Sheriff Mahmoud Ismail: Sierra Leone Telegraph: 20 September 2026:
The sound of prayer had barely settled over the congregation at Makeni Central Masjid when another kind of emotion began to fill the great hall. Men rose from their seats. Hands reached out. Voices called his name. Some smiled; others simply stared, as if reassuring themselves that the man sitting among them was indeed back in Makeni.
There were old men and school-age children, women at the edges of the gathering, young people pressing forward for a glimpse. There were the poor and the well-dressed, the elderly and the adolescent, people with visual impairments and those who had come simply to see the former president after years away.
Former President Koroma had arrived at Makeni Central Mosque for Friday prayers, accompanied by members of his entourage including the Mayor of the municipality His Worship Abu Bakarr Kamara, Dr. Mohamed MB Sisay, Chairmanof the Makeni Town Council, Joseph Fitzgerald Kamara. He entered into a place of worship that is not his own faith tradition but has long been part of the social and spiritual landscape of the city.
It was a striking scene
Only days earlier, Koroma had worshipped with his family at the Wesleyan Church at Ferry Junction in Freetown — a church deeply connected to his childhood and personal spiritual journey — in his first church service in Sierra Leone since returning home. Then, he had visited the graves of his parents and elder sister, pausing there in prayer and remembrance.
Now, in Makeni, the former Christian president was seated inside a mosque, listening to an Islamic sermon and joining the congregation in prayer. The significance was difficult to miss.
Sierra Leone’s religious life has been marked by close interaction between Muslims and Christians, including families in which both faiths are represented and people who participate in each other’s religious occasions. At the Central Mosque, that tradition was not being discussed in theory. It was being lived.
A sermon about power, forgiveness and restraint
The sermon was delivered by Sheikh Alhaji Mohamed Mujahedeen Bangura, Northwest Regional Chief Imam, with the Central Mosque’s Chief Imam, Sheikh Mohamed Mualim Kamara, also addressing the congregation.
The Chief Imam’s message was, at its heart, an appeal for forgiveness. Drawing on stories from the Qur’an, he spoke of Prophet-King Sulaiman — Solomon — and the extraordinary authority and gifts attributed to him. The Qur’an records that Sulaiman, owing to the disobedience of some of his people, prayed in anger that Allah should never grant the nation anyone as great as him.
But it was the story of the ants that gave the sermon its most vivid image. The Imam recalled Qur’anic text recounting that as Sulaiman’s army approached on their way to battle, an ant king warned the others to retreat into their dwellings lest they be crushed unknowingly by the advancing soldiers.
The Qur’an says Sulaiman, who was blessed with the unique privilege of hearing and understanding the animals and insects, smiled at what he heard and then prayed for gratitude
and righteousness. For the Imam, the lesson was about leadership: power need not make a leader indifferent to the smallest of those under his protection.
He then turned to Musa — Moses
The Qur’an describes how his people doubted his claim of a supreme God and demanded to see Him themselves only to fall unconscious when the divine manifestation came upon them on the mountain.
Sheikh Bangura said Moses did not celebrate their fate in view of the fact that what happened to them was because they doubted him. Instead, he pleaded with God to forgive and restore them.
It was this quality of restraint, compassion and responsibility that the Imam placed before the congregation. A leader, he argued, must not be defined by the anger of those who oppose him, nor should those who have benefited from leadership take lightly the responsibility of respecting those who have served them.
Then the sermon became personal. The Imam appealed directly to Koroma to continue forgiving those who had spoken against him or offended him, and to pray instead for Sierra Leone’s peace and progress.
He recalled his own experience as a beneficiary of Koroma’s kindness, remembering his inclusion in the Hajj Committee and the prestige and respect that came with the appointment. He spoke with evident pride about the respect accorded him by senior State House officials while he served on the committee.
The message was unmistakable: whatever the disagreements of politics, the Imam wanted the former president to respond to the past with forgiveness rather than bitterness. He also prayed for President Julius Maada Bio, asking for wisdom, strength and compassion in the discharge of his responsibilities.
Koroma’s answer: Peace begins at home
When it was his turn to speak, Koroma did not attempt to turn the occasion into a political address. Instead, he returned to a theme that has accompanied his first days back in Sierra Leone: faith. He thanked the Imam for the sermon, saying he had heard its implied message and that senior stakeholders accompanying him had heard it too.
He repeated that he had returned with an open mind. God, he said, had a reason for sending him away, and that reason would reveal itself through the actions and decisions he would take in the days ahead. Then he asked the congregation to pray for peace.
But he gave the word a meaning larger than politics. Peace, he said, must begin in the mosque, in homes and in communities. There was something almost intimate about the simplicity of the appeal. After years in which the country’s politics had often been consumed by confrontation, the former president was asking for the rebuilding of peace from the smallest places outward.
He also expressed satisfaction that, with his homecoming preparations, the people of Makeni could see that there were leaders capable of carrying forward community responsibilities collaboratively. He urged that such should be the approach going forward.
And then came his most revealing acknowledgement. What God had done for him, he said, was not because of power or wealth. It was because of prayers.
A homecoming measured in human faces
Outside the formalities of the mosque, however, the day belonged to ordinary people. They came close whenever protocol allowed. Some wanted to shake his hand. Others wanted only to touch him.
There were those who called out greetings from a distance, those who smiled broadly, those who stood silently watching.
Children looked on with the uncomplicated curiosity of children. Young men manoeuvred for a better view. Elderly men watched with the familiarity of people who had known Koroma long before the presidency and who now seemed to be measuring the passage of time in his face.
Among the crowd were people who had little of their own but had nevertheless come to offer what they could: a greeting, a prayer, a blessing, a smile.
The visually impaired and the physically vulnerable were not absent from the scene. Neither were those who ordinarily stand at the margins of public occasions. For a moment, the former president was simply Ernest — Pa Koroma, as many Sierra Leoneans affectionately call him — back among people who had watched his political journey from close quarters.
That warmth has been evident since his return to Sierra Leone on September 6 after more than two years in Nigeria. His return has been described as a moment of reconciliation and national significance, with Koroma himself saying on arrival: “I am back home. And home will always be home.”
At Makeni Central Mosque, those words seemed to acquire another dimension. Home was not merely the town, the house, the familiar roads or the faces of people who had known him for decades.
Home was also the mosque, the church, the graves of his parents, the memory of his sister, the prayers of Muslims, the prayers of Christians, and the space between them where faith becomes less a boundary than a bridge.
A country seeing itself
There was something larger than a former president attending Friday prayers in Makeni. The scene offered a small portrait of a country whose religious identities have traditionally lived remarkably close to one another.
Sierra Leone’s constitutional framework protects freedom of religion, while interfaith institutions have for years worked to preserve peaceful coexistence between Christian and Muslim communities.
But statistics and constitutional provisions cannot fully convey what happened inside that mosque. They cannot capture the sight of a Christian former president sitting among Muslim worshippers. They cannot capture the Imam invoking Solomon and Moses while speaking directly to him about forgiveness. They cannot capture the former president asking Muslims to pray for peace. Nor can they adequately describe the faces of the people who gathered around him afterwards.
Perhaps that is why the most memorable moment was the acknowledgement that, after everything that had happened, prayers had brought him home.
And in the great hall of Makeni Central Mosque, surrounded by people of another faith who had gathered to pray with and for him, Ernest Bai Koroma appeared less concerned with what he had once been than with what he might yet become to his country.
A man returned, chastened by distance, steadied by faith, and asking that the country find its way back to peace.
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