Former Attorney General Joseph Fitzgerald Kamara has publicly criticised the 2015 removal of then-Vice President Samuel Sam-Sumana, saying he personally disagreed with the decision and believed the judges “did not do justice” to the matter.
Speaking on AYV’s State of the Nation, Kamara stressed that he was not Attorney General at the time. When President Ernest Bai Koroma dismissed Sam-Sumana in March 2015, Kamara was serving as Commissioner of the Anti-Corruption Commission. He only later became Attorney General and Minister of Justice under the same APC government.
Kamara also denied giving Koroma any legal or political advice on the move, noting that his role then kept him largely outside the political manoeuvring around the case.
Asked for his assessment as a legal practitioner, Kamara was direct: “Personally, I don’t think I liked it, and I thought that the judges did not do justice to that decision.”
He added that, had he been president, he would have approached the issue differently.
The remarks carry particular weight given Kamara’s later position. In November 2017, while he was Attorney General, the ECOWAS Court of Justice ruled that Sam-Sumana’s removal had violated his rights to a fair hearing and to participate in government. The regional court ordered Sierra Leone to pay his outstanding salaries and benefits. The government, through Kamara’s ministry, rejected the judgment, arguing that the ECOWAS Court lacked jurisdiction after the matter had already been decided by Sierra Leone’s Supreme Court.
Sam-Sumana was removed on 17 March 2015 after the APC expelled him from the party and amid reports that he had sought asylum at the US Embassy in Freetown. President Koroma cited abandonment of duties and the loss of the constitutional requirement that the vice president belong to a political party. In September 2015 the Supreme Court upheld the dismissal, finding that the loss of party membership had created a vacancy the president was entitled to fill. Critics maintained that the Constitution provided only for a parliamentary process to remove a vice president.
Kamara, who is now seeking the APC flagbearer nomination ahead of the 2028 presidential election, has returned to the subject in recent interviews. He has argued that the Supreme Court ruling is often misunderstood and did not endorse the executive’s actions, but rather focused on Sam-Sumana’s failure to exhaust internal party remedies.
He has also maintained that loss of party membership alone should not automatically remove an elected vice president, and that only the electorate or constitutionally mandated institutions such as Parliament should hold that power.
The 2015 episode remains one of the most contentious of the Koroma administration. Kamara’s public distancing from it is likely to reopen debate within the APC as the party prepares for its next leadership contest and the 2028 elections.
