ANNOUNCEMENT BY THE SPEAKER BY THE RT. HON. DR. ABASS CHERNOR BUNDU (TUESDAY, 25 JULY 2023)
Hon. Members
Today, 25th July 2023, marks the third sitting of this Sixth Parliament to which a total of 149 Members have been duly elected by the citizens of this country in the last General Election held on 24th June 2023; the first sitting being on 13th July when those of you seated here today took your oath of office as Members of Parliament.
2. There are 54 seats to my left reserved exclusively for those Members-Elect of the All Peoples’ Congress Party (APC) who are yet to present themselves to the House to take their seats. Like all of you, they too have been declared duly elected by the Electoral Commission of Sierra Leone (ECSL) and, apart from Hon. Mohamed Bangura who has taken his seat, all the other 53 Members are yet to do so. I want to take this opportunity to specially acknowledge the presence in the Chamber of the Hon. Mohamed Bangura who has been well advised and directed to come and take his seat to represent the people who had voted for him. I thank the Hon. Mohamed Bangura for his wise decision, and I know this nation owes you a deep and abiding sense of gratitude for that singular patriotic action on your part.
Hon. Members,
3. There is a coterie of highly respected citizens of this country most of whom I know well and hold in high regard. They have been either contemporaries of mine at school or college or laboured together in public life in this country. They are too numerous to call them by name but a good number of them are household names and are well known both here at home and abroad. They are people who have served this country with great distinction in governance in both the public and private sectors and of whom this country is richly proud. They are all members of the APC Party.
4. I want especially to appeal to them, especially to their sense of patriotism and duty to our country not to sit idly by and allow the present stalemate in their party to persist. If they do, the result could be devastating and detrimental to their party and ultimately to the country as a whole as well as to our democratic polity. Under their watch and leadership, this country promulgated the extant Constitution in October 1991. That Constitution eschewed the one-party system of government that had governed the country since 1978 and reintroduced a multiparty democratic system as the only legal and acceptable polity that must prevail in this country and be held sacred by the entire citizenry. In the 1991 Constitution, it is proclaimed that this country shall never again return to the abomination of the one-party system. More specifically, every citizen is enjoined to “participate in and defend all democratic processes and practices and render assistance to appropriate and lawful agencies in the maintenance of law and order”. I therefore want to appeal to all those eminent citizens to whom I have referred to step up to their sense of national duty and not allow their Party to be hijacked again by a small band of greedy, selfish and self-seeking politicians whose era is already well past and spent.
5. Not too long ago they sat idly by and allowed a situation to be nurtured for many years almost to the point of becoming entrenched within the framework of the APC until one of their own summoned the courage of conviction to having his day in Court by instituting legal proceedings against the APC and its Executive. Mercifully the Court accepted the need to exorcise the entire APC Party Executives at all levels that had outlived their mandates and liberated the Party from the darkness of domination and bring it back to the bright light of compliance with the sacred democratic provisions of the very 1991 Constitution of which they were the architect. For this we say kudos to our Judiciary of our country.
6. Now, another darkness is looming on the horizon and this is why I want today to appeal to all those eminent statesmen of the APC Party to rise up and liberate their Party from the clutches of despotism and authoritarianism before it is dragged again to the precipice of destruction and extinction. Walk-outs and boycotts are political tools of yesteryears; they no longer have value and relevance and they are no longer fit for purpose in this 21st Century of participatory democracy. The truth of the matter is palpably simple. If you withdraw yourself from participating in the process of decision-making then you should not be angry when others who agree to participate decide for you and your destiny. Even worse, if you think foreigners from outside Africa have a right to come again to our country to help you take control of our governance or anything else that is not your entitlement under our sovereign laws, then you are still living in the dark ages of colonialism which had long ago been banished to the attics of history.
7. The reality of the world in which we live today has changed. The new reality is clearly prescribed in the provisions of paragraph (e) of subsection (1) of Section 77 of the Constitution of Sierra Leone (Act No. 6 of 1991). That provision states that and I quote: “A Member of Parliament shall vacate his seat in Parliament if he is absent from sittings of Parliament for such period and in such circumstances as may be prescribed in the rules of procedure of Parliament.” That provision is further amplified in S.O. 77 (2)(a) of the Standing Orders of this Parliament and again I quote: “Any member who, without good cause, during any session, is absent from the sittings of Parliament on a number of days amounting to an aggregate period of 30 days shall vacate his seat.”
Hon. Members,
8. So this is the message I have for you today. It is addressed more particularly to the eminent citizens of our land who have been duly elected as Members of this noble House and who are members of the APC Party. I appeal to all of them to see reason and to step up and in consonance with their sense of national duty to come and take their seats in this Chamber to which they have been rightly and properly elected to represent their people before it is too late.
