By Mohamed Sankoh (One Drop)
I know supporters of, and apologists for, the ruling Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) love to hate it; but I love to love it. I love the current stance taken by the All People’s Congress (APC) by declaring its “non-participation in any level of governance, including the legislature and local councils, as the results [which gave President Julius Maada Bio a controversial second term in office were] tampered with to give the SLPP an unjust majority at all levels”.
When someone has repeatedly shown that he is a glutton; give him all the food in the house! The SLPP has repeatedly shown that it wants political power for the sake of having it; so the APC has done them the favours by giving them everything they had wished for!
I hopefully hope President Bio is, or some of his toadies are, following this One Dropian dropping? Since the March of 2018 to date, one of the things which our Commander-in-Chief appears to be very good at is finding scapegoats for his administrative ineptitude and lack of national acceptability. Even if you ask our Head of State why State House is painted white; I bet he will try to find scapegoats for why it was not painted green. He seems to have scapegoats for every inaction or blunder of his government.
But after having steered the rudder of state for the last five years, he appears to have now run out of scapegoats. He can no longer claim to have inherited a “battered economy” because claiming such now will mean that he inherited a weather-beaten economy from himself! In fact, the state of Sierra Leone’s economy in his second term is a by-product of the half-assed economic policies implemented during his first term. The APC has been out of power for the last five years, so he can’t continue accusing it for the current state of the country’s economy. He can’t eat all of his birthday cake and still expect to see it uneaten!
President Bio cannot claim anymore that he needs to travel the world over because he wants to rebrand Sierra Leone. If he starts his globetrotting habit again, he should be honest enough to tell the suffering Sierra Leoneans that he needs to travel overseas to launder the horrid human rights violations and anti-democratic image which he carved for himself in his first term in office.
He cannot even scapegoat-nize the Russia-Ukraine War anymore because most serious African Heads of State have found sensible ways around that issue which have either stabilize their economies or improve them. So, I’m expecting our “dancing” president to find a new sound-bite this time.
And since President Bio seems to have run out of local scapegoats (notably the “terrorists” and “insurrectionists” in alleged APC-dom), he has now found some in Sierra Leone’s Development Partners whose main crime is to pick out “inconsistencies, and lack of integrity in most of the key activities of the [June 24 multi-tier] election[s] including the tabulation of results [which brought President Bio to power again]”. Their other crime is their highlights of “statistical inaccuracies” in the Presidential Election results which has irritated our president.
Here again Sierra Leone’s so-called “Father of Democracy”, who appears to have murdered Democracy prior to and after the June 24 multi-tier elections, is now playing the proverbial bad workman who blames his tools for not doing what is expected of him. It is laughably laughable for President Bio to be now talking about “sovereignty” when it is some of those very “white people” whose institutions have been giving his bedridden government budgetary supports. It is logically logical that a president who depends heavily on foreign loans, grants, and aids must never have the word “Independence” in his vocabulary! The Krios will succinctly put it thus: “Big tok nor know say ihm master po”!
Probably, President Bio is feigning forgetfulness of the factual fact that the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the European Union (EU), and the American and British governments have the rightful right to put their mouths where their grants, loans, and aids are going! When, on 5 December 2022, the World Bank announced “the approval of US$100 million grant to the Government of Sierra Leone to improve natural resource governance, enhance inclusiveness and strengthen accountability and transparency in public finance”; our president and his toadies at State House were over the moon (and they announced it with fanfare complete with the typical Paopa-ian pomp)!
And on Monday 5 June 2023, the State House Communications Unit informed the rest of humankind of how President Bio was “impressed with the outcomes of the latest reviews by the…IMF, citing the disbursement of USD$20.7 million, after the visit of the team, as a vote of confidence in Government’s economic management measures….” We were even told that the “…economic management measures my government put in place early in my administration in 2018 won the confidence of the International Monetary Fund and reinstated Sierra Leone in the Extended Credit Facility programme….”
When President Bio was politically interpreting the foreigners’ grants, loans, and aids as “a vote of confidence in [his] Government’s economic management measures…”; he didn’t stop for once to think about Kwame Nkrumah’s 1965 seminal book: “Neo-Colonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism”. When the Board of Directors of the United States Government’s Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC)reselected Sierra Leone as eligible to continue developing aCompact; President Bio and his team celebrated it with their characteristic Paopa-ian spectacle. And when, on 19 March 2023, the British High Commission in Freetown announced an “additionaltwenty-five million Pounds (£25m) grant for a new five-year programme funded by the United Kingdom government to support secondary schools in the country”; the Bio-led administration rejoiced such tiding like a starving homeless man winning the mega lottery.
But little did our Head of State and his flatterers realise, or were pretending not to know, that “a man who brings home ant-infested faggots should not complain if he is visited by lizards”, to quote Chinua Achebe. They should have known that a time would come when Sierra Leone’s Foreign Donors, or Development Partners, would love to put their mouths where their monies are going! That means: if the SLPP government doesn’t like what is now coming out of their mouths; they should stop receiving their grants, loans, and aids! For you cannot be a hopelessly hopeless beggar and wanting to be very choosy about your mendicancy through flippancy!
As I see it, all what the European Union, the American and British governments are asking for are transparency, accountability, honesty, and fair play. They are not asking for much. They are simply saying that: let’s see the breakdown of the final June 24 elections results by each polling station and each polling centre.
So, for President Bio to be playing the cry-baby (and finding scapegoats in the World Bank, the IMF, the EU, the American and British governments) because transparency and accountability appear to be haunting him now reminds me of Abraham Lincoln’s fabled man who murdered both his parents, and then, when sentence was about to be pronounced, pleaded for mercy on the grounds that he was an orphan.
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