By Mohamed Sankoh (One Drop)
Without any attempts at mincing my words, President Julius Maada Bio’s incessant foreign trips, in his so-called quest for overseas investors, could be likened to a man taking a sieve to a river to fetch water. And to be honest with him, it is high time he stopped his fruitless escapades and settle down to the business of finding solutions to the bread and butter issues which he promised to solve whilst campaigning in 2018.
And from the economic mess which the ruling Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) has flung the country into through maladministration and fiscal recklessness; it is now clear that the SLPP’s 2018 New Direction Manifesto is one of the greatest hoaxes ever foisted on the people of Sierra Leone. Everything about the current SLPP government is a big lie and high-sounding nothing. Since 2018 to date, the SLPP’s unfulfilled promises keep on swelling, everyday, like “Bo gari”; yet members of the Bio administration keep on lying about abstract achievements as if they believe that they are talking to persons wearing pampers!
And I cannot imagine that, with all what is now happening in Sierra Leone, President Bio could still have the courage to assure a thin audience of investors, at the EXPO 2020 Dubai’s Investment Forum, that his government has “…worked hard in the last three years to shape up the ecosystem to be conducive for business to flourish, fighting corruption and working very hard to make sure economic fundamentals [are] strong….” (according to the State House press release of 15 October 2021.) Such a statement appears to be a true lie because the President knows that his government has not done much to make Sierra Leone “conducive for business to flourish”; he knows that his fight against corruption has never been holistic but selectively selective aimed only at members of the opposition, and he pretty well knows that his SLPP government has been hopelessly hopeless in its attempts to make sure the country’s “economic fundamentals [are] strong…” In my opinion, it seems that the only truth about those seemingly lies is that they are spoken by a President whose words are now being taken with pinches of salt by majority of his own people!
Despite I was not part of that thin audience which our Commander-in-Chief addressed at the EXPO 2020 Dubai’s Investment Forum, in the United Arab Emirates, but I could imagine how some of those in that audience would have reacted after listening to President Bio’s drab speech (I’m yet to hear any lively one from him!). No doubt some Arab investors, who would have quickly Googled the United States’ “State Department’s 2021 Human Rights Report” on Sierra Leone on their smart phones, would have behaved like the people in the fabled tale in Ayi Kwei Armah’s novel, “The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born”, in which whilst the baboon is climbing higher to defecate on the people’s faces doesn’t realise that the people have seen its buttocks and have already turned their faces in disguised laughter!
Prior to that drab assurance to would-be investors, we are also informed by the State House Media and Communications Unit (I have problems with “Media” and “Communications” appearing in the same breath before “Unit”) that another reason why President Bio chartered a flight and spent hundreds of thousands of United States’ dollars in hotel bills and per diems was for him to “….also launch the maiden edition of the [Sierra Leone] Embassy’s Newsletter….” (according to another State House press release of 14 October 2021.) It appears that the President has so much free time and unproductive energy to fly all the way from Freetown to Dubai just to launch a newsletter which could have been done by a low-level sheep-headed Embassy staff! To be candid, President Bio and his team of hangers-on always give me the figurative picture of a group of Boy Scouts that suddenly chances upon an unguarded orchard and engages in a free-for-all picking!
I think it is high time that the toadies surrounding President Bio, both at State House and State Lodge, told their “Tok and Do” (what a classic example of personified irony) chieftain that his incessant foreign trips have been fruitlessly fruitless. Since he took over the Rudder of State in 2018, President Bio has fruitlessly traversed Ghana to Morocco to Rwanda to Uganda to Guinea to Senegal to The Gambia to Ethiopia to Japan to China to Qatar to Lebanon to Turkey to the United Kingdom to the United States of America to South Africa unto the United Arab Emirates; seeking foreign investors. Yet, foreign investors have been treating him and Sierra Leone as members of a royal family would do to a leper infected with Ebola! My advice is: If President Bio cannot find what he has been looking for overseas for over three years now, why can’t he stay home and concentrate on building the Lungi Bridge across the Atlantic Ocean or the airport in Bo. Or even build a thatch church in Tihun, his village in Bonthe District, southern Sierra Leone. And what has happened to the two million jobs the SLPP promised to create, which was announced by the ruling party’s newspaper (the Unity) with the fanfare like that of deprived children showing-off pictures of their would-be Christmas gifts?
Even the Guinean Fullah businessman, next door, could not trust President Bio that Sierra Leone is “conducive for business to flourish”, which is why he is still reluctant to build a “Tapalapa” bakery in Sierra Leone. And if businesspeople in neighbouring countries cannot trust our President and his government to come and invest in the country then why should Akon, Bill Gates, and Idris Elba come with their multi-million dollars investments in a country where government and party functionaries appear to tell lies with the frequencies with which they inhale air!
Now under the watchful watch of the SLPP government, all what President Julius Maada Bio’s foreign trips seem to have earned Sierra Leone is the unpleasant place on the World Bank 2020 GDP data as one of the “ten poorest countries in the world.” Even Government-less Somalia and drought-infested Niger are doing better than Sierra Leone. Yet, our President could still muster the courage to tell investors, at the EXPO 2020 Dubai’s Investment Forum, that his government has “…worked hard in the last three years to shape up the ecosystem to be conducive for business to flourish, fighting corruption and working very hard to make sure economic fundamentals [are] strong….” Which country was, or is, our Commander-in-Chief talking about? Certainly, he might not be talking about Sierra Leone?
It is on that note that I will end today’s One Dropian dropping with a Krio proverb that says, “Big tok nor know say ihm master po” (please pardon my English-nised Krio). And I won’t make any inference here!
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