QUESTIONS

Photo Credit Anusa Pisanec

Photo Credit Anusa Pisanec

Post election period is an interesting mix of quietness, anticipation, confidence but also questions.

Observers came, international media did not question the democratic ways of our elections too much, but what no one seems to raise is, what does democracy mean for Sierra Leoneans.

Is the fact that we have elections and the fact that we can vote enough for our nation to say, this is democracy? What are the criteria people use when they decide to vote? Ethnic background, family ties to running candidates, what part of Freetown, Bo or Kono one lives? How many people have actually read the manifestos of political parties? How many people have held the running candidates they support accountable to the promises they have made in the past? What should our people ask of their candidates? And why their candidates perform?  Is the outcome of the elections all we care about, or is the process more important­? And if it is the latter, what does that mean? The questions are a plethora, the answers, often more complex than we can grapple. Our responsibility, I humbly believe is to ask these questions, demand answers, pressure our leaders to respond to them as a Sierra Leonean first, before party affiliation. This is imperative to the democratic sustainability of our country.

My final question remains, who do we want to be?   

fambul dem this is how we do