Former president depends on his mother

By Rashid Suleiman

Valentine Strasser’s life is a typical case of grace to grass. The former Sierra Leonean president is now broke and is accommodated by his mother.

Strasser, 41, has few options. He spends most of his time drinking palm wine at a roadside shack with the ‘down trodden’.

Sometimes the people who once sang his praises in supplication, jeer and throw stones at him.

The army captain ruled Sierra Leone for four years from 1992-1996 and became an ex-president before he reached 30.

His is a story of rags to riches and back to rags. The chic look he cultivated with stylish designer outfits and sunglasses he loved so much during his days in power have been replaced with shaggy, weather-beaten second-hand clothes.

Mum’s boy

He is once again dependent on the generosity of his mother who raised him as a single parent. Always a mummy’s boy, he has been living with his mother since he fell on hard times after exile in Britain and Gambia.

He is now on a small government pension from the military after he complained bitterly he is living in penury yet he is a former head of state who should be taken care of.

"I don’t enjoy any privileges whatsoever under the constitution as someone who once served the country in high office," he lamented in 2005 when he announced his failed bid to contest the country’s elections the following year.

"Basically I haven’t been doing anything. I am unemployed. I am out of work. I don’t own a business. I have not been able to talk to any prospective employer and I wonder who that employer would be," he said 2002.

The four-year rule of Strasser was unremarkable except for its corrupt, repressive and bloody consequences.

He was overthrown in what has been termed a polite coup by his second in command, Brigadier Julius Maada Bio and given safe passage to Britain.

The only indignity he suffered during the ordeal was that he was roughed and flown to Britain in handcuffs.

As part of the deal hatched after the coup, the UN sponsored him to study law at the University of Warwick in Coventry, England. But he quit after a year in mysterious circumstances and fell on hard times, living anonymously in Islington area.

The unemployed Strasser changed his first name to ‘Reginald’ but was unmasked in 2000, two years after he went underground.

After he was busted, he fled to Gambia where he was promptly arrested and deported to Britain. His case became complicated when the British authorities denied him entry and rejected his application for asylum.

Jobless

He was shipped back to Gambia where military officers detained him for ‘questioning’. Eventually, he ended up in his mother’s house in Sierra Leone, jobless and penniless.

Valentine Esegragbo Melvine Strasser was born in 1967 in Murry Town west of Freetown. Though his mother is from the Krio tribe, she traces some of her ancestry to Jamaica.

After secondary school in 1985, Strasser joined the military. He distinguished himself as an ambitious and highly popular soldier.

In 1987, he was among the young soldiers in their teens and twenties who were posted to Kailahun District in eastern Sierra Leone where the late Captain Foday Sankoh and his rebels of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) was waging war against the government of Joseph Saidu Momoh. As fate would have it, Strasser was with his childhood pals among them Sergeant Solomon Musa. It was a period of suffering at the war front.

Lacked acumen

Strasser and his fellow soldiers lacked the basic things needed to maintain an army in peacetime. To compound a delicate situation, the soldiers fighting the RUF rebels were unpaid for months.

Feeling ignored and belittled, the soldiers made several threats, appeals and warnings to get the attention of Momoh’s government in vain.

They then decided to make the long march to State House in Freetown to register their protest directly with the president and to demand the salary arrears in April 29, 1992.

The arrival of the soldiers led by Strasser and Musa terrified Momoh. Before they reached State House, he went cowering to exile in Guinea-Conakry.

The young soldiers never intended to overthrow the government but with the cowardly flight of Momoh, they needed no second invitation to take power.

Besides Strasser and Musa, the other ringleaders of the mutiny were Brigadier-General Julius Maada Bio, Lt-Col Tom Nyuma, Colonel Yahya Kanu, Lt-Col Komba Monde and Captain Samuel Komba Kambo.

Though the then immensely popular Strasser was the natural leader of the group, it was Kanu who was made Sierra Leone’s head of state and chairman of the ruling National Provisional Ruling Council (NPRC) on April 29.

But tables turned two days later when NPRC members assassinated Kanu after accusations that he was trying to negotiate with the ousted Momoh regime.

Youngest President

Strasser then took over as chairman of NPRC and head of state. He was the youngest president in the world at 25 years. His deputy was his close buddy Musa.

After 23 years of oppression at the hands of the sole ruling party, All Peoples Congress (APC), Sierra Leoneans welcomed the coup wholeheartedly.

But if they hoped for better things under the junta, they were given a rude-awakening after Strasser and his administration went to action immediately with repressive measures.

State of emergency

The soldiers suspended the constitution, declared a state of emergency, limited freedom of the press and speech and introduce rule by decree.

The security forces got a blank check to do as they please, including detention without trial or charge. Challenging the actions of the security was outlawed.

Eight months after coming to power, Strasser and his junta executed nine former soldiers he suspected of hatching a coup against him and 17 other prisoners at a beach outside Freetown, despite international appeals.

Among the executed was former police boss General James Kamara and army colonel James Kanu.

Britain immediately suspended aid to Sierra Leone after the first executions as a horrified international community reeled in shock. But this did not prevent the junta from carrying out several executions in later years.

A major execution was carried out on the night of 11-12 December 1994 when 12 soldiers and other civilians were shot by firing squad. Among the executed was a 77-year-old Lance Corporal Amara Conteh, who was accused of collaborating with rebels.

Their charges included collaborating with rebels, armed robbery, robbery with violence and murder.

Despite his youth, inexperience and terrible human rights record, Strasser successfully courted such popular leaders as Bill Clinton, Nelson Mandela and John Major, who feted him.

After riding to power because the civilian government was mishandling the war against the RUF rebels, the junta did not do better in repelling the insurrection.

Sierra Leoneans were deeply disappointed that the new regime did not defeat the rebels nor end the war through other means. To make it worse, the RUF overran the diamond-rich areas of the country and were on the verge of capturing Freetown by 1995.

This is despite the fact that Strasser enforced a military recruitment drive that enlisted children as young as 12. By 1994, the army had increased to 12,000 soldiers up from the 5,000.

He launched a torture and terror campaign against people he suspected of committing atrocities. State radio urged the people to arm themselves to deal with rebels and in a country at war, this was a carte blanche for all manner of thugs and misfits to engage in murder and plunder.

Mercenaries

As the RUF threatened to overthrow the junta, a desperate Strasser and his NPRC threw caution and national pride to the wind and brought in mercenaries to beat back the rebel advance. The dogs of war routed the RUF rebels within a month and pushed them back to their bases near the border.

Strasser was ousted by fellow soldiers in the NPRC on January 16 1997 mainly because of his mishandling of the war and the peace process.

The coup was executed by his deputy Maada Bio supported by the other members of the junta like Nyuma and Mondeh. Amnesty International has been pressing for the trial of Strasser for war crimes.

However, despite his sorry life, he remains defiant about the executions he ordered and his repressive rule.

"Have you ever heard of the offence called treason? Now if someone wants to argue that I should appear before any court of whatever source, accused of whatever crime committed against anybody at the time when I was in office, I would tell them to come with evidence to prove beyond reasonable doubt that I committed the crimes," he said in an interview in 2002.