Despite the ethno-regional divisions that shape Sierra Leonean politics, citizens continue to reach across social, religious, familial, and political lines. Beneath party allegiances—and the hostility often displayed on political platforms—our lives remain deeply intertwined.
The SLPP partisan who attacks the APC from a podium may have a brother, cousin, childhood friend, or business partner in the APC. The same is true of the fiercest APC partisan, whose spouse, relative, or closest friend may belong to the other side.
Our politics may speak the language of division, but our daily lives often contradict it.
That contradiction tells us something important: Sierra Leone is held together by bonds older and deeper than political parties—family, marriage, friendship, faith, community, commerce, and shared history. Yet we have allowed political competition to harden into divisions that threaten those very bonds.
The danger is not political disagreement. Democracy requires disagreement. The danger begins when party identity becomes a test of loyalty, belonging, opportunity, and even personal worth.
This becomes especially apparent when political power changes hands.
A new government may establish commissions of inquiry, conduct audits, or investigate former officials’ conduct. Accountability is essential. Yet after the public accusations and political theatre, something revealing often happens: private relationships re-emerge.
Friends call friends. Relatives intervene for relatives. Former schoolmates appeal to one another. Religious leaders, business associates and political acquaintances quietly seek leniency, reconciliation or protection for people they know on the other side.
Some who publicly condemn political opponents may privately advocate for them when the consequences become personal.
Sometimes that may be hypocrisy. But it also reveals a deeper truth: our human relationships often matter more than the political identities we perform publicly.
The tragedy is that we recognize this truth in private but rarely build our public politics around it.
If relationships across party lines are strong enough to foster reconciliation after conflict, why not use them to prevent conflict in the first place? Why should friendship across the political divide become useful only when someone is in trouble?
Why can it not become useful when the country is in trouble?
This is where leadership becomes critical.
National consensus does not form on its own. Institutions matter. Civil society matters. Political parties matter. Citizens matter. But in a political culture heavily shaped by those at the top, meaningful change may require a leader willing to initiate it.
Sierra Leone needs leaders prepared to place the national interest above the immediate appetites of party politics.
That is easier said than done.
Every governing party develops constituencies that expect victory to bring rewards: appointments, access, contracts, influence and recognition. Supporters who have worked for years to bring their party to power may believe it is finally their turn to benefit. They may then interpret cooperation with opponents as weakness or betrayal.
A president who genuinely attempts to govern beyond party lines may therefore discover that the fiercest resistance comes not from the opposition, but from within the governing party.
That is where leadership becomes more than occupying office.
Leadership means being willing to endure partisan anger to defend a national purpose. A transformational leader must sometimes be prepared to disappoint the party to serve the country.
That does not mean abandoning the political organization that brought a leader to power. It means recognizing that once a person assumes the presidency, that office’s constituency becomes larger than the governing party.
A party may win an election.
It cannot own the presidency.
The presidency belongs to the republic.
A leader committed to national transformation should be willing to continue a successful program launched by a previous government; appoint capable Sierra Leoneans regardless of party affiliation; protect competent professionals from partisan purges; and ensure that investigations of opponents meet the same standards applied to allies.
But decisive leadership must never become unchecked leadership. Sierra Leone does not need a president who substitutes personal will for institutions. Courageous leadership should strengthen institutions so national progress no longer depends on a single individual’s courage—or restraint.
That is the paradox of democratic leadership: a leader may begin a transformation, but institutions must preserve it.
This is why Sierra Leone needs greater continuity at the national level.
Every change of government should not become an opportunity to reinvent the country. Democracy requires political competition, but development requires continuity. A country cannot afford to abandon useful policies, infrastructure projects, educational reforms, health programs or agricultural investments simply because a rival administration initiated them.
Sierra Leone does not need political uniformity.
It needs a shared national floor.
One way forward would be a National Development Compact: a long-term, cross-party agreement on a limited set of national priorities that should endure across electoral cycles. Such a framework could include education, healthcare, agriculture, energy, infrastructure, youth employment, judicial reform, institutional independence, and responsible management of natural resources.
Political parties would still disagree—and they should. They could debate methods, financing, timelines, and priorities. But they would no longer have to debate the country’s basic destination every five years.
If the national compact says we are heading for Leicester Peak, no government should be free to turn the country toward the pits of Samba Gutter merely to prove it chose a different road.
A genuine national compact cannot belong to the SLPP.
It cannot belong to the APC.
It must belong to Sierra Leone.
Development partners and international financial institutions could support such a framework where appropriate. Still, its legitimacy must ultimately come from Sierra Leoneans themselves—political parties, Parliament, civil society, professional bodies, traditional and religious leaders, the private sector, and citizens.
Such a compact would require sacrifice on all sides. A governing party would have to resist the temptation to monopolize credit. Opposition parties would have to resist rejecting useful ideas simply because the government proposed them.
Most importantly, citizens must begin to see national achievements as national property.
A good school built under an APC government belongs to Sierra Leone. A functioning hospital improved under an SLPP government belongs to Sierra Leone. A sound agricultural policy should not be partisan. A productive infrastructure project should not become politically tainted because of who commissioned it.
The same principle must apply to public institutions. The judiciary, anti-corruption agencies, police, civil service, electoral bodies, and audit institutions must command public trust regardless of who governs.
A national compact would not solve every political problem. Nor should it eliminate legitimate ideological disagreement. But it could provide guardrails against the destructive partisan impulse to dismantle, rename, or discredit worthwhile national initiatives simply because they are associated with a political rival.
Our private relationships already show us that another Sierra Leone is possible.
We marry across political lines. We worship together. We trade together. We attend one another’s weddings and funerals. We help friends whose politics we may strongly oppose.
The challenge is to move that spirit from private life into public institutions.
Someone will have to begin.
Someone in national leadership will have to decide that the cycle has gone on long enough. Someone will have to retain a good program from a previous administration despite partisan criticism. Someone will have to appoint people based on competence rather than loyalty. Someone will have to tell supporters that winning an election does not mean inheriting the country as political property.
And someone will have to uphold processes and institutions even when doing so carries a political cost.
That person may be the current president or a future one. But someone must begin the national conversation required to build a genuine compact across party lines.
The alternative is to keep erasing and demonizing one another’s achievements after every electoral cycle until, in trying to erase the other side’s legacy, we weaken the nation itself.
Such a leader may pay a political price.
But leadership is not merely doing what is applauded. Sometimes it means doing what the country needs before the political culture is ready to reward it.
Governments are temporary.
Parties are temporary.
Presidents are temporary.
The nation is permanent.
Perhaps the greatest legacy any Sierra Leonean leader can leave is not a monument or a slogan, but a country where the next government inherits stronger institutions, deeper public trust, and a national direction that cannot easily be reversed.
About The Author
Oumar Farouk Sesay is a poet, playwright and novelist. He is also the President of Pen Sierra Leone, Chapter.