Kasho Joseph Holland-Cole, Chairman of the Western Area Rural District Council and a recognised voice within the All People’s Congress, has called on President Julius Maada Bio to keep Vice President Dr Mohamed Juldeh Jalloh at the helm of the ongoing mediation and negotiation efforts between the government and the opposition. Speaking to AYV, Holland-Cole described the vice president as a national-minded leader a characterisation that, coming from the opposition side of the political divide, is not the kind of language that gets deployed casually.
The remarks land in the context of what those familiar with the process are describing as a genuinely productive engagement between the Vice President and APC-led local council leaders a meeting that appears to have shifted, at least momentarily, the register of how the two sides are speaking to one another. Dr Juldeh Jalloh chaired the discussion in his capacity as Chairman of the Inter-Ministerial Committee on Decentralisation and Local Governance, a role that gave the dialogue a structured, institutional footing rather than the improvised quality that has sometimes characterised political back-channel conversations in Sierra Leone.
The substance of the meeting focused on a problem with immediate, practical consequences: the impasse affecting local councils whose ability to function and deliver services has been undermined by the ongoing political tensions. The Vice President called for calm, for cooperation, and for a return of focus to service delivery an appeal grounded not in abstract political goodwill but in the reality that ordinary citizens, in communities across the country, are bearing the cost of governance dysfunction at the local level every day that the standoff continues.
The timing of Holland-Cole’s endorsement is significant. It arrives alongside a parallel development at the national level President Bio’s reception of Fatoumata Jallow-Tambajang, Lead Moral Guarantor of the mediated dialogue process, and her delegation at State House. The President used the occasion to reaffirm his commitment to the Agreement for National Unity, recalling his own role in initiating the October 2023 mediated dialogue and pledging continued engagement.
Taken together, these developments sketch the outline of a political moment that observers are cautiously reading as a de-escalation not a resolution, but a directional shift. The Inter-Ministerial Committee providing a legitimate forum for grievances. An opposition figure lending public credibility to the mediator. The international moral guarantors maintaining their presence and pressure. A president reaffirming, at least in public, that the agreement he signed remains operative.
The caution is warranted because Sierra Leone has been here before moments of apparent thaw that dissolved when the structural tensions beneath them reasserted themselves. The agreement on proportional representation, the unresolved questions around ECSL reform, the disputes over local governance authority none of these have been settled by the current warmth in tone. They remain live fault lines.
What the current moment offers is not settlement but possibility. The possibility that a Vice President trusted enough by both sides to chair sensitive negotiations can hold that space long enough for something more durable to take shape. The possibility that local council leaders, freed from the paralysis of political standoff, can return their attention to the roads, schools, and health facilities that their constituents have been waiting on.
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Whether that possibility is seized will depend, as it always does in Sierra Leone’s political life, on whether the commitments made in meeting rooms survive contact with the pressures waiting outside them. Holland-Cole’s endorsement of Juldeh is a signal. What matters now is what both parties do with it.
