FANDAY TURAY, LIKE PRESIDENT BIO, AND MANY OTHER PRESENT SLPP FUNCTIONARIES OWE A LOT TO PRESIDENT ERNEST KOROMA’S KIND AND BENEVOLENT SPIRIT
By KABS KANU
IF others are not going to say it, I am going to make bold to do so. President Ernest Bai KOROMA really helped a lot of people when he was in power and many of them being appointed to key posts today by President Maada Bio owe a lot to the former president. I hope God gives place in their hearts to always appreciate what the ex-president did for them.
Most often, when some people talk, it is as if ERNEST KOROMA was a very bad man when in power or it is also like he is a malevolent man that has never done good for others. But the fact is that President KOROMA was a kind and benevolent man who helped launch many people in life .
Ernest KOROMA may have his faults and weaknesses which should surprise nobody because he is a human being, like everyone of us who have our own faults and weaknesses too. But the fact is that, when you view the whole picture , he is a good man who deserves more gratefulness than he is getting presently.
Even President Maada Bio would not have seen the light of day to become head of state in Sierra Leone today, but for the benevolence, kindness and political tolerance of President Ernest Bai KOROMA. KOROMA bestowed many favours on Bio and was primarily responsible for the zeal, determination and gusto that Bio summoned to achieve his goal. KOROMA gave Bio a lot of financial and moral assistance that Bio has never acknowledged but we, who were closer to KOROMA, can attest to that.
If President Koroma had been the vindictive and malicious type, he could have even crushed Bio’s presidential pretensions by bringing trumped up charges against him for all the violence he and his supporters perpetrated at the SLPP headquarters against his opponents before he became the SLPP flagbearer. Koroma failed to allow what could have been an epic inquest on the massacre of Bambay KAMARA and 28 others in which Bio would have been implicated and arrested or banned from taking part in politics. If Koroma was an evil man, and did not want to see the success of Bio, the inquest would have provided a golden opportunity for him to have destroyed Maada Bio. Maada and others committed a blatant crime by butchering 29 people without the benefits of any legal process. The 29 people were murdered out of a vengeful spirit by Bio and collaborators.
As Bio, the opposite of President Koroma is demonstrating now, an African president has limitless and unchecked power and can hinder the progress of anybody he wants. He controls the legal system, unfortunately. The African president controls everything.
Since President Bio came to power, he has been very vindictive, unlike ERNEST KOROMA and has been punishing and destroying anybody he considers a rival or antagonist . See how he is punishing MOHAMED Kamarainba Mansaray , who might die in prison ,though he only allegedly committed an alleged bailable offence, statutory rape. Bio has kept Kamarainba in prison for over a year now , though the alleged crime he is accused of carries a bail . Imagine. Many SLPP supporters have killed, maimed and committed serious economic crimes but they are not in jail. But a man accused of having sex with a minor is virtually dying in prison, sick and denied bail. Koroma would have found cause to do the same things to Bio to wreck his political career, but he didn’t. Rather he gave Bio immense financial and moral assistance, which helped propel him to power. Bio used Koroma’s own financial windfalls to campaign but today he has the ungrateful temerity to say in public that President Koroma is not his friend and has never been his friend. How can man born of a woman be so ungrateful ?
Today, one Colonel Fanday Turay took leave of President Bio to come to the scandal and corruption-plagued Sierra Leone Permanent Mission to the United Nations as the next permanent representative, replacing Allie Kabba, under whose tenure U.S $3 million sent to renovate the mission.was stolen and has not been accounted for.
Fanday is a nice, young man and should excel at his post . What many do not know, however, is that whatever Fanday Turay became and will ever be was also the result of the kindness of President Ernest Koroma. He is not the only ambassador or minister in the present SLPP government who should be indebted to President Koroma. There are many more.
The point I want to make here is that President Koroma appointed people without caring what political party or tribe they belonged to, unlike the tribalistic President Bio. How many of you know that it was President Koroma who really brought Col. Fanday Turay to the limelight when he appointed him military attaché to the same mission in 2008 ? Fanday was a nobody in Sierra Leone, but without regard to the fact that he was SLPP; as is now manifest, President Koroma picked him up and sent him to New York to enjoy his first shot as a diplomat.
President Koroma did not stop at that. While working for Sierra Leone at the UN , Fanday saw something else in which he was interested . He wanted to work for the UN itself , for the UN Disengagement Force in Ethiopia . Normally, when serving a government at the UN and you want to switch to the UN itself, you need the blessings and support of your home government to succeed. This was where President Koroma came in again. He gave the colonel every support he needed to make the switch. Koroma, again, did not care whether Fanday was in fact not a member of the APC or belonged to a different tribe. President Koroma saw a young, ambitious Sierra Leonean who wanted to advance himself and he helped him. Today, we have a president that bestows such favours only to his Mende people. If it had been President Bio, Fanday would have had to be SLPP or a Mende, to merit any recommendation from him.
One only hopes that all these ambassadors and ministers whose political alliance is now being known will have time one day to do the needful—be grateful to a former president who actually helped them launch out in life and who did not care whether they were SLPP. or APC , Mende or Temne or Mandingo or Fulla. He helped them because they were Sierra Leoneans. We also pray that God will give you another president with ERNEST Koroma’s kind of heart—-a president who will help people achieve their dreams in life, not because they are Mende or SLPP but because they are Sierra Leoneans.
