By Mohamed Sankoh (One Drop) :
I cannot predict who President Ernest Bai Koroma’s running mate, in this year’s November Presidential poll, will be. This is simply because the President is still making that issue an issue of an enigma wrapped in a labyrinth of political puzzle. But one prediction I will make, with all certainty, is that the 2012 manifesto of the President and his ruling All People’s Congress (APC) will be dubbed: an “Agenda for Prosperity”.
MOHAMED SANKOH ( ONE DROP)
This is predictable like a typical unadulterated Konoman’s wife pregnancy: whatever the sex of the would-be baby, there is a predestined name for it—even if born posthumously. So, those of us who are now experts in Koromaism (well, I will be modest here by not referring to myself as the exponent of Koromaism because even that self-celebrated egocentric publisher, who was once pillorying me for having the audacity of conceptualising the “Agenda for Change” thus, is now more Koromaist than yours truly) know that an “Agenda for Prosperity” will be the progression of the “Agenda for Change”.
The “Agenda for Change” was, and still is, the foundation for futuristic constant electricity supply; good and wider roads; the transformation of agriculture from a subsistence affair to a commercialised one; the improvement of conditions of service for government workers; the improvement in the educational standards in the country, and the assurance of good health in the form of the Free Health Care initiative. In summary, it is the sign-posting of what the President wants Sierra Leone to look like after he would have retired in 2017. And to synopsise the summary further: it is all about actions rather than intensions.
And since the “Agenda for Change” has progressed to breathtaking transformational level; so enters the “Agenda for Prosperity”. The “Agenda for Prosperity” is the would-be pruning and polishing of the current positive transformations taking place countrywide. It will, definitely, extricate Sierra Leone from a beggar nation, which the Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) left it in 2007, to an alms-giving nation in the next twenty years.
Unlike the SLPP presidential candidate’s opaque “New Direction”, which is not only rudderless but a document of sublime organised nonsense enveloped in tasteless logic, President Koroma’s “Agenda for Prosperity” will be the blueprint for Sierra Leone total economic emancipation. It will be Sierra Leone’s version of Germany’s “Marshall Plan”, as it will take the country from the “worst of times to the best of times” (to quote the British celebrated novelist, Charles Dickens). It will be a workable document not the utopian directionless “New Direction” of Madder Bio (by the way, the SLPP Presidential candidate has been missing in action for sometime now. Has he gone to the United States of America to raise funds?).
President Koroma’s “Agenda for Prosperity” is expected to be the transition point wherein lots and lots of Sierra Leoneans will be elevated from abject poverty to middle class level—through hard work—as the President’s plans will create the avenues for both personal and national growth. It will be a document that will further strengthen all the democratic tenets which the “Agenda for Change” has not only upheld but projects in the modus operandi of the President. The “Agenda for Prosperity” will take Sierra Leone into the level wherein accountability, transparency, and nationalism will be virtues rather than the vices which the eleven years SLPP rule made them to be.
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