By Mohamed Sankoh (One Drop)
I will not comment on the 2021 Mid-term Population and Housing Census that has all the hallmarks of a fraudulent fraud. It is Statistics Sierra Leone (Stats-SL), itself, that makes the Freudian slip in its “Message To Census Field Staff”, dated 2 June 2022, that a good number of enumerators only did between 31% to 50% of their assigned tasks, so they would only be paid for such tasks.
And as I’m trying to digest that Freudian slip, which shows the Statistician-General and his team’s deceptive deception, Stats-SL tears off its trousers and Boxer right in the middle of the PZ area (figuratively, of course) and tells the nation that several enumerators did between 1% and 30% of their assigned tasks during the course of the 2021 Mid-term Population and Housing Census. This tells you that the whole exercise was not only a process in futility but a half-assed one believed to be credible by either opinionated fools or partisan clowns!
This half-assed-ness (is this another One Dropian word?) of the 2021 Mid-term Population and Housing Census is being ridiculed by Yusuf Bangura who, in a recent article, noted that, “The figures that really hit me in the census results are those for Western Urban and Western Rural. Does Statistics-Sierra Leone really believe that there are more people in Western Rural (662,056) than Western Urban or the Freetown municipality (606,701)? This must be the joke of the century….The really disturbing point about the Western Urban figure is that it is even lower than the figure recorded in the 2004 census (772,873), which was conducted under an SLPP government—the party of those who are currently in power. Are we to believe that the 2004 figure was also inflated by the Tejan-Kabbah SLPP government?”
And the other issue, which I won’t comment on, is the proposed non-refundable fee of Le500,000,000 (five hundred million Leones) for those who intend to aspire to be the presidential candidate for the All People’s Congress (APC) in 2023. Those who are arguing that such an amount is exorbitant should come to terms with the fact that modern-day Presidential politics is no longer about ‘Dregmanism’ but about someone who has an untainted persona and clout to marshal funds to oil the machinery of political campaign(s). If someone who is aspiring to be President of the Republic of Sierra Leone is unable to use his/her networks to raise less than US$45,000 to buy an application form, then s/he should go to Abacha Street and start some form of petty trading! People should learn to cut their coats according to the available materials (If five yards are normally used to sew you a suit but you only have four-and-half yards; you could still sew your coat by making it slim-fit with a Michael Jackson-like trousers!).
In my opinionated opinion, what I think the APC’s Transitional Elections Rules and Regulations, approved by the Interim Transitional Governance Committee (ITGC), are trying to achieve is to sanitize the political space within the party. We all saw that, in 2018, when the political space was a free-for-all affair; clowns, fools, conmen, and even mad people who appeared to be sane muddied the already murky waters. At least, with a non-refundable fee of Le500,000,000 (five hundred million Leones), the APC will not have jokers trying to transform the party’s Flagbearer race into a sort of circus as it looked like in 2018.
Another issue that I won’t comment on is the ruling Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP)’s mumbo-jumbo about “plugging leakages and wastages” in Government’s spending. I can’t imagine President Julius Maada Bio allowing his cash-strapped administration to allegedly spend nearly half-a-million United States’ dollars in chartering a plane, paying hotel bills, and giving per diems to members of his large entourage just for him to go to Dubai to “tell hush for berin” when Sierra Leone has an ambassador resident in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Equally unimagined is his financial frivolousness to go to Kenya just to engage in Ngorboi-like dance with President Uhuru Kenyatta to celebrate “Madaraka Day” and enjoy uninterrupted electricity supply which his SLPP government is unable to provide in Freetown!
Prior to that seemingly “Madaraka Day” financial frivolousness our Commander-in-Chief, whose administration has great difficulties in paying salaries on time and owing local contractors millions and millions of United States’ dollars, could put up a beggar’s show-off by pledging US$500,000 to the African Union Humanitarian Fundraising during the opening session of the 16th Extraordinary Conference of the African Union in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea, on Friday 27 May 2022. Albeit I’m not commenting on the mumbo-jumbo about “plugging leakages and wastages” in Government’s spending; but if I should, I will say that our Head of State and his hangers-on seem to be behaving like deprived hungry children who chanced upon an unguarded orchard!
And don’t ask me to comment on recent visits to the Makeni Lodge of former President Ernest Bai Koroma. I won’t. Few days ago, Vice President Dr Mohamed Juldeh Jalloh visited the former Head of State and they spoke in camera. Last Saturday, the British High Commissioner to Sierra Leone, Lisa Chesney, visited him at his residence. “The two had a closed-door meeting which the former president described as fantastic”, says a report from the Office of the Former President.
According to Sheriff Mahmud Ismail, the Personal Assistant to Ernest Bai Koroma, “[last Saturday’s visit] follows several other meetings the Sierra Leonean statesman has had in Freetown with the British High Commissioner and other Western diplomats in Sierra Leone [in private].” I think something is brewing which senior members of the Bio-led administration know about but are not telling their unsuspecting supporters. They appear to be guiding them far enough down the wrong path, enveloping them in enough smoke (to paraphrase Robert Greene’s 48 Laws of Power), and by the time the SLPP grassroots realize their elites’ intentions; the 2023 elections would have been won by the APC!
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