By Mohamed Sankoh (One Drop)
Elders in Africa have always used proverbs to summarise, or explain, certain situations or happenings. One of those proverbs that come to mind, in relation to President Julius Maada Bio’s northern tour last week, is the one which says, “Beware of the naked person who offers you clothes”.
After four good years at the rudder of state; I’m wondering why President Bio has suddenly thought that now is the time for him to eat humble pie and extend the olive branch to the Yumkella family in Kambia District, northern Sierra Leone. It is my opinion that it is only a cursed child (in our local parlance: “pekin way get sweh”) that would reconcile with someone who had acquiesced to his acolytes spitting on his mother’s face and throwing her head-tie on the ground!
But I’m aware that most Sierra Leonean politicians can do everything and anything just for the sake of wielding political power or accumulating wealth. It is only in Sierra Leone where it being alleged that a once-upon-a-time Civil Servant sold his biological father in neighbouring Liberia to cannibals and also purportedly used his penis as a thumbprint to sign documents all with the aimed of being wealthy and influential. As I see it, some Sierra Leonean politicians do not have an iota of integrity in their DNAs. So, it is understandable whenever they keep shifting their political loyalties with the frequencies with which prostitutes take off their panties!
So, I’m waiting-ly waiting to see if Dr Kandeh Kolleh Yumkella, the leader of the National Grand Coalition (NGC) in the House of Parliament, will return to his vomit and regard it as a newfound edible food. All these four years, Dr Yumkella has been talking about “integrity”, he has been talking about democratic tenets, and he has been talking about good governance issues and the rule of law; now the situation has presented itself for me to know if he meant what he has been shouting about above the parapet!
And whilst President Bio was emptily pledging to “rebuild [the] Magburaka Boys Government Secondary School and restore its lost glory”, during the launching of the Bo School Staff Quarters Construction Project last Saturday, in the southern city of Bo; he forgot, or feigned forgetfulness, that the institutions that need rebuilding and rebranding are the Sierra Leone Police (SLP) and the Judiciary. And he is also pretending not to know that what matters most to most old boys of that school is justice for those families whose sons and daughters were killed in cold blood in Tonko Limba, Mile-91, Makeni, Tombo, and the Pademba Road Correctional Centre in Freetown.
And from the time when those killings occurred to date, President Bio or his party has not offered an apology in the spirit of collective responsibility. And if he is craving for reconciliation, it should not be with the Yumkella family but the families of those who were killed in Tonko Limba, Mile-91, Makeni, Tombo, and the Pademba Road Correctional Centre in Freetown. As Wole Soyinka notes, in his prison memoir The Man Died, “Even in totalitarian states, the time comes when past ‘errors’ are admitted, high-placed criminals unmasked and victims rehabilitated, mostly alas, posthumously!” So, when will that time come for the Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) government to accept and admit those “past errors”? If the Commander-in-Chief could now admit “past errors” to the Yumkella family; then what is preventing him from saying “sorry” to the bereaved families and unmasked those responsible for those atrocities?
It is funnily funny that after four years of massive sackings of mostly north-westerners from their jobs, after four years of maltreatments of mostly northerners like trash, and after four years of carrying out some of the worst human rights abuses in the northern parts of the country by the security forces; it is only now that the Bio-led government appears to think that north-westerners are important in Sierra Leone. It was once alleged that the late Okere Adams of the SLPP referred to northerners as “sheep” that would follow any leader who thrust salt in their direction. Well, 2023 will be the year for northerners to prove that assertion wrong by not being led to the abattoir again like dumb sheep by President Bio’s latest cajoleries!
In his 2018 “People’s Manifesto”, the then Mr Julius Maada Bio promised “…a New Direction for Sierra Leone [that would be] a united, peaceful, progressive, dynamic, confident, enterprising and happy nation where the people have unlimited access to jobs, food, education and health services and where there is equal justice and equal opportunity for all”. But looking at the status quo today, it is comically comical for President Bio to claim that he has achieved the bulk of what he promised. Maybe, he and his SLPP are living in Dubai whereas I and my family are living in Sierra Leone. Even the basic bread and butters issues, which the SLPP promised to solve in that Manifesto, are as elusive as the promised “Tapalapa” bakery.
Going around the country now after four years of progressive failures; after four years of blatant human rights abuses; after four years of maladministration; after four years of seemingly organised grand corruption, and after four years of lording over a divided nation; President Bio thinks majority of Sierra Leoneans will be as “simple-minded like the fishermen of Galilee” (to quote Achebe) to give him another free ride at the National Treasury! He should know that “the music is nothing, if the audience is deaf”, to quote the elders of Africa. He might have carried messages of reconciliation to Port Loko and Kambia Districts, but northerners know that “sometimes, you have to play the role of a fool to fool the fools who think they are fooling you”, to quote another African proverb.
And for President Bio to suddenly realise that he has to meet the people of, and in, the north after all what has transpired these four years could be likened to the hyena befriending the antelopes when dinner time is fast approaching. And you only need to conjure the picture of how that friendship will end.
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