LESSON 1: Professionals MUST be in the very front of holding government and power to account. If we have more lawyers speaking up, we’d have a better justice system. If we have more doctors defying the status quo, our hospitals won’t lie in pitiful ruins. If we have more engineers challenging adverse infrastructural development, we’d have less number of Chinese on our roads—making and remaking them.LESSON 2: If you speak up, you won’t die. Your family won’t starve. Your children won’t roam the streets hungry. That is the lie they tell you; to frighten you to shut up. Speaking up or holding leadership to account isn’t condemning oneself to penury. God the author of all provisions would make a way when you’re on the side of truth-to-power.
LESSON 3: To challenge your superiors for the good of nation is not insubordination. It is the highest form of patriotism and loyalty to nation. You must not respect your superior more than your nation. It is not respect for authority, it is called incompetence!
LESSON 4: You’re not a professional if you’re silent in the midst of bad governance and unlawful act. While politics is for politicians, governance is for everyone. Professionals may belong to a political party but not their professionalism.
LESSON 5: It is just about time that we invested more resources on women and enacted laws to have more women in leadership positions. The women of Sierra Leone did not only bore the huge brunt of our civil war and demanded peace with their naked bodies, the small number which our patriarchal structures permit, are at the very fore of defending our governance. They’re not only speaking up, they’re risking their livelihoods for the welfare of all and the good of our democracy.
LESSON 6: It is our duty as ordinary citizens to demand more performance and results under the social contract with leadership. But more importantly, it is the duty of the elites to speak up for the men and women who have been deprived of the power of education by sheer omission of leadership. Professional/elites have the higher moral duty to speak up for all, lest society drowns in misery because of collective silence or inaction.
So, instead of bullying and browbeating our Jackson-Coles, we should nurture and replicate their kind. That is the only way we can inspire citizens’ participation in democracy. But when leadership lays a finger on the Jackson-Coles, runs a calculated media smear campaign against them, they are not building our democracy. They are dismembering it. And that is why these lessons are valuable for our leaders and for us too.
**Dr. Catherine Jackson-Cole is a medical doctor and a vocal critic against the appalling state of the health sector in Sierra Leone and a social change agent and activist.**
Indeed women continue to be in the forefront of upholding our “democracy “..The more Professionals continue to stay silent out of fear for themselves and their livelihoods, the worse situation gets for ALL. Not everyone has the words or temperament to speak, but we should SUPPORT those who do.