When Femi Claudius Cole decided to form a political party, to address what she saw as Sierra Leone’s slow economic development and poor governance, she knew it would be tough. A former nurse, she had no experience in politics and people told her no one would vote for an unknown. But she could not have predicted quite how gruelling it would be: leaving her spending time in jail and fighting for her reputation.
The Unity party, registered by Cole in 2017, failed to win any seats in the 2018 general election. But she persevered, travelling around the country offering medical treatment with a surgeon, giving interviews and building up a social media following. In 2021 she co-founded the Consortium of Progressive Political Parties, an opposition alliance. “People thought that once I lost, I would disappear into thin air – they didn’t know me,” she says.
