About two days ago, I commented on the membership of the NGC following the appointment of Andrew Keili as the vice presidential candidate of the party in the upcoming elections.
I stated that the NGC is not different from the SLPP and APC – the two dominant parties that have ruled and are still ruling, Sierra Leone over the last fifty years.
I did point out that the NGC, in particular, is mostly an excremental waste of the SLPP; that there is nothing new in the NGC since it is made up of a disgruntled and alienated faction of the same middle class that destroyed the country.
Chernoh Alpha M. Bah
In my opinion, the NGC’s claim to being new and different is an effort to dupe the oppressed and exploited majority of our population which has grown fed-up with age-old incestuous politics of this class of politicians who all share a collective responsibility for the underdevelopment of the country over the last fifty years.
I wonder, why the NGC thinks we should believe that it is different from the APC and SLPP when its leadership and core membership is a direct product of the APC and SLPP?
I had asked the following questions two days ago that no one dared to answer: who are the progressives in the NGC? And what is new in the NGC?
NGC members and supporters have avoided the questions, and they seek to insult me to silence because I called out the NGC for what it is: a group of political desperados and opportunists who want to be in power by all means.
Is it not apparent that if the current NGC leadership had not failed in its bid to lead the SLPP by all means, there would have been no NGC in the first place?
So the NGC came into existence solely because its leaders discovered they couldn’t win the contest to lead the SLPP for the upcoming elections.
The NGC is not born out of a growing shared commitment to change the political conditions in the country. It is a party whose leaders’ universal unity is on its reaction of been alienated by its compatriots in the two leading political Parties.
Was this not the same way Charles Margai formed the PMDC?
In the case of Margai, he arguably had a moral case for breaking away from the SLPP ahead of the 2007 elections after been unfairly denied leadership multiple times. And it must be said that some in the very conspiracy that is now the NGC were part of the group that robbed Margai various times – in 1996, 2002, and 2005 – when he contested to lead the SLPP.
How then can the NGC claim be new and different from these two twin parties?
The NGC has not shown us any political program or ideology that makes it different from the SLPP and APC. They are only loudly shouting “progressive” and “change” in the ears of our people. You can’t just say you are a “progressive group” because you are a splinter faction of the same parties that you now seek to replace.
Claiming to be “progressive” does not make one a “progressive” at all. After all, Foday Sankoh and his RUF did claim to be “revolutionary” but were they revolutionaries?
Have I asked the NGC and its supporters to show us the differences between the NGC and the rest? They have not done so. They have only responded with outrage and insults. Their only answer is that the NGC’s presidential candidate; Kandeh Yumkella was a former UN employee. They have not shown us what makes Yumkella different from the rest outside the fact that he was an old UN employee. They can’t even fully acknowledge that Yumkella was himself a part of a military regime before he joined the UN.
I have observed the responses of the various members and supporters of the KKY Movement, which now calls itself the National Grand Coalition (NGC). Based on the few comments I made about their party and its membership two days ago, I would not hesitate to conclude now that the NGC is a dangerous and distrustful group that we cannot entrust with political power in Sierra Leone. Apart from their desperation and political jihadism, the intolerance and sheer arrogance of the NGC leadership and its membership are worrying signs.
If the NGC comes to power in 2018, we will be worse than the already messy situation we now have in Ernest Bai Koroma.
I will expand on this point in the next few days.
(c) Chernoh Alpha M. Bah
