In Defense Of Puawui: An Open Reply To Andrew K. Keili By Kelfala M. Kallon Dear Mr. Keili, When two people (a relative and a close friend of my wife) canvassed me to support you in the last campaign for the SLPP presidential nomination, they touted your intellect, integrity, reasonableness, and good judgment as key attributes that make you fit for the job. In addition to a candidate’s ability to win the presidency, I believe that good judgment (what Americans call presidential temperament) is one of the most important qualities that any presidential contender must have. This is because a president’s most important task is to use good judgment to appoint capable people to do the heavy lifting. With a capable cabinet, an effective civil service, and an honest judiciary (all borne out of the good judgment of the presidents who nominate them), any country can run itself without a president. Indeed, Ronald Reagan proved this to be true by sleeping through most of his presidency and still accomplishing much. It is this good judgment that many of your supporters continually tout as one of your best qualifications for not only the nomination of our party but also for the presidency itself. It is therefore unfortunate, in my opinion, that you failed to exhibit your alleged good judgment in your recent response to Puawui, an elder who—in spite of mistakes he might have made in the past—has shown that he puts the SLPP above himself and all else. This is even evident in his concluding paragraph of the article to which you take umbrage. Mr. Keili, you have every right to disagree with Puawui’s statement that Julius Maada Bio is one of the two most popular politicians in the country. However, as a citizen of a free society, he also has every right to make such statements if and when he feels the need to do so. And you are correct to point out to the old man that, as the party’s recent presidential nominee, Maada Bio had a head-start in the popularity game. You are also equally correct to suggest that if given a level playing field, others like you could whittle down Maada’s popularity by the time the nomination comes around. This is the nuts and bolts of competitive politics. Pointing those things out would have shown Puawui and those of us who have stated publicly that this is Madda Bio’s SLPP (based on his current popularity within the party) to at least wait for more evidence before making claims that might turn out to be lacking empirical support. There is always a right and wrong way to respond to issues and I regret to say that the approach you took in this case is plainly wrong. More importantly,I believe that it has dented the one quality that put you in good stead for the party’s nomination and the presidency—namely, your alleged sense of reasonableness and good judgment. For God’s sake, do you really believe that rhetorically beating up an old man who has contributed so much to this party (one of the original Mafanta graduates), just because you disagree with him, would win you broad goodwill in the partyand also convince other Sierra Leoneans to support your bid for the presidency? Honestly, immediately after reading your piece, the following question cropped up in my mind: If Andrew Keiliwould publicly insult an old man just because he disagrees with what the latter has said, what would he have done to him if he were president of the republic—when he would have had all the coercive powers of the state at his command? For the purpose of keeping such questions from cropping up in peoples’ minds about them, smart politicians generally try to appear presidential by staying above such pettiness. Thus, theyfarm out such responses to the proverbial pit bulls in their campaigns. Therefore, if you truly intended to lash out at the old man in the way you did, I think a smarter approach would have been to let someone else in your campaign, who had nothing to lose politically, do it for you. For example, although Barack Obama was pilloried ad nauseum during the 2008 presidential campaign, he remained stoically silent and let his pit bulls muddy themselves defending him against all sorts of charges and insults. So perfect was his approach that he soon became known as “No Drama Obama”. This made him appear presidential to even some of his worst critics, which convinced the majority of Americans that he had the temperament and good judgment to be trusted with the nation’s nuclear briefcase. Similarly, when Sylvia Blyden and the APC vuvuzellas piled all sorts of insults on Maada Bio during the last presidential election campaign (to taunt and tempt him to get into the gutter with them so that they could turn around and claim that he lacked presidential temperament), Bio kept his cool and never once took their bait. Given Bio’s and Obama’s examples, as well aseverything we have been told about thereasonableness and good judgment that make you fit for the presidency, I am quite surprisedthat you chose to descend into the proverbial gutter with an old man over what is simply a disagreement over the truth as you both see it. You sought to portray Puawui as dishonest because he claimed that he had not supported any of the aspirants for the party’s nomination prior to the nomination itself. Your evidence were: 1) that he had been in a group of people that led Bio to John Benjamin to apologize to the latter; and 2) that a supporter of yours had told you that Puawui had canvassed him/her to support Bio. Your evidence is however not convincing because we know that whenever one transgresses against another in our society, we call on the elders to help us mend the proverbial fence. Perhaps the following personal narrative might help you understand why Puawui could have accompanied Maada on such a peace-mending trip to JOB and still not have supported him. My father was a strict task master who never spared the rod. We also knew that his cousin, Mamma FodeiSeifui, was the only person in the whole chiefdom who had any sway over him. Therefore, whenever we transgressed his edicts, we ran to Mamma Fodei to lead us to our father and help us ask for his forgiveness; and it always worked. Clearly, you would not conclude that Mamma Fodei supported us in our miscreant ways just because she did what is expected of elders in our society. Similarly, I believe that following Maada (or leading him) to ask for JOB’s forgiveness is not sufficient to make him a Maada supporter.Puawui might have just been doing what we expect of elders in the party—to help bring people together. With regard to your second evidence, I think that it is reasonable to assume that you went to the 2011 convention believing that you will win the nomination. I also think that this belief was shaped by what the delegates who claimed to support you told you. Therefore, your poor showing in the actual contest, in spite of their promises, should suggest to you that many of your pledged supporters lied to you. If this is true, why then would you put such faith in something that one of them (who might have actually not voted for you after promising to do so) told you about Puawui’s alleged attempt to lure him/her to support Maada Bio? Mr. Keili, I believe that Puawui deserves our thanks, not vilification, for having the guts to call things as he sees them—whether rightly or wrongly. This is what we expect of elders in this party. Therefore, unlike Vice President Berewa, who called a closet meeting whose leaked minutes report you sayingthe same thing that Puawui claimed in his piece (that Bio is the most popular politician in the party and that only uniting behind one candidate would deny him the nomination), Puawui told us in the public domain what he believed we should do. We are at liberty to act on his advice or dismiss it as the musing of an old man. But we do not have the right to insult him just because we disagree with his reading of the political barometer in the party and country. And more importantly, Puawui was honest enough to inform Maada Bio and the rest of us that he has very personal reasons to not support him. However, given his reading of the political palms in the party, he has concluded that Maada Bio will likely win the nomination again. Hence, his call at President Kabbah’s laying out at Party Headquartersfor us to unite behind Bio in order to improve the party’s chances of capturing the presidency in the next presidential election is most likely the product of that conclusion. And as a loyal party man, he would be forced to support him for the sake of the party and country, in spite of his personal reasons for not supporting Maada. Many will agree with me that,if the leaked minutes of the infamous meeting correctly reflect what transpired, your own assessment of the political landscape is no different than what Puawui claimed—that Maada is the most popular politician within the party. Those minutes also report you suggesting that the group should unite behind one candidate to deny Bio the nomination. Therefore, unless you want to characterize your own suggestion that people unite behind one candidate to deny Maada the nomination as an unconstitutional attempt to deny Maada the nomination, I think that it would be disingenuous of you to characterize Puawui’s suggestion that the party unite behind Maada as an attempt to deny others their constitutional right to vie for the same nomination.Isn’t what is good for the goose also good for the gander? Frankly, if I had been in your shoes, I would have shown presidential temperament by working even harder to prove Puawui wrong on the convention floor instead of publicly humiliating someone who may be old enough to be my father. I only hope that Puawui will be wise enough to not descend with you into the rhetorical mudslinging into which you are tempting him. Finally, I often remind people that we in the SLPP should copy Ronald Reagan’s eleventh commandment, which is: “Thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican”. Hence, but for the fact that those of us who will support any candidate that emerges as the party’s nominee will not want you or any other aspirant to so single handedly attempt to destroy their chances in the contest as you have by your very intemperate response to Puawui, I would have kept my peace in this case. All is not lost, however, because I believe that you can regain some of your squandered luster by exhibiting humility and publicly apologizing to Puawui, on the one hand, and refraining from such outbursts in the future, on the other hand. I hope that you will seriously consider this modest advice. Sincerely, Kelfala M. Kallon (One who thinks that Bio is currently the most popular politician in the SLPP)
Posted on: Thu, 10 Apr 2014 01:49:21 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015