By Mohamed Sankoh (One Drop)
Two of the few people who could breast-beat themselves that they know the psyches of most supporters of the ruling Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) are President Julius Maada Bio and his wife, Fatima. And they have repeatedly proven that they can tame them to their whims and caprices without them raising their fingers in open protests or make their faces in obscene defiant gestures.
The Bios have experimented with their supporters’ psyches and now know that they can abuse them; they can treat them with contempt; they can tell them half-truths; they can implement bad intra-party policies that could be comparable to throwing hungry and angry foxes into a chicken’s coop, and they know that they can ignore their democratic choices; but as long as it concerns SLPP matters the supporters are always ready to be led like sheep to the abattoir! President Bio and his wife know that most SLPP supporters have been “programmed” (to borrow the American phrase) by tribal and regional considerations that they don’t care if their leader leads them to their collective doom.
So I was, and still is, not surprised that President Bio, the leader of the SLPP, recently referred to his own “people” and supporters as “idiots” at an SLPP function in the south—the very heartland of SLPP-dom. Well, if the King comes out from his bedroom and tells you that the Queen is a circumcised woman, who are you to think otherwise? If the President publicly says his supporters are “idiots”, it means that is what he thinks of them in private and might have told his wife so. And there is no better way President Bio could have described his own “people” who appear to be so half-witted that they are still unable to see the damage which the First Lady is doing to their party and the seemingly rudderless manner in which the Commander-in-Chief is running the country.
And for a leader to call some of his own supporters “idiots” may mean that he might have realised that they are so brainless that they will accept hook, line and sinker any mumbo-jumbo that is rammed down their throats. When President Bio claimed that he inherited a dysfunctional economy and an empty National Treasury; his supporters behaved like typical “idiots” without asking him where he was getting all the United States’ Dollars he was using to finance his foreign trips and running the Office of the First Lady. When President Bio said his government would construct the Lungi Bride; his supporters behaved like “idiots” who were incapable of telling him that the “bread and butter issues” were more important than a bride to nowhere. And when President Bio is sending his children to private schools and most of his ministers following his footsteps and still talking about Free [minus “Quality”] Education; he knows most of his supporters are “idiots” and will not ask him why is that so. Idiots will always be idiots; and the Head of State and his wife know that. They know that most of their “idiots” could be so idiotic that they can behave like idiots who have mastered the art of idiocy!
And it was that same belief that Fatima Bio must have held about two weeks ago when she went to Kailahun, eastern Sierra Leone, during the election for the leadership of the SLPP National Women’s Wing. And when she noticed that the “idiots” were not behaving in their trademark idiotic manner, the election was cancelled and rescheduled for Freetown where she knew she would have her way. And the rest is now history, as the cliché goes.
I’m one of those non-idiots who are still filled with malicious satisfaction for the defeat of Fatmata Sawaneh as the SLPP National Women’s Leader for two reasons. Firstly, for whatever reasons, she has always been trying to be the modern SLPP version of Nancy Steele of the Siaka Stevens era. She seems to have taken uncouthness as a virtue. I could still remember her WhatsApp audio in the aftermath of the alleged massacre at the Pademba Road Correctional Centre in Freetown. Whilst mothers were grieving for their slain sons, Madam Sawaneh behaved like Lady Macbeth by calling on the spirits “that tend on mortal thoughts [to] unsex [her] and fill [her] from the crown to the toe topful of direst cruelty!” Now, Fatima Bio has shown her that she is the wife of President Bio by plotting and executing her downfall with a typical Machiavellian script.
Secondly, Fatmata Sawaneh’s losing to Hawa Foray has clearly shown that Fatima Bio appears to be the undisputed Co-President of the Republic of Sierra Leone. And the manner in which the First Lady danced like an intoxicated “Sampa”, to celebrate Madam Foray’s win, really gives us an insight into how President Bio is running his home. In fact, Fatima Bio’s public behaviour has been so un-First Lady-ish that most right-thinking Sierra Leoneans are getting the frightful impression that our Commander-in-Chief is a sort of a henpecked husband!
Even President Bio’s attempt at bravado, at an SLPP event at State House last Friday, by cautioning his wife to always get rid of their party’s soiled menstrual pads (figuratively writing, please,) in private could be described as the last kicks of a dying horse. But what I will, grudgingly, agree with the President on is his home truth that his wife’s utterances could be used as propagandistic ammunition against their party in future. And the truth is: she has already given the opposition more than enough ammo to demolish the SLPP in 2023!
With a First Lady like Fatima and a President like Julius Maada; does the All People’s Congress (APC) need to convince the non-idiots that Sierra Leone will always be rudderless under the Bios? But as long as they have their tamed “idiots”, the Bios could always get away with everything and anything—even with murder if they decide to commit one at any of their party’s events. And the non-idiots will be the only ones that will be screaming blue murder at the murder!
It is on that note that I will end today’s One Dropian dropping with a quote from Ambrose Bierce, an American short story writer and journalist, who in his book “The Devil’s Dictionary” described an idiot as “a member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant and controlling.” And I don’t know whether President Julius Maada Bio has read Bierce for him to have made that Freudian slip.
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