla had a lot of opportunities to interview for their book credible sources in the form of people and reading materials pointing to the fact that no proof has shown that Sierra Leone’s September 2007 presidential run-off elections were not deliberately and maliciously rigged following the refusal of Chief Electoral Commissioner, Christiana Thorpe, to publish polling figures – at polling station level - to substantiate her claims of over voting at 477 stations, a claim she used as the basis for her declaration of Ernest Bai Koroma as President and Samuel Sam Sumana as Vice President. Also, Zack-Williams and Osman Gbla’s chapter of the book ignored the fact that when public and media pressures were being mounted for Christiana Thorpe to publish the figures, she instead defiantly responded by dissolving the official website of the National Election Commission (NEC), thus closing the doors of international public access to election information on Sierra Leone, thereby desecrating the most important pillar - franchise - on which democracy stands by all international standards. Thus the premise on which Osman Gbla and Zack-Williams’ analysis stands - that the 2007 elections entirely reflected the expression of franchise by the electorate who voted and whose votes constituted the legitimization of Ernest Bai Koroma as president and Samuel Sam Sumana as vice president – does not qualify for a conclusion to be based on it without running into the risk of being crowned scholars of prejudice.

This brings up the question as whether the 2007 elections was one that presents high prospects for sustainable democracy, development and peace in Sierra Leone. The introductory chapter of the book under review rightly says “The 2007 Presidential and Parliamentary elections in Sierra Leone were important not just for consolidating peace, but also for nurturing and sustaining a fledgling democracy. The majority of Sierra Leoneans who turned out to vote on August 11, 2007 and the September 8, 2007, ‘Presidential run-off election’ were inspired by the increasing realization that their votes would in several ways contribute to the country’s development”.

In addition to high tolerance of corruption and mismanagement of public resources by past regimes, the root causes of the war in Sierra Leone have also been often and again attributed to past governments’ policies of perpetrating the exclusion and marginalization of certain Sierra Leonean citizens in preference of others with respect to sharing various forms of the national cake such as franchise (equal rights to vote and be voted for in a free and fair election), basing public office appointments on merit beyond ethnic and regional considerations, the excessive centralization of governance, perpetration violence against political opponents, among others.

There is definitely a direct relationship between the widely perceived and substantiated denial of franchise in the September 2007 presidential run-off elections (or a least a lack of closure on it) and the disaffection that has since developed among most electorates of the 477 polling stations whose vote casts were excludedfrom determining the leadership that emerged without substantiation. This relationship if not factored into current technical papers or academic publications, such as the one by Osman Gbla and Zack-Williams, would go a long way in depriving citizens, policy makers, academic students/scholars and the international community of a much needed information about the high possibilities of the re-emergence of conflict in Sierra Leone, particularly when the excluded citizens continue to perceive the resulting regime as one that has failed to legitimize itself since the elections in line with the widespread citizens’ expectation of a government of inclusiveness and one that truly pursues zero-tolerance of corruption.

By excluding from their book this important facts, Osman Gbla and A.B. Zack-Williams, have not only – consciously or unconsciously – done a great disservice to contemporary fellow citizens but to posterity as well. This necessitates a challenge to be thrown at the doorsteps of other future Sierra Leonean authors of the 2007 ELECTIONS to do better.