Habits, whether good or bad according to an old adage, are difficult to hide. Even if you apply a million gallons of Rainbow Paint to whiten the tail of a black monkey; it will eventually exhibit its black tail with time.
That holds true for the ruling elite of the Sierra Leone People’s Party’s (SLPP) who have been playing the role of the proverbial bird in Ayi Kwei Armah’s novel: “The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born”, who hates excrement but eats lava that breeds in excrement.
When President Julius Maada Bio launched his so-called “anti-corruption crusade” in 2018, many Sierra Leoneans who could recall what ex-president Ahmad Tejan Kabba said, while he was launching a gunboat at the Government Wharf in Freetown about Bio when he was military Head of State in the mid 1990s, took his words with a pinch of salt. And before long, they were proven right as Audit Service Sierra Leone (ASSL) unearthed allegations of receipts being forged at the Office of the President with the aim of covering up reckless spending of government funds while the President was on one of his countless overseas escapades.
And like two peas in a pod, the Office of the First Lady also stands accused by the United States’ based Africanist Press of using state resources like a drunken sailor. Monies that should have oiled the running of some Government Agencies and Departments effectively were poured in that Office with allegations of little or no regard for fiscal transparency and accountability.
Under the watchful watch of President Bio and his SLPP, corruption has permeated every Government Ministry, Department, and Agency to the extent that the Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC) has become uselessly useless, in the fight against corruption, so much so that it is now one of the Bio-led administration’s chief weapons to defend government corruption and its perpetrators! Whenever members of the Bio regime or SLPP party card carriers are being investigated for blatant corruption or corrupt practices, the ACC will become painfully slow in its usual slowness to find several ways to water down the findings!
For the last five years now, everyday Sierra Leoneans will hear about scandalous corrupt practices by government officials but nothing is being done about it. What is very nauseating about the SLPP’s fight against corruption, under President Bio with his seemingly lame duck ACC, is the reckless and arrogance with which grand corruption is being carried out.
And when Hon. Ibrahim “Tawa” Conteh and Hon. Hindolo Moiwo Gevao, both from the SLPP, informed Sierra Leoneans on the BBC and Radio Democracy that our House of Parliament was reeking with grand corruption; those who did not take them seriously have now been rudely awaken from their reveries as the Clerk of Parliament, Hon. Umar Paran Tarawallie, is currently embroiled in a “conflict of interest” mess.
The Clerk of Parliament, Hon. Umar Paran Tarawallie, is now being investigated by the ACC for allegedly paying his wife a hefty salary claiming that she was being employed by Parliament whilst she was comfortably ensconced at home collecting salaries and other allowances for the last ten months. This latest corruption allegation is just a microcosm of the grand corruption within the SLPP government!
One of the sections in the amended Anti-Corruption Commission Act which has been repeatedly bastardized by the very ACC is that which deals with “unexplained wealth”. There are countless examples of rags-to-riches in SLPP-dom which the ACC has repeatedly been turning a blind eye to.
With the forgoing we, in The Nationalist, strongly believe that the Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) government of President Julius Maada Bio is corruptly corrupt! And there are no two ways about that.