Dauda Yillah: Sierra Leone Telegraph: 24 November 2025:
MaadaBiodom is a metaphor. It fuses the name of the present political figurehead Maada Bio with the image of a biodome. In this image, politics becomes a sealed environment that suffocates, dominated by a single person, cut off from accountability and held up by tribal loyalties, militarised governance and, ironically, administrative failure.
The metaphor captures the essence of Maada Bio’s rule: not just a closed political system, but a closed historical era, marked by his dominance, defined by its own logic, aggressively resistant, and repeatedly murderously so, to challenge.
Yet, MaadaBiodom is not timeless. It mirrors a specific historical moment, echoing Sierra Leone’s patterns of authoritarianism and ethno-regional division, while continuing to unfold in real time.
This collection does not offer policies. Instead, it encourages reflection. In doing so, it dramatises dilemmas rather than providing solutions. Put differently, it questions the emotional and ethical costs of dysfunction, electoral manipulation, tribalism and the decline of democratic norms.
However, the collection also hints at possibility, that is, at the idea of a third political force, the hope for renewed civic awareness and the vision of a nation beyond its divisions.
Fractured Democracy
My heart bleeds for my motherland. Madness stalks again, wearing democracy’s mask. The incumbent, a twice-born putschist, dons civilian robes, determined to win at all costs.
Census: fakery. Voter rolls: chaos. Together they foretold a monstrous harvest of lives, freedoms, of opponents real and imagined.
Soyinka’s Kongi looms. And where will it end? Turbulence. Instability. Killings. Another interregnum of agony. New saviours emerge, jackboots thudding, Kalashnikovs aloft, leading us deeper into Gehenna.
Fellow citizens, tighten your belts. A democidal regime paves the road for one still bloodier. We remain passengers on death roads, where brothers kill brothers, sisters too. Such is our way of life: fractured, undemocratic, undone.
Democracy Simulacrum
Egregiously skewed census results, paving the way for gerrymandered maps, in a climate of suspicion, of rancour, of sharpened divisions. Surely this is the incubation, the parturition of the unspeakable: a coup.
Our homeland, beloved yet brittle, on the incumbent’s watch, moves toward the obvious and the abominable: another round of khakistocracy.
Unless voters intervene, unless grace itself descends, the forces of coercion march towards Romarong, to be reborn.
A coup yet again
Once more, an act of national self-immolation. Bloodletting, horrendous and fratricidal. Will this culture of antagonism never cease? Was Sunday a coup, or its cynical shadow, or both?
Truth dissolves into falsehood, reality into mere appearance: everything blurred beyond recognition. What remains is mystery, obfuscation and the relentless drumbeat of division echoing along ethnic lines.
Northerners slaughtered now; Southerners tomorrow. All of us losers, putting to the sword our very humanity. We are a sick nation, in need of radical therapy: boundless love that makes ethnicity peripheral and nationhood whole.
Death comes calling… On polling day
Voters’ lives violated in cold blood. From the depths, voices cry: “Why, on polling day of all days, this spilling of blood? Why our brothers, our sisters, cut down in their prime?”
Corpses pile high, lying in rivulets of blood. Around them, khaki-clad operatives, wild-eyed, high on omolé, kush, kumbeyara, swarm and crush, eager to add more bodies to the heap.
Was the decade-long war just two decades ago not lesson enough? Must ballots bleed again, as they did in many other lost decades of ours?
And was Conrad right? Is Africa truly the Heart of Darkness?
Here, to govern means to decide who lives and who dies. But that right was given in trust. Once power turns to coercion, legitimacy is lost. Those guilty must answer for the blood spilled. Yet even in grief, voices ring out like iron bells, unyielding before wrong, steadfast in the call for justice.
Our Dear Leader Speaks
What a speech. What a way to mark sixty-four years of independence. Our Dear Leader sets his homework, marks it himself, awards full marks. Statesmanship, a costume for narcissism.
Are we expected to swallow it whole? Yes, if you ask him. Yes, if you ask his adulators.
But beware the dish. Not all that is aromatic is consumable. Only the stout of spirit can stomach the feast our Master Chef lays before us.
Curiosity may have claimed the cat. Here, it is language that kills. Here, words let loose a flood of emptiness. They smother sense. They suffocate meaning.
So, fellow citizens, be alert. Stay prudent. Stay safe.
An anniversary is for sober reflection, not drunken speechification. We should reckon with our failures, not sing of fictitious triumphs. We do not need distractions. We cannot afford them.
Beyond Tribe
As the newest tremour of our tribal fault lines, MaadaBiodom cannot be surpassed after seven years. Any possibility then of much-needed unity, a cohesion that transcends ethnic and regional divides?
Must blind loyalties endure for ever, breeding antagonisms, forging chains on the Sierra Leonean polity? If so, why not begin where division always begins, with the two major groups: Temne-Limbaland and Mendeland?
And if that flawed logic runs its course, what stops smaller groups from asserting their claims, too? Mandingos, Kurankos, Sherbros, Kissis, Lokos, Konos, Susus, Krios, Fulas, Vais, all demanding their own fenced homelands, each fragment a republic of grievances?
Thus would we perfect our undoing, a nation atomised into ethnoterritories, a map dismembered by exclusionary belonging.
We owe it to ourselves and to generations unborn to imagine politics differently, to see beyond tribe and region, to nurture a third force, a force of national sameness, a wholeness unbroken, unbreakable, as powerful as APC or SLPP, but free of their grip on division.
Sierra Leone must be more than a fractured aggregate of enemy tribes and warring regions. For that vision to live, the duopolistic stranglehold must cease.
The Dream of a Third Force
How insanely wonderful – intoxicatingly beautiful – it would be, were our country’s sixty-four-year-old system to grow new roots, sprouting a third force powerful enough to rival APC and SLPP, giving voters a real alternative at the polls.
And is between now and the year 2028 time enough for that to happen? It would take nothing short of a Copernican scale political revolution, capable of moving our country from its current duopolistic, ethnically divided centre into a healthier, more productive orbit.
This new third force must have a solid, active base in every region, led by men and women of every ethnic group, who, while proud of their identities, think and act nationally first.
Such leaders would be a new species of politician: new patriots. Their task: to identify priorities common to all regions, and address them rationally, wholeheartedly, selflessly.
They will know that distinct ethnic identities matter but are part of a larger, all-encompassing national self. Defending the supreme interests of this national self is their sacred duty.
Can the NGC, C4C, and other minor parties, following the 2023 election heist, rise again to the challenge, resisting potently for once the APC-SLPP emasculating powers of co-option? Can they become the patriots Sierra Leone needs?
The answer trembles in the air.
MaadaBiodom speaks of Sierra Leone’s democratic crisis while dreaming beyond it. If these fragments stand as testament to blood and betrayal, they none the less keep alive the trembling possibility of something new: of a nation healed, re-imagined, re-born.
For even in the sealed dome of despair, a crack is enough for light and air to enter. And when and where the light and air of wholeness and sameness enter, a nation may yet reawaken and breathe again.
Notes
- Khakistocracy: a fusion of “khaki” and “kakistocracy,” denoting governance by rogue military elements recognisable by their khaki-coloured uniforms.
2. Romarong: the indigenous name of what became Freetown, meaning “Land of Tears.”
3. This fragment finds its origin in an armed attack in Freetown in the early hours of Sunday 26 November 2023 that the Bio government described as an attempted coup. That event occurred in the country’s fragile and unsettling political climate after its contentious June 2023 elections.
4. APC: All People’s Congress.
5. SLPP: Sierra Leone People’s Party.
6. NGC: National Grand Coalition.
7. C4C: Coalition for Change.
About the author
Dauda Yillah is a scholar based in Oxford, UK, and Specialises in French and Francophone Studies. He has published in leading journals including French Studies, Forum for Modern Language Studies and Nottingham French Studies. His collection MaadaBiodom blends literary skill with ethical critique and explores Sierra Leone’s democratic crises while envisioning the possibilities of national renewal.
Be the first to comment