By Mohamed Sankoh (One Drop)
The modus operandi of President Julius Maada Bio, since he came to power in 2018, has shown that the only thing that is consistent about him is his inconsistency. If he tells you good morning; look outside it would have surely passed midday. And even in his best of intensions, it seems that anything and everything he touches turns into dross instead of gold!
He pardons a convicted killer (Mbaimba Moiforay aka LA Chocolate) in the morning and revokes it in the afternoon—making him the first President in Sierra Leone’s history to swallow his Prerogative of Mercy. He sacks, reappoints sacked Ministers and recycles them (Dennis Vandi, Ali Kabba, Nabeela Tunis, Anthony Brewah, Sadiq Sillah et al) with the frequency with which King Henry VIII changed his wives (he had six wives and several mistresses). And the Commander-in-Chief flip-flops on his 2018 Manifesto promises like a preprogrammed see-saw.
Yet, President Bio has the courage to claim that he has delivered what he promised. And his toadies, both at State House and State Lodge, comically call him “Tok en Do President”. Our Head of State promises to fight corruption, tooth and nail, but when the apparition of corruption appears to have appeared in the rooms at State Lodge, the corridors of the Office of the President, and the backyards of Government Ministries and Departments; he pays lip service to it. The President should be reminded that charity must start at home. If he wants me to take him seriously, in his so-called fight against corruption, he needs to start cleaning the backyard and frontage of his house! And he also has to start cleaning the Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC) which now appears to be infested with bribe-takers (I’m still waiting for the ACC to comment on the Receipts-Gate scandal in the Office of the President)!
And whilst President Bio and his toadies appear to be play-acting in a typical Shakespearean “Comedy of Errors”; the brightly bright Dr Dennis Bright has laid bare the fact that the Bio-led administration is hopelessly hopeless. In his “Sierra Leone Hardship Index January 2022”, the Chairman and Leader of the National Grand Coalition (NGC) cleverly insinuates that the President and his hangers-on seem to be comedians who for the past three years have been promising to flood Sierra Leone with rice harvested from the local Toma Bom Farm but are now “frantically importing rice…fourteen months to the next elections.” Such a statement gives one the graphic picture of “Vamboi” (a character in the local comedy “Wan Pot”) racing to a river with a sieve to fetch water for his wife, “Rosaline”, who is choking at home!
But Dr Bright is not done yet with these “Tok en Do” comedians. According to the NGC Chairman and Leader, since the Bio-led administration started its “Comedy of Errors” four years ago “….a minimum wage earner’s income [of Le600,000], if spent on food alone… will last for only 9 days; so since the family has other compulsory items to pay for such as rent, transport fares, clothing and medical bills, one can assume that parents and children will have to go without food some days, without bus fare, without light etc”. He laments that “this is the misery to which our people have been reduced while people in power are spending on themselves, callously blind to the sufferings of the poor and stone deaf to their cries”. And, I think, Dr Bright forgets to mention the massive corruption (as highlighted in the last two Audit Reports by Audit Service Sierra Leone) and Per Diem rush which are now two of the defining traits of the Bio-led administration.
In spite of the grim economic situation in the country, all President Bio is “more interested in [is] flying…[allegedly] cooking [up] elections [results] and sacking upright women [like Lara Taylor-Pearce the Auditor General] who are doing their job[s] than rescuing the poor people of this country that are gradually sinking into disgraceful poverty (to quote the brightly bright Dr Bright for the last time).” Indeed, majority of Sierra Leoneans are worse off today than they were four years ago. Yet the narrow-minded Tok-en-Doers still have the nerve to even think that right-thinking Sierra Leoneans will sheepishly replicate their 2018 blunder next year by voting for President Bio and his toadies again. But since majority of Sierra Leoneans were once bitten in 2018; they will be twice shy in 2023. And it is that shyness that will ballot-out the SLPP even if Rome will have to burn or the heavens to fall!
And it is clear that the ruling Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) has failed woefully to solve the basic “bread and butter issues”, which were the centerpieces of its 2018 Manifesto promise. Now the prices for Bo “gari”; Kenema “cow kanda”; “Samu salt”; “Koya plassas”; “Waterloo Kassada brade”, and even “Freetong cookery” are now racing up the Bintumani Mountain. Yet, in the SLPP 2018 Manifesto, dubbed the “People’s Manifesto”, we are promised of a New Direction in which, “people [will] have unlimited access to jobs, food, education and health services and where there is equal justice and equal opportunity for all”.
But, today, under the rudderless New Direction majority of the youth are unemployed which has made them hungrier and angrier. The health services are nothing to write home about. And job opportunities appear to be only meant for either members of the Bio Family or those who could speak the Palm-Treeian language. And the economic mess which the Bio-led government has sunk Sierra Leone into is messily messy that it is now a personification of the SLPP, both as a Party and Government.
It is on that note that I will end today’s One Dropian dropping with a Yugoslav proverb that says, “If you wish to know what a man is, place him in authority.” Truly true. And President Julius Maada Bio was placed in authority in 2018; now we know who he really is! He can’t hoodwink the people of Sierra Leone anymore.
[email protected]/+232-76-611-986