By Mohamed Sankoh (One Drop)
A ghostwriter, or a-pen-for-hire rookie, has done a propagandistic rejoinder to my One Dropian dropping of Tuesday 3 November 2026 titled “President Bio’s Conversion From Saul To Paul.” But in trying to justify the unjustifiable; he wades into troubled waters like someone who jumps into the Atlantic Ocean but doesn’t know how to swim and needs a Good Samaritan to throw him a lifejacket!
The rejoinder by one “Nyadavoo”, titled “A Reply To Mohamed Sankoh: Bio Was Never Saul, And Peace Is Not A Conversion”, reminds me of the penmanship of someone who works at the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s dystopian novel: “1984”. Like the early duties of the protagonist, Winston Smith, who works at the Ministry of Truth; Nyadavoo tries to rewrite some of Sierra Leone’s historical events to adapt to the ever-changing narratives that are now being insultingly churned out by the ruling Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP)’s propaganda machines.
Like in Orwell’s 1984, Nyadavoo attempts to employ techniques like “Newspeak” and “Doublethink”, in crude printed form, with the aim of whitewashing the realities in present day Sierra Leone from a twisted and illogical Revisionist History viewpoint! But unlike Winston Smith who thinks briefly out of the box until his ordeal at the Ministry of Love; Nyadavoo appears not to have had any “on his way to Damascus” experience, or Eureka moments, and seems determined to follow the SLPP-ian scripted script to his grave—albeit with feigned ignorance!
And in trying to justify the unjustifiable, Nyadavoo simultaneously opens a Pandora’s Box and also lets the genie out of the greenish bottle. S/he claims that President Bio “inherited a broken economy and a bankrupt state”. But since 2018 to date, President Bio’s seemingly countless and fruitless overseas travels and thoughtless economic policies have not only left Sierra Leone more broken than its presumed inherited brokenness but close to bankruptcy to the extent that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank have to constantly be switching on the switch on the life-support machine on which Sierra Leone’s economy now breaths. Despite Statistics-Sierra Leone and other government institutions have been churning out data, year-in and year-out, on how well the SLPP government’s financial mobilization processes have been successful in their successfulness; the Bio-led administration has been relying heavily on “budgetary supports” from the World Bank, IMF, and the European Union. That tells anyone with a critical thinking brain that the Bio-led administration is spending like a spendthrift while it runs a shoestring budget!
S/he also claims that President Bio “inherited…institutions weakened by years of mismanagement”. But what s/he fails to acknowledge is the fact that under the Bio-led administration, state institutions have been hyper-weakened by state capture so much so that even the “Plasas” and “Ogiree” Sellers’ Associations have been weakened by seemingly political interference from the corridors of power. And even our security forces and ports authorities appeared not to have been spared by the Bio-led administration’s defilements. According to the 7 February 2025 – Vol 66 – No 3 online edition of the Africa Confidential, one of Europe’s most dangerous criminals, convicted Dutch cocaine kingpin Jos Leijdekkers, or ‘Bolle Jos’ (‘Fat Jos’ in Dutch), has deployed “enormous bribes, recruited members of the country’s national security infrastructure to provide logistical and security services” for his alleged cocaine trafficking operations in Sierra Leone. Now, under the watchful watch of President Bio, Sierra Leone appears to have been rebranded from a decent nation with respect for international laws to a seemingly narco-state.
When the author notes that “De-MP-ing 10 MPs was a decision of the High Court, not a presidential decree”; s/he fails to appreciate my savage sarcasm: “…by judicial sleight of gavels.” This is a sophisticated One Dropian way of conjecturing to the Orwellian Big Brother manner in which the judicial gavels appeared to have been puppet-stringed from the Wallace-Johnson Street shadows!
One of the laughable portions of Nyadavoo’s rejoinder is where s/he states that, “Bio has always preached peace from his first inaugural address…” and gives a thin list of institutions he has established and activities he has undertaken towards that venture. Here again Orwell’s 1984 comes to mind. Like the Ministry of Truth which publishes and broadcasts untruths and the Ministry of Love where people are physically and psychologically tortured; President Bio appears to be preaching peace from his first inaugural address but his actions (and even his inactions) have always been hawkish in their hawkishness! And rightly so, I was shocked that on 26 October 2026 President Bio called former President Ernest Bai Koroma his “big brother” simply because the only thing that seems to be consistent in our Commander-in-Chief’s is his inconsistencies! I was also shocked because I quickly realised that his tongue might have been caressing the inside of his cheeks when he was making that statement!
But I can understand when someone is desperately trying to sell an unsellable good which countless people know is not sellable to even opinionated idiots. That’s why Nyadavoo could not understand, or feign ignorance of, my brutal and deliberate use of “persecuting” and “prosecuting” when referencing state activities at the start of the Bio-led administration. That’s why s/he believes that “persecution was accountability”. And, also, that’s why Nyadavoo believes that Bio’s guilty-before-trial Commissions of Inquiry (COI) were not “show trials” simply because they were “open to the public”.
Now, let me give Nyadavoo a free historical lecture. He might not have known that Stalin’s “Show Trials” held between 1936 and 1938; The Nuremberg Trials held from 20 November 1945 to 1 October 1946, and even the 1961 trial in Israel of Adolf Eichmann, a senior Nazi official, were all “open to the public”. They were all “approved” by some legislative bodies of those countries at the time. But the thread of commonality that ran through them was that: they all had semblances of guilty-before-trial trials! So, that was the point I was pointing at when I made a reference to Bio’s guilty-before-trial Commissions of Inquiry (COI) in my One Dropian dropping of Tuesday 3 November 2026.
And like someone who jumps into the Atlantic Ocean but doesn’t know how to swim and needs a Good Samaritan to throw him a lifejacket; I will do Nyadavoo the favour. S/he repeats the often quoted SLPP-ian cliché of Bio being the coupist who handed back political power to a civilian government in 1996. But what the author fails to state is that a true democrat cannot murder Democracy as Bio and his military colleagues did when multi-party democracy was being midwifed by the late President Joseph Saidu Momoh. And looking at the circumstances at the time, including the activities of those who were funding and supporting the Peace Before Elections campaign, Bio appeared to have handed over power grudgingly not by his own freewill! In disrobed language: he had a Hobson’s choice in 1996!
So Nyadavoo’s rejoinder, titled “A Reply To Mohamed Sankoh: Bio Was Never Saul, And Peace Is Not A Conversion”, is an attempt to transform a rusty metal into gleaming gold. But the fact remains that President Bio still is what he is!
medsankoh@yahoo.com/+232-76-611-986