The Chairman and Leader of the All People´s Congress Party, Ernest Bai Koroma has addressed the party members on a presentation meeting organised in line with the upcoming conventions.

“We thank God because we have come a long way. You have shown resilience and your support for the party has never changed. I thank you all for the support. If not for the constitution I know that you would have spoken aloud about your desires but because we are democrats, we have respected the constitution and will continue to respect it. We have respected the human rights of people in this country, the freedom of the people and we will continue the democratic process. In a democratic state, when a leader works hard the people will maintain him but if he doesn’t he should not force people to maintain him, it doesn’t work by force.

“Today you have come to make a presentation for the convention, the people you want to represent you. I believe this is the right time, considering the cases, injunctions and PPRC meetings that had prevented us from having this convention. I thank God we have shown a lot of maturity so far. We have kept quiet and yesterday we have been granted the ruling on our constitution by the PPRC, so the good news is we now have our constitution. Now that we have the constitution, we should ensure to implement what’s in the constitution. So the way forward is to have a convention and who so ever the people elected on the convention will be the ones that will represent us, nobody will change it.

“By the will of God, this is the last session with the PPRC and the court will decide, but what is a must is that whatever happens we will go for the convention. Whatever happens, whoever you want is who you will choose. I will not be electing for you, I don’t even need to be in the convention. I will just sit at the corner and allow you make your choice. When the time comes I will go and vote, the court will not stop me to vote. And this time around, the votes will be counted from wards to constituencies; nobody will be announcing just the percentages as in 25%, 45 %, that will not happen again.

“Today you have presented these two great women as your representatives. As Chairman and Leader of the Party, I accept your choice and your selection is fine. In terms of numbers where there are market women and bike riders are numbers, politics is a game of number. In this coming year we get close to 500,000 bike riders and traders are everywhere, so if all of you register and votes, we will count ourselves and we will know the amount of votes we will get, so nobody will manipulate it, even if you put all your relatives at NEC. It will not work.

“Make sure you do the right thing. When it’s time for registration, make sure you register and when it’s time for voting, ensure to vote because when you have voted, your votes will be detected, so nobody will manufacture results as in 2015. This time, it is you the people that will elect officers of the party.

“By February we shall start the convention and by March to May, we would have gotten our line up (National Officials). I am happy for these presentations and I welcome them. With these presentations and the kind of good results we are having, we will soon get our convention.

“I appreciate all your comments, we need to be dynamic. Our face should be at the background as we need young faces to come up the surface.  This is a difficult moment for us but let us continue to show resilience. They have done a lot of things but we still maintain peace. We say it’s a democratic party so we will continue the democratic process. We are a party on record in the whole West Africa; we are the first to change Government through the ballot box, we did it in 2017 and will do it in 2023.”