Former Flag Bearer of the National Grand Coalition (NGC) Honorable. Dr. Kandeh Kolleh Yumkella finally resigned from the party and switched over to the Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP).

The inevitable can’t be resisted, even in the best of faith. Yumkella formally resigned from the NGC to return to the SLPP. No one’s shocked. What alliances? It was always a game for him and those who did his maneuvering.

Yumkella played and disrespected his colleagues and supporters from start to finish. How can you resign from a junior partner you led into a coalition only to defect to the majority partner with such callousness?

Hurling further insult at those who were prepared to take bullets for him, he wrote, ‘My late wife Philomena and I have always believed that the NGC Party was not meant to be “my” party but rather a vehicle and an institution for change’.

What an ingrate. They sped up, almost put that thing together for him! Now he’s disowned it.

He not only undermined the NGC’s genuine momentum-building efforts but plotted its fatality. The final blow was joining it with the SLPP months before an election. The NGC got wiped out. Three months later, he resigned. He publicly humiliated those who stayed with him when Dr. Dennis Bright and others left the party in disgust at his selfishness.

But, of course, the plan played out as he wanted. He’s got a job in government. The NGC is deceased, and therefore sod his supporters and those who tied their political ambitions to what they thought was a credible party.

To think that a lot of people saw Yumkella as a positive departure from the rotten political class is perhaps the greatest misplacement of trust in Sierra Leone’s politics. 

Suddenly, the realization couldn’t be more pronounced: Yumkella is the archetype, the sample of the Sierra Leonean politician: prioritizing himself and the cult of personality ahead of building and operating within institutional integrity. 

Just like a common sycophant, ‘Enti Fos Lady dae for witness,’ he sought validation from the president’s unelected missus while addressing the party faithful in rhetoric. He knows too well, that the people he’s talking to, out of desperation for better lives, would cheer anything but have zero stake in government. But he’s fooling them anyway. Telling them the government is answerable to them. Until a sentence later, the mask slipped. He title-checked the real boss, the person those in the current government are under oath to submit to: Bio’s wife.

Even the visually impaired and the cognitively challenged can read Yumkella’s simplistic rationale for destroying the NGC. He thinks he’s Bio’s successor in the SLPP’s next leadership race and as president after 2028. In his thinking, even the opposition does not exist. Somebody should read him something about Hilary Clinton’s arrogance against Obama and her eventual defeat by Donald Trump. If that’s pushing it, he can read the story leading up to the 2018 elections, where he was a Major protagonist.

But it’s Sierra Leone. The government is the judiciary, the police, the army, and most importantly, the electoral commission.

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