STATEMENT BY DR. SAMURA MATHEW WILSON KAMARA
ON THE CONSTITUTION OF SIERRA LEONE (AMENDMENT) BILL, 2025
10 August 2026
I have read the statement issued by the All Peoples Congress on the Constitution of Sierra Leone (Amendment) Bill, 2025.
I support it.
I support the constitutional guarantee of a minimum of thirty percent representation for women in political nominations. I support the broadening of political participation for Sierra Leoneans holding dual citizenship. I support the retention of the First-Past-the-Post constituency-based electoral system, because the bond between a citizen and the Member of Parliament who answers to that citizen by name is one of the few direct relationships our democracy has, and it should be restored rather than abolished. And I support the retention of the fifty-five percent threshold for the election of a President, because a country as diverse as ours should require anyone who seeks its highest office to go out and earn the trust of Sierra Leoneans who did not begin as his or her supporters.
These positions are correct. I commend them.
But I want to speak beyond the Bill, because the most important sentence in that statement is not about the Bill at all.
The Constitution belongs to the people
That sentence is true. It is the truest thing that has been said in our national conversation this week.
The Constitution does not belong to the party that governs. It does not belong to the party that opposes. It does not belong to a President, a Cabinet, a Parliament, or a party executive. It belongs to the market woman in Bo who was never asked, the okada rider in Makeni whose voice must count, the farmer in Kenema who will be governed by it, and the student in Freetown who will live under it long after every one of us has left the stage.
And because that is true, something else must also be true. The principle cannot stop at the Constitution.
What a party owes its people
A political party is not the property of those who happen to lead it at a given moment. It is a trust.
It is held on behalf of the men and women who carry its card, wear its colors, fill its rallies, walk long distances in the sun, sit through the night at polling centers, and ask for nothing in return except that their voices be heard by the people they put in office. Leadership of a party is a tenancy. It is not an inheritance, and it is not a possession. Those who lead do not own the mandate. They administer it, and they answer for it.
A party that cannot hear its own members will not be believed when it claims to hear the nation.
The statement rightly observes that consultation must have consequences. That is a fine principle and a true one. But it cannot be true only in Parliament. It must be true in every room where decisions are taken in the name of other people, including our own rooms. We cannot ask citizens to speak and then decide in advance what we are prepared to hear.
If it is wrong for Parliament to disregard the expressed wishes of citizens on a constitutional question, then it is wrong to disregard the expressed wishes of citizens on any question on which they have already spoken. The ballot is the highest form of consultation known to a democracy. Its consequences cannot be optional.
That principle must govern the question that has occupied our party and our supporters since 24 June 2023. For three years, men and women across this country and in the diaspora have stood in the demand for electoral justice. They defended their votes, they bore real cost, and they placed their trust in commitments made to them that their democratic voice would not be quietly set aside. National commitments arrived at through dialogue after those elections remain unimplemented to this day. No leadership, in any party, has the moral authority to bring that struggle to an end, alter its course, or redefine its purpose without first hearing from the people in whose name it was undertaken.
And every day those commitments remain unimplemented, this country is being taught a dangerous lesson: that a people can be consulted and then set aside. That lesson will not stay confined to the matter that taught it. It will corrode every consultation that follows, including this one.
To our Members of Parliament
To every Member of Parliament, on both sides of the aisle, I say this without partisanship.
Let us be honest about how you came to that Chamber. Not one of you was elected by a constituency. You were elected from a district list, and your position on that list was determined inside a political party. That is not an accusation against any Member. It is a plain description of the system under which all of us contested in 2023, and it is the very system this Bill now proposes to write permanently into the supreme law of the Republic.
Consider carefully what that means. Under a list, a Member’s accountability runs upward, toward those who compile the list, rather than outward, toward the citizens who must live with the result. A citizen who is failed has no one he can name and no one he can remove. A Member who serves the people faithfully but displeases those who rank the list has no protection at all. This is not a technical matter of electoral administration. It is the difference between a Parliament that answers to the nation and a Parliament that answers to itself.
I know this argument is uncomfortable, because it is uncomfortable for all of us. I make it anyway, and I make it first about my own party. A system in which representatives answer to lists rather than to people is precisely how any leadership, in any party, comes to believe that it need not consult the people at all.
The arithmetic is public. Section 108(2) of the Constitution requires the affirmative votes of not less than two-thirds of all one hundred and forty-nine Members. That is one hundred votes. Fifty Members are enough to withhold passage, and our party alone holds more than fifty seats. On this Bill there will be no crowd to hide in and no majority to blame.
History will not record the whip. It will record the vote.
To my party, and to the nation
I say this with love for the All Peoples Congress and with no rancor toward anyone.
A principle that is invoked only when it is convenient is not a principle. It is a tactic. And the people of Sierra Leone can tell the difference. They have long memories and very short patience for words that are not matched by conduct. They will listen to what we say today. They will judge us by what we do tomorrow.
So let us mean it. Let us mean it in Parliament, and let us mean it in our own house. Let the standard we demand of the Government be the standard we accept for ourselves. Let consultation have consequences everywhere, or let us stop using the word.
The party’s statement closed with words I gladly adopt as my own:
Country first. Democracy always. The people must have the final say.
Those are the right words. Let them now become our conduct.
Dr. Samura Mathew Wilson Kamara
APC Presidential Candidate, 2023
My Sierra Leone, My Responsibility
