Fine! She may well have this potential and we have no quarrel with that. We even go so far to say, at the risk of sounding patronising, that we believe that a woman President could probably do better and no worse for Sierra Leone than current and previous holders of that office during the last thirty years. So (please, please!) Mrs Bangura's gender is not the point in issue. We do actually champion the cause of women on this site from time to time because we believe in equality of opportunity for all sexes, without distinction.

But the problem that is bugging us, hence the reason for our uncharacteristic outburst this time, is why anybody or foreign interests should want to get her into this job through the back door. We know she has friends in high places and in the foreign community, such as former British High Commissioner,  Pa Komrabai Peter Penfold for one. But that cannot be the definitive credential for Presidential material.

The principle must be that anyone who aspires to this level of conducting national and public affairs must, from the onset, show and set very high standards that should help catapult them into high office.

Three such standards come immediately to mind:

• Good faith - which requires you to realise that there can be conflicts of interest and obliges you to declare any personal interests which may affect the interests of those you serve.

• Transparency -  which requires you to be transparent in your decisions and actions, and not withhold information which is in the public interest.

• Accountability - which obliges you to recognise that you are accountable for your decisions and actions, and that you will submit to some form of scrutiny.

Those people in the British and USA establishments who appear to fancy Mrs Bangura, or any other person, as material for high public office in Sierra Leone must concede that they cannot expect Sierra Leoneans always to accept lower standards for our own public officials than they would tolerate in their own countries. They have tried it once before and succeeded. But we serve notice on them now to beware that any attempt to foist another of these inconsequential characters on us again, like they did Kabbah,  James Jonah (now that's one man who has gone suspiciously silent while Kabbah alone reaps the blame for failure!), and all these failed and incompetent lackeys with whom Kabbah has surrounded himself, will be resisted fiercely this time. If it is done through the backdoor then our resistance to it will be all the more fierce. Most Sierra Leoneans are wide awake to that fact now and will never be fooled again.

The point that we are making is this: If  Zainab Bangura fancies her chances of becoming the next President of Sierra Leone, she must not do it while riding on our backs, or be helped to accomplish it by stealth through surrogacy of an organisation via which her foreign friends channel funds supposedly to help this nation, when in fact the ultimate aim is most probably to elevate her into officialdom.

Those who know the Chair of CGG will tell you she is a pure political animal.. Her instincts are thus purely settled on power and influence. She cannot disguise it. Every utterance from her mouth is laced with political diatribe. She is not and has never played the role of conciliator. How can she, when she struts around whipping passions of hate and vengeance against those who do not share her political position. Then when she falls out of favour with President Kabbah, she unleashes self-serving vitriolic remarks about him, and even orchestrates a demonstration against him simply because he sensibly decides to change course and sue for peace with our rebel opponents.

Mrs Bangura even forgets that just over a year ago she was in the forefront of political agitation, arguing what a good man Kabbah was and how dare soldiers remove him.  Then when she does not have her way with him she turns round to stab him in the back. In our book this is known as political inconsistency or vacillation. Others call it simply political opportunism. She is just a bitter and disgruntled person whose political ambitions have yet to materialise. She is not fit for high office and it makes no iota of difference that her foreign friends think the world of her. We don't!

It is  wrong that such a person heads an organisation like CGG. It makes a mockery of Transparency International's claim that their national chapters "observe our guiding principles of ... independence from government, commercial and partisan political interests.. ." 

We specifically refer to the perfectly reasonable comment by the original complainant who says that when no satsfactory response came from any official at CGG's office in Freetown (Mrs Bangura was probably away on one of her numerous foreign trips!), and "due to the high political profile of this chairperson (Mrs Zainab Bangura), I sought to establish that the organisation was truly independent of government and had no financial links with government." The complainant's instincts were quite correct in pursuing that course. What we too know and have seen of Zainab Bangura's activities over the years of turmoil in Sierra Leone confirm their haunch. But it seems to us that this simple observation by the complainant got Mrs Bangura rattled. She does us the favour of hanging herself in her so-called narrative of accounts. She could not hide the lack of candour behind the ducking and weaving in that letter.

But even long before this letter of complaint reached us, we ourselves had become fully aware of the relationship between the government and Mrs Bangura and her CGG.  In Conakry (Guinea) she was part and parcel of the exiled "bomb them, kill them, finish them" rabble who went around calling for war, war and war to reverse the AFRC coup.

In conclusion, we have to say that we remain deeply suspicious that there are ulterior motives behind this readiness and generosity by our major donor countries towards the chair of the CGG. No doubt they will argue that it is the aims and objectives of the CGG that they are helping to carry out. We can can live with that because the aims and objectives of the CGG are truly a key to our future ability to run our affairs responsibly and well. But what we also say is that in both her behaviour and attitude, and if they have time to read the letter of accounts that she sent to us, Zainab Bangura reveals herself as an arrogant and self-serving personality who will eventually prove to be a liability to them.

The choice for Zainab Bangura is quite simple. If she is entertaining ambitions for high/ political office, she is free to do so like every Sierra Leonean. But first, she must relinquish her Chair of the CGG which by its own charter does not directly engage in such activities, and let someone who wants purely to serve its aims and objectives run the show. We hope then that such a person will have access to the same generous level of resources as befits that cause. 

The bottom line is this, and here's hoping that Zainab Bangura takes note: If she truly believes that her allegiance and accountability is solely to those who give her money – hence the means to influence and control her lowly minions in Sierra Leone - then she deserves to be taken to the cleaners. Focus will always relish the task.

21/03/00