By Mohamed Jaward Nyallay
Strategic Communications Adviser (MOICE)

Freetown, 21st September 2026- Last night, I witnessed the debate on the Constitutional Amendment Bill, which has now been referred to the Supreme Court. The debate featured Kailahun lawmaker, Hon Hindolo Ngevao, APC Flag-bearer hopeful, Ady Macualey and Civil Society activist, Marcella Macauley.

First, credit to the organisers. Public debates of this nature can only strengthen democratic culture. Let us do this more often. The debate was heavily grounded in law and constitutional interpretation. That was understandable. But there was also a voice on the stage attempting to bring what one might call the layman’s perspective.

I salute Madam Marcella’s contribution to public discourse. But I found myself disagreeing with some of the broader argument about politics and politicians that Madam Marcella was advancing through the evening.

Firstly, there is an increasingly fashionable tendency to describe politics as inherently broken and politicians as inherently self-serving. It is an easy argument to make. It is the bedrock of every populist argument. “Everyone is a victim of politics at some point, and everyone can identify a politician they dislike.”

But democracy becomes intellectually poorer when we reduce politics to the failures of politicians. One of the phrases Madam Marcella used during the debate to describe the standoff in Parliament about the amendment bill was: “This is elite bargaining gone wrong.”

That phrase deserves interrogation.

We often speak about “elites” as though they are a foreign body that somehow entered democratic politics over the years.

They are not.

In every functioning state, there are people who occupy positions of political, economic, institutional and social power. They make decisions, negotiate interests and exercise authority. The question is not whether elites exist. They do.

The more important question is what they bargain for.

This is where Stefan Dercon’s ‘Gambling on Development’ offers an interesting framework. Stefan is the former Chief Economist for DFID and I was fortunate enough to interview him in 2023 when he visited Sierra Leone.

Dercon argues in his book that development depends, in part, on what he calls a “development bargain”: a commitment among people with power and influence to pursue growth and development rather than simply protect their immediate positions. His argument is not that elites are inherently virtuous. Quite the opposite. He recognizes that elite bargains can serve narrow interests. But he makes an important distinction between an elite bargain that merely distributes power and resources among insiders and one that creates a longer-term commitment to national development.

That distinction is useful beyond economics.

Elite bargaining is not, by itself, a democratic failure. It is an unavoidable feature of representative government.

Democracy gives citizens agency. Citizens exercise that agency through elections and other democratic processes, and they entrust particular people with the authority to make decisions on their behalf.

That authority is not decorative.

We elect a President to lead the Executive. We elect legislators to legislate. We establish courts to interpret and apply the law. These institutions have different responsibilities precisely because a modern state cannot be run through crowd-sourcing,  in which everyone participates in every decision.

There will always be rooms that most citizens will not enter.

Parliament is one of those rooms. Cabinet is another. The courtroom is another. That is not necessarily exclusion. It is representation and institutional design.

The citizen who votes for a Member of Parliament is not voting merely for someone to carry their voice into every room. They are entrusting that person with a constitutional responsibility to deliberate and make decisions on their behalf.

Of course, that authority has limits. Representatives must remain accountable. Citizens have the right to criticize them. Civil society has the right to challenge government. The media has the responsibility to scrutinise power.

But criticism and representation are not competing ideas. They are supposed to coexist.

Who speaks for the people?

This is where I think we sometimes make a conceptual mistake.

There is a growing tendency for activists, civil society organisations and other actors outside government to speak of themselves as the authentic representatives of “ordinary people”, while treating elected politicians as somehow separate from the people. Opposition politicians have also sought to it too, especially when its comfortable to divorce themselves from a certain decision for political optics. This framing is inherently flawed.

Government as we know is a representation of all of us, as people. Elected politicians are representatives of the people. The idea of “People Vs the Government”, both with competing interests, is a fallacy.  To be specific, it is a false dichotomy.

Civil society is part of society. It can advocate, mobilise, criticise and demand accountability. Its contribution to democracy is indispensable.

But advocacy is different from constitutional authority.

The question is not whether activists have a voice. They should.

The question is whether their voice automatically supersedes the mandate given to elected officials and institutions.

It does not.

If citizens disagree with the decisions of their representatives, democracy provides mechanisms for responding: public pressure, political organization, elections, litigation where appropriate, journalism, and civic engagement.

The answer to representation that fails is not to abolish representation. It is to make representation more accountable.

The argument about “ordinary people”

I was particularly interested in the suggestion that because ‘ordinary citizens’ were not directly in the room, the process could be understood as an elite bargain that excluded them.

There is a logical problem with taking that argument too far. Because, not everyone can be in every room.

The democratic question is whether the people in the room have legitimate authority to be there, whether the rules governing their decisions are constitutional, and whether citizens have meaningful avenues to scrutinise and challenge those decisions.

A lack of technical knowledge among citizens does not make a constitutional process illegitimate. It creates an obligation on institutions, lawyers, journalists, politicians and civic actors to explain the process more clearly. Lets also avoid discussing this as if we only started the conversation about our constitution in 2023. We have been at this for 25 years, the excuse about lack of public consultation will fall flat on its face, at this point.

My beef with the anti-politics argument

Perhaps my biggest disagreement with the anti-politics argument is that it asks politics to be something politics has never been.

 

Politics is not supposed to be perfect. Politics is imperfect because society itself is imperfect. People do not enter the political arena with identical interests, values or conceptions of the public good. Democracy therefore cannot be understood as the elimination of disagreement; rather, it is a system for managing disagreement without destroying the political community. Bernard Crick, in In Defence of Politics, makes precisely this case: the compromises, negotiations and power struggles that make politics frustrating are also what distinguish political settlement from rule by coercion

Politics is the management of competing interests.

Politicians will disagree. Parties will bargain. Institutions will defend their jurisdictions. Interest groups will lobby. Citizens will demand things that governments cannot always provide. And the cycle goes on, we become better for what seems like a mundane repetitive exercise. It is evidence that democracy is functioning.

The real danger is not bargaining. It is bargaining without accountability; bargaining that places narrow interests above the public good; bargaining that weakens institutions rather than strengthening them.

That distinction matters.

Dercon’s work is useful here because it refuses to pretend that development happens outside politics. We should not be suspicious of every negotiation simply because politicians are leading it.  Sometimes people in power need to negotiate precisely because they are responsible for decisions that affect millions of people.

The task of democracy is to ensure that those decisions remain subject to law, institutions, scrutiny and, ultimately, the people who confer political authority.

A final thought

The debate was useful because it brought these tensions into the open.

One side brought constitutional and legal reasoning. Another insisted that we keep sight of ordinary citizens. Both perspectives have a place.

But perhaps our democratic conversation would benefit from moving beyond the easy language of “politicians versus the people”.

Politicians are part of the people. Institutions are part of democracy.

Civil society is part of democracy. The media is part of democracy.

And so is the messy, sometimes frustrating process through which these actors compete, negotiate and constrain one another.

The challenge is not to eliminate elites. That is neither realistic nor desirable.

The challenge is to ensure that those who exercise power use it within legitimate institutions as this government has done, and that their bargains produce outcomes that can withstand public scrutiny.

That is the conversation I would have like to see us push further.

And perhaps next time we should give ourselves more time to have it. How about a full blown three-hour debate?

I will bring my dinner with me.