By Chernoh Alpha M. Bah
Ahead of the 2018 presidential elections in Sierra Leone (3 July 2017), I published a series of articles evaluating Kandeh Yumkella and his newly constituted National Grand Coalition (NGC) in Sierra Leone.
On that day, Yumkella had called a press conference at the Brookfield’s Hotel in Freetown to announce the suspension of his bid to seek the presidential nomination of the Sierra Leone Peoples Party (SLPP). At that press conference, Yumkella said he would vigorously pursue his ambition to become president of Sierra Leone through his newly formed NGC.
Two years before that event, Yumkella had embarked on a political journey that turned out to be rocky and difficult in his desperate bid to become president. His campaign to lead the SLPP had been struggling since it was launched in 2015. Two of his close-protection guards were arrested on allegations of carrying firearms; his membership status in the SLPP faced questions of irregular registration, and his accusations that the SLPP members did not allow him entry into the party’s headquarters had garnered attention.
From the onset, controversy after controversy hounded Yumkella’s campaign. And by July 2017, when it had become clear that he would lose the SLPP nomination, Yumkella jumped out of the SLPP leadership race. At the press conference, Yumkella claimed, “democracy has been choked, suffocated, stifled, and rendered meaningless in the SLPP.” This is the same political party he had been fighting to lead for two years. It was this very political party for which, he says, his father, a founding member, and other family members allegedly received jail time in the 1960s.
Before the 2018 elections, Yumkella complained that he and his supporters had faced “harassment and violence” in his quest to become the SLPP’s presidential candidate. “There has been a deliberate policy by certain groups in control of the party structures to aggressively exclude any person or group of persons that do not support their candidate,” he told his audience of supporters at that press conference. At the time, Yumkella did not mention the other candidate by name, but it was evident then that he was directing his innuendos at only one politician, Julius Maada Bio.
Bio was the only person who Yumkella and his supporters knew was a threat to his claiming leadership over the SLPP. For two years, Yumkella and ten other politicians who were aspirants for the presidential ticket of the SLPP had directed their political campaign against Bio, accusing him of violence and holding the SLPP hostage. A year prior to the formation of the NGC, the anti-Bio candidates of the SLPP formed an alliance of aspirants, which excluded Bio and made it their principal goal to challenge Bio’s grip on the party. That coalition fell apart a few months after it was formed because Yumkella had put himself forward as its leading architect without the full consent and approval of the other candidates. A few more months later, Yumkella would galvanize his defeated and demoralized SLPP faction into the political organization that became known as the National Grand Coalition (NGC).
After its inception, the NGC embarked on a frenzied media showcase of alienated and disgruntled politicians from both the APC and SLPP who were declaring staged support for the NGC. These media events were part of a propaganda campaign designed to portray a swelling support for Yumkella’s agenda; a support that never existed. As it turned out, it was an ineffective strategy: the media charade itself epitomized an age-old trademark of an ideologically bankrupt Sierra Leonean political class always willing to jump ship from the APC to SLPP so long as they benefit.
The enduring truth is that Yumkella has been an inconsistent and unreliable politician since he entered the national politics of Sierra Leone. In a still unforgotten radio interview, Kandeh Yumkella is on record as having told the Sierra Leonean radio journalist David Tam-Baryoh that he was not a registered member of any political party and had never voted in an election in Sierra Leone. This was shortly before he officially launched his political campaign for the presidential ticket of the SLPP.
Months before that radio interview, Yumkella visited Ernest Bai Koroma, then president of Sierra Leone and leader of the APC. Those close to Koroma rumored that Yumkella was trying to persuade Koroma to make him his successor and welcome him into the APC. The leadership of the APC was, around that time, surreptitiously scheming to extend Koroma’s stay in power. The APC’s national convention held in 2013 had already coronated Koroma as its chairman for a third consecutive term. Koroma was not only holding on to power but he had hijacked significant energy and mining contracts to multinational corporations that Yumkella had helped negotiate. Besides his determination to edge-out Yumkella from these corrupt investment deals, the leaders of the APC, who were aware of these rogue arrangements between Koroma and Yumkella, reportedly opposed Koroma’s intention of making Yumkella his successor. Yumkella’s initial efforts to lead Koroma’s APC failed.
It was after this failed meeting with Koroma and attempt to lead the APC that Kandeh Yumkella finally turned his political ambition towards the SLPP. But the SLPP, like the rest of the opposition parties that existed in Sierra Leone around this time, was already bogged down by factional infighting orchestrated by the Koroma regime ahead of the elections of 2012.
Before this time, an already disgruntled faction existed within the SLPP. These factions were nearly ostracized and made up mostly of elite politicians from the south and eastern districts of Sierra Leone, areas considered SLPP electoral strongholds. Their disaffection comes from a failure to secure party nominations for parliamentary and local council positions to contest in the SLPP’s heartlands of the south and east during the 2012 elections. They were the factions that had organized into a support group to fuel Kandeh Yumkella’s ambition for the presidency. The group, which included names like Martin Gbonda, Ambassador Foday Darboe, Brima Keitta, Isatu Jabbie Kabbah, and Victor Sheriff, was already holding meetings across several locations in western Freetown to pull together a support committee for Yumkella.
The Yumkella project then became, for this group, their own 2018 Agenda; a plan hatched solely to prevent the SLPP’s 2012 presidential candidate, Julius Maada Bio, from contesting the party’s future presidential ticket. These disgruntled politicians, united only by their shared opposition to Maada Bio, organized themselves into a nucleus from which the Kandeh Kolleh Yumkella (KKY) Movement would emerge.
Thus, the KKY Movement, from its embryonic stages, was hatched as a political faction born out of the scattered entrails of the SLPP, but one that was patched together only by a shared opposition to Maada Bio. It was their hatred towards Bio that coalesced into a platform from which Kandeh Yumkella was to launch his presidential project. The KKY Movement, its program, and emblematic features – its color, representation, posters, symbols, and organizational structure – hurriedly cast and setup from the very beginning, was heading in opposing directions to the predominantly prevailing mood of the general membership of the SLPP and its central leadership.
The SLPP, the actual political organization that Yumkella finally zeroed his plans to contest the elections of 2018 after his failure to enter the APC, recorded a new battlefront. Yumkella and his supporters built their campaign on personal attacks against Bio by identifying and making their ultimate target the overturning of Bio’s presidential ambition. To achieve their goal, they only recycled the APC’s anti-Bio propaganda campaign of 2012 and made it their propaganda campaign program. They then launched Kandeh Yumkella into the politics of the SLPP by pitching his United Nations profile against the military record of Julius Maada Bio.
In brandishing Yumkella as a new political breed, and an unblemished politician representing the only hope for the SLPP, they cast Maada Bio deep into the muddy pit that was dug out by the APC during the elections of 2012. They desired at the time that Yumkella’s United Nations profile would be enough to edge out Bio’s support among the rank-and-file of the SLPP. But they faced stiff resistance from the overwhelming mass of SLPP supporters. From accusations of irregular membership to suspicions that he was an agent of the APC, the Yumkella campaign, from the start became a troubled one, and their politics of smear campaigns was doomed to fail. Yumkella and the other aspirants forced the SLPP into one controversy and court petition after another for nearly two years; these litigations rocked and crippled the SLPP from functioning as an active opposition to Koroma throughout his second term.
It was evident then that the KKY Movement and Yumkella plunged themselves and the SLPP into a counterproductive civil war. They became, directly or indirectly, the fratricidal opposition within an already fractured and badly wounded opposition party. The SLPP, already severely splintered by fierce internal leadership battles that began in 2005 under the divisive politics of Tejan Kabbah, was thrown into renewed factional fighting by the Yumkella movement, and the party has since not recovered from that seemingly irredeemable predicament.
A few weeks before the 2023 elections, Yumkella again plunged the NGC into a fresh organizational crisis; one resulting from Yumkella’s opportunistic decision to force the NGC out of the 2023 presidential race. Back in 2018, Yumkella scored some 136,000 votes (about 6.9%), a distant third position in the presidential election that Bio narrowly won. Analysts had argued that Yumkella would have gotten lower vote counts had he contested the presidential elections again in June 2023; a reason attributed to his decision to endorse Bio’s candidacy in exchange for future presidential ticket of the SLPP in 2028. To actualize this plan, Yumkella and other Members of Parliament (MPs) enacted a new public elections law in June 2022 that gave the Electoral Commission of Sierra Leone (ECSL) and Bio unrestricted powers to redefine the electoral rules and determine how the June 2023 elections would be held and eventually rigged in Bio’s favor.
A national voter registration exercise undertaken in September 2022 was fraught with tremendous technical and bureaucratic challenges. Hundreds of videos and other evidence collected by Africanist Press showed that thousands of potential voters who turned up at voter registration centers, mostly in Freetown and in cities across the north of Sierra Leone, were unable to register. In several centers in Freetown, voters queued up for many hours to register only to be told by electoral officials that they were experiencing technical problems, including lack of functioning computers, absence of electricity supply, and other complications with software and fingerprint scanners.
The voter registration exercise was marred largely due to procurement irregularities. The Electoral Commission of Sierra Leone (ECSL) awarded two procurements contracts worth over US$10 million to two companies that did not show technical capacity to supply the requested voter registration technology and software. Yumkella and other MPs failed to inquire into the activities of the Electoral Commission, including the problematic registration process itself which threatened the smooth conduct of the elections.
Then when the time for nominating candidates came, Yumkella refused to have the NGC nominate him as its presidential candidate or another candidate in the June 2023 presidential elections. Instead, Yumkella announced that he was voting for the incumbent SLPP candidate, Julius Maada Bio. Other NGC leaders, including Dennis Bright, staged a deceptive splitting drama pretending that the NGC had disintegrated and that a majority of the NGC executive members had deserted the party after Yumkella decided to support Bio’s bid for a second term. The theatrical performance was part of a grand political plot designed to subsume an opportunistic political deal that Yumkella and NGC leaders, including Dennis Bright, had brokered with Bio. The treacherous political deal was midwifed by foreign diplomats and their energy corporate executives who want Yumkella to succeed Bio to guarantee protection and continuation of corruptly awarded energy, telecommunication, transportation, and other critical infrastructure projects in Sierra Leone.
Subsequent to the staged disintegration of the NGC, Yumkella travelled around the country with Bio in hope of convincing Sierra Leoneans that his decision to disenfranchise NGC voters in June 2023 was actually a plan to promote development in Sierra Leone. Sierra Leoneans were unconvinced and have continuously questioned Yumkella’s sincerity; saying that the plot was designed to advance his self-interest.
Recent developments have shown that they were right. The undisclosed agreement signed between Bio and Yumkella ahead of the June 2023 elections promised to make Yumkella a strategic executive in the cabinet if the NGC leaders could help Bio retain power. The agreement also promised similar political positions for other NGC leaders. The deal also included a promise that Bio would make Yumkella the next SLPP presidential candidate for the 2028 elections. They agreed that Yumkella, once imposed as presidential candidate, must become president by all means regardless of whether the outcome of the next elections in 2028 did or did not favor him. In other words, they agreed to make Yumkella president through another sham election.
In the June 2023 elections, 13 candidates contested Sierra Leone’s presidential elections, including incumbent candidate Julius Maada Bio. Bio was elected President of Sierra Leone in April 2018 on a platform to fight corruption and introduce fiscal discipline in government. On assuming office, Bio told representatives of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Freetown, that his government had inherited the worst economic situation in the country since independence in 1961. He announced a range of economic measures including the introduction of a Treasury Single Account (TSA) that centralized government expenditure.
A governance transition committee established on 6th April 2018, just two days after Bio was sworn into office, reported that the outgoing administration of Ernest Koroma had led Sierra Leone to the brink of economic collapse. It identified a huge external and domestic debt burden driven mostly by an “exploded payroll” to the tune of US$263 million or 14.4% of the GDP. President Bio responded by launching multiple audits into the past activities of the Koroma regime, examining issues of political and financial corruption, nepotism, and widespread economic graft that permeated governance during the ten years that the All Peoples Congress (APC) was in power. These investigations concluded by accusing officials of the Koroma regime of corruption and the acquisition of unexplained wealth. Bio imposed a travel ban on several of Koroma’s former ministers, including his leading contender, Samura Kamara. Bio has placed Kamara on a travel ban for the entire five years that he has been in office on the guise of fighting corruption.
As it later turned out, Bio’s “corruption war” against his predecessors was a façade: Africanist Press investigations uncovered evidence showing that corruption increased significantly after Bio took power. In the six months after the 2018 election, cash amounting to more than US$2.4 million was directly withdrawn from the Bank of Sierra Leone (BSL) for supposed personal use by President Bio and First Lady Fatima Bio. Large daily cash withdrawals of both foreign and local currencies were regularly carried out directly by the president and his wife, or by close aides of the president who acted on instructions from the president. Within the same six months, a combined total of over US$3.1 million was withdrawn and jointly spent by Bio and his wife as travel per diems. Expenditure records show that such large cash withdrawals are now a regular financial practice; there is no documentation whatsoever to show how these monies were spent. In fact, misspending of travel funds became normalized. Thus, Sierra Leone’s economic challenges intensified as inflation skyrocketed amidst a sharply depreciating currency and huge domestic and external debt burdens.
In previous years, Yumkella and other NGC members claimed they were against Bio’s human rights records and his mismanagement of public finances. But since the June 2023 elections, Yumkella has not only renounced his previous criticism of Bio, saying Bio is developmentally oriented, but Yumkella and the NGC, hiding behind Bio’s shadow, are now running the show in Sierra Leone.
Since the end of the June 2023 elections, NGC members, including Yumkella, have occupied more than 85% of all strategic cabinet and senior administrative positions in the Bio regime. These positions include the chief minister’s office, foreign affairs ministry, finance ministry, energy ministry, gender affairs ministry, information and communication ministries, anti-corruption commission, office of national security, chief justice office, attorney general’s office, national procurement agency, and political parties registration commission. The list of appointments now extends to staff of the country’s diplomatic missions in Washington, New York, and Brussels.
The Bio loyalists and all potential opponents to Yumkella within the SLPP have been purged out of the administration. The victims of the internal purge include former foreign affairs minister Alie Kabba, former finance minister, Jacob Jusu Saffa, former chief minister David John Francis, former energy minister Alhaji Kanja Sesay, former labor minister Alpha Timbo, former internal affairs minister, Joseph Panda Noah, and his deputy Lahai Lawrence Leema. The internal operation to neutralize opposition to Yumkella’s planned effort to succeed Bio has extended to opposition parties, including loyalists of Ernest Bai Koroma within the ranks of the APC. The plot to ensure Yumkella becomes president after Bio leaves office in 2028 has taken a huge toll on civil society and the media.
In essence, the NGC movement has surreptitiously captured all state institutions and civil society organizations, coopting the media and professional groups in the country. Politically, the NGC movement now holds Maada Bio and his First Lady, Fatima Bio hostage to Yumkella’s planned 2028 election rigging agenda. They know that Yumkella can only be president through electoral authoritarian methods operationalized under a state captured political environment where the coercive instruments of state power will be fully unleashed despite the potential instability that such an agenda embodies.