By Our Correspondent in Freetown and files from PV headquarters in Vancouver, Canada.
Foday Yumkella (photo), from Kambia district, northern Sierra Leone, is a well known politician within the country and to some extent outside Sierra Leone.
He was Sierra Leone’s High Commissioner to The Gambia in the former SLPP government of late President Ahmed Tejan Kabbah. He was also a government minister.
Yumkella, is, more significantly for this story, the elder brother of the most famous member of the Yumkella family, Dr. Kandeh Yumkella, a former high-ranking United Nations official who is now struggling to clinch the position of SLPP flagbearer. He, we can confidently speculate, would have had it in the bag by now were it not for that party’s former flagbearer Brigadier (Rtd) Julius Maada Bio who is determined to be flagbearer once again to face the ruling APC’s candidate in 2018.
Foday the elder brother, according to SLPP commentator Kai-Samba, is embroiled in a lethal legal battle with Kandeh over some family property left behind by their deceased father a former Paramount Chief and one of the founders of the SLPP.
That is why, Kai-Samba speculated on social media, Foday recently stunned the country by endorsing Bio as the "next president" of Sierra Leone instead of his own younger brother, Kandeh.
Asked to comment on Yumkella’s statement, a leading member of the APC in Freetown dismissed it as mere day-dreaming.
"Bio can only be President or Chairman of the the SLPP, nothing else, he said."
Here is the video clip that captured Foday Yumkella in that major historical moment in Sierra Leone politics:
Comments