By Saidu Bangura

President Julius Maada Bio has summoned Members of Parliament back to the Chamber for an emergency sitting this Thursday, 20th August 2026. The notice, issued under Section 86(1) of the 1991 Constitution, gives the President the power to call Parliament back at any time. Officially, the business at hand is the approval of presidential nominees. But no one summoning MPs back this week can pretend it happens in a vacuum. It happens while the country is still waiting to hear whether the way its own Constitution was amended was lawful in the first place.

Parliament passed the Constitution of Sierra Leone (Amendment) Bill, 2025 on 11th August, after the Opposition APC walked out over how the vote was conducted. The dispute was not a small technicality. Section 108 of the 1991 Constitution requires a two-thirds majority of all Members of Parliament to change the Constitution – not two-thirds of those present in the Chamber that day. The Speaker allowed the process to continue on a simple-majority basis and only afterward referred the question of whether that was proper to the Supreme Court. He has since said the ruling on how voting should proceed “cannot be interpreted by any court,” even as the matter sits with the judiciary.

That is not a small contradiction. You cannot ask the court to interpret a constitutional question and, in the same breath, tell the country the answer is already settled. Either the Supreme Court’s role in this matter is real, or it is theatre. Sierra Leoneans deserve to know which.

This is exactly the moment the justice system exists for. When politicians disagree about what the Constitution permits, the courts are not an inconvenience to be worked around — they are the institution built to settle it. That means a few things must hold, whatever comes next:

The Supreme Court must be allowed to rule without being pressured or pre-empted. A referral that gets undercut by public statements before judges have spoken sends the message that the outcome is already decided, and that the referral was symbolic rather than sincere.

Government business should not be used to overtake or outpace the judicial process. Summoning Parliament back for other matters is the President’s constitutional right. But when it happens while the legality of the last sitting is still unresolved, it is fair for citizens to ask why the country is moving forward before the foundational question has been answered.

Whatever the Court decides must actually be followed. A ruling that is celebrated when convenient and dismissed when it is not is not the rule of law. It is the rule of whoever holds power at the time.

None of this is about which side of the constitutional amendment debate is right — proportional representation, the 50%+1 threshold, the women’s quota. Reasonable people disagree on all of that, and they should be free to keep disagreeing, loudly and publicly. What is not up for debate is the process. A country cannot have a Constitution that only binds the government when it is politically convenient.

It is easy, watching this unfold from Freetown or from a diaspora living room, to see it as an elite argument – MPs, lawyers, the Speaker, procedural rules most people will never read in full. But the Constitution is not a document for politicians. It is the document that decides how much power any government can hold over the people it serves, how elections are won and lost, and how disputes between citizen and state get resolved when nothing else works.

Sierra Leoneans paid an unbearable price to get to a Constitution at all. The 1991 Constitution was born out of a country trying to end one-party rule and give itself real, contested, multi-party democracy. It has since survived a civil war, coups, and fragile peace. Every amendment to it is not simply a legal adjustment – it is a renegotiation of the terms under which government is allowed to hold power over its people. That is too consequential a thing to be settled by a disputed vote count and a Speaker’s shifting explanations.

If the process by which this amendment passed cannot survive scrutiny from the country’s own Supreme Court, then no explanation about proportional representation or women’s quotas will make it legitimate. A good outcome reached through a broken process is still a broken process – and broken processes have a way of being used against ordinary people long after the politicians who built them have moved on.

The Court should be given the space to answer the question it was asked. And whichever way that answer goes, the government that referred the matter should be the first to respect it. Anything less asks Sierra Leoneans to trust a Constitution that its own government treats as optional.

Copyright –Published in Expo Times News on Wednesday, 19th August 2026 (ExpoTimes News – Expo Media Group (expomediasl.com)