By Oumar Farouk Sesay
A dangerous principle increasingly governs Sierra Leone’s politics: yesterday’s wrongs can justify today’s abuses.
That principle is captured in the Krio expression “You du me, ah du you”—if you wrong me, I will repay you in kind. In everyday life, it may sound like a simple declaration of retaliation. In national politics, however, it can harden into something far more consequential: a philosophy of governance that invokes past injustices to excuse, legitimize, or reproduce present misconduct.
Under this logic, history ceases to be a source of instruction. It becomes a weapon, a debt to be collected, a ledger that each government feels entitled to balance.
The result is a state less interested in learning from the past than in fighting it—and, in the process, repeating it.
This retaliatory impulse was evident during and after the 2018 elections, when His Excellency, Julius Maada Bio, was elected president. Reports of violence emerged from parts of the Eastern Province, including Njama Swafe, where some residents fled to Masingbi amid post-election unrest that reportedly resulted in deaths. Opposition representatives later met with the newly elected president to acknowledge the tensions and raise concerns about violence in affected communities.
President Bio, for his part, publicly recalled being struck in the head during the campaign. The incident—in which he removed his hat to reveal his wound—became part of a broader political narrative of injury, grievance, and reprisal. Whether or not retaliation was ever formally articulated as policy, the sense that one side had suffered and could therefore respond in kind has often hovered over Sierra Leone’s partisan discourse.
The deeper problem is not merely that history is remembered. It is how it is remembered. Past misconduct is too often recalled not to prevent its recurrence but to provide moral cover for repeating it. Past initiatives, meanwhile, can be disregarded, claimed, or erased, so each administration must begin the struggle anew.
Whenever an alleged abuse affects the opposition, government defenders may search the historical record for a comparable offense committed under a previous administration. The purpose is seldom to establish a consistent national standard. More often, the comparison suggests that present misconduct should be tolerated because something similar happened before.
If civilians are killed during a police operation in Makeni, for example, the first demands should be straightforward: an independent investigation, public accountability, and justice wherever wrongdoing is established. Yet the national conversation can quickly be diverted to an incident in Bo decades earlier. The debate then begins to resemble a quarrel among children on a playground: “Na so you sef do me yesterday”—you did the same thing to me yesterday.
But a nation cannot build justice on the logic of retaliation. One past abuse does not excuse another; it merely creates a second injustice, often borne by a generation that had no role in the original grievance.
Again and again, the past is summoned as a defence witness for the present.
Yet one unresolved killing cannot justify another. One government’s failure to investigate abuse does not absolve the next government of its duty to investigate and act responsibly. Historical injustice cannot become a renewable license for contemporary impunity.
When political actors revisit past misconduct—such as abuses already reviewed by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission—and use it to justify current wrongdoings, they risk perpetuating historical failures into the future. Additionally, they instill in a new generation the idea that injustice is not a breach to be addressed and remedied, but rather the starting point of an ongoing cycle: each act of wrongdoing providing the moral excuse for the next.
Responsibility is displaced by comparison. Accountability is buried beneath partisan archaeology.
In such a political culture, every present offence is measured against an older one, and every demand for justice is answered with an accusation from history.
The government is therefore not merely competing with today’s opposition. It risks becoming entangled in battles with past administrations, former leaders, inherited grievances, and political actors who may no longer be alive. The danger is that the living are made to bear the cost of quarrels with the dead—and, in turn, inherit grievances to pass on to those not yet born.
That is precisely the cycle Sierra Leone’s postwar institutions were supposed to help break.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was intended to help the country confront the causes of its conflict, acknowledge suffering, establish responsibility, and prevent a recurrence. Its deeper moral purpose was to move Sierra Leone from vengeance toward truth, reform, accountability, and national healing.
Yet the country continues to excavate its past—not always to learn from it, but sometimes to conscript it into present-day political combat. Old wounds are selectively reopened. Past abuses are invoked competitively. Earlier failures are used to rationalize new ones. Rather than breaking free from the cycles that contributed to national collapse, Sierra Leone risks reproducing them under new leadership and in a new political vocabulary.
The hosting of the OAU summit in 1980 finds its contemporary echo in the ECOWAS conference of 2026. The Special Security Division (SSD) of the 1970s is mirrored by the State Protection Service of 2026. And the de jure one-party state established in 1978 now threatens to re-emerge, not necessarily by formal declaration, but as a de facto one-party system advanced under the cover of constitutional amendment.
A constitution should not be treated as a tool for one generation of politicians to settle scores with another. Instead, constitutional reform must be grounded in the national interest, democratic principles, broad consultation, institutional necessity, and public consent.
Yet proposed changes are sometimes defended by invoking precedent: similar measures were taken before; earlier leaders altered the rules; previous governments concentrated power; today’s opposition cannot object to practices it once tolerated or used.
That argument is dangerous.
The fact that earlier political actors weakened democratic safeguards is no reason to weaken them again. The fact that a previous government manipulated institutions does not make future manipulation legitimate. If some of Sierra Leone’s past constitutional arrangements contributed to political exclusion, instability, or concentrated power, that history should make the country more cautious about repeating them, not more willing to reenact them.
History should mark the boundary that must not be crossed again. It should not provide a blueprint for crossing it.
This concern lies at the centre of debate over the proposed 2025 constitutional amendment bill. Critics fear that some of the changes could weaken political pluralism, reduce meaningful competition, and further diminish the opposition’s ability to operate effectively.
A constitution belongs not to the government of the day, but to the nation across generations.
If it is altered as part of an unresolved quarrel with former governments, the country’s future becomes collateral damage in a conflict with its past.
For that reason, concerns about repeated constitutional tinkering and the possibility of de facto one-party dominance should not be dismissed as alarmism. Sierra Leone need not formally declare itself a de jure one-party state for democratic competition to be hollowed out.
Democracy can erode when electoral rules are repeatedly changed without broad agreement; when smaller parties lose viable paths to representation; when opposition institutions are weakened; when accountability becomes selective; when public bodies lose credibility; and when the governing party gradually becomes indistinguishable from the state itself.
A de facto one-party system does not always arrive through a dramatic constitutional proclamation. It can emerge incrementally: one amendment, one precedent, one institutional compromise, and one retaliatory justification at a time.
This is the ultimate danger of governing against history rather than learning from it.
A government preoccupied with defeating the past may end up recreating it.
In trying to correct the abuses of former rulers, it may adopt their methods. In seeking redress for earlier exclusion, it may create new forms of exclusion. In proving that it can wield the same powers once exercised by its opponents, it may revive the very political culture associated with repression, instability, and national fracture.
What, then, is gained in this endless contest with history?
Does the country become more just when one abuse is answered with another? Do today’s victims receive justice because leaders can identify victims from an earlier era? Are institutions strengthened because previous governments weakened them? Are citizens safer because political parties can produce competing catalogues of atrocities?
The answer is no.
Retaliation does not correct history. It extends its damage.
If every government treats its predecessor’s misconduct as a license for its own excesses, democratic decline becomes cumulative. Each administration inherits not only the powers of the state but also an expanding archive of excuses.
Eventually, almost any abuse can be rationalized because nearly every abuse has a precedent.
Sierra Leone has already paid a devastating price for political exclusion, concentrated power, institutional decay, and the erosion of public trust. The civil war should have dispelled any illusion that a country can indefinitely neglect accountability, deepen exclusion, and weaken institutions while assuming that peace will endure.
The nation should not return to that path because one party believes it has historical scores to settle with another. The central question is no longer what the APC did to the SLPP, what the SLPP did to the APC, or who first broke the democratic compact. The urgent question is whether this generation of leaders dares to stop repeating the conduct it so readily condemns.
Sierra Leone must move beyond “You du me, ah du you.”
Justice is not yesterday’s injustice with new beneficiaries. Accountability is not revenge carried out through state institutions. Constitutional reform must not become a weapon for settling old political scores through new laws.
A responsible government does not wage war against the past. It confronts it. It studies it. It learns from it. And it refuses to reproduce it. No nation can build a democratic future while its politics remain trapped in an endless search for yesterday’s enemies. A country that keeps governing against its past will eventually sacrifice its future to that past.