Stage-Managed Romance: At Least Get the Kissing Angle Right

by Fatima Babih, EdD

Is this couple’s public display of romance meant to distract us from leadership failure to address Sierra Leone’s urgent issues? If love is truly their message, it should be shown through justice for victimized girls, not staged romance.

While public leadership carries responsibility, leaders engaging in exaggerated public displays of intimacy on official platforms undermine societal dignity and ignore pressing issues like the rape of girls and women’s suffering in the country.

Let’s be clear, affection between spouses is not the issue here. What is troubling is the deliberate display of stage-managed intimacy by individuals whose governance has brought deep hardship to citizens, while neglecting the urgent need for justice and protection for women and girls.

Instead of showing care through transparency, justice, and protection for girls, we are offered public kisses and sensational personal disclosures, such as menstrual cloth-washing by a sitting President, anecdotes at events with elementary school children. This superficial display undermines the importance of real progress and can make the audience feel the need for meaningful change.

Worse still, these performances are poorly executed, literally. After years together, one would expect a couple to show a basic understanding of how to angle their faces when kissing. Yet we repeatedly witness nose-to-nose collisions presented as romance, even during their Church wedding ceremony.

If public display of intimacy is now part of the national performance strategy, perhaps some of the resources being looted could be invested in etiquette training before exporting these trends to impressionable boys and girls in Sierra Leone.

Sierra Leone remains conservative not out of backwardness, but out of cultural dignity. Leadership should uphold and respect that dignity, not erode it through awkward spectacles while ignoring the real suffering of the people, especially women and girls whose voices go unheard every day.

Leaders should demonstrate love through policies that protect children, improve healthcare, and uphold justice, not through awkward public kisses that mask leadership neglect and failure.

If symbolism is all this couple has left to offer the people of Sierra Leone, then perhaps the real problem is not how they kiss in public but how they have failed to protect girls from sexual predators.