By KABS KANU
The chronic economic meltdown and the excruciating suffering of the Sierra Leonean people as food prices spiral out of country are worsening by day.
Even market women and traders are now facing a very serious squeeze. Their foodstuffs are so expensive, people cannot afford and so business is very slow. Everybody is complaining , from the office messenger and security officer to the street cleaner, okada driver, poda poda boy and Mr. Johnsons with – neck ties in the offices. Everybody is at their wits end because of the steadily escalating prices of basic commodities in the country.
Within four years since President Bio came to power in 2018, everything has gone up, dangerously. The SLPP government, unlike the previous Ernest Koroma administration, has not been able to establish any measure of price control. Yes, people still complained during the Ernest Koroma era but now, what everybody is saying is that things have worsened under the Maada Bio SLPP government. “Things were not as worse as this . “:During the Koroma era,at least we survived, “ complained one frustrated office worker who faced the prospect of returning home to a hungry house. “But during this Maada Bio era, even survival is becoming impossible. “
For the third time in as many months, fuel price is about to go up again. Rice is now Le 400,000 a bag , above the minimum wage in the country. All basic food products like onions, pepper, salt, tomatoes, palm oil, cassava leaves etc .have gone up steeply and dramatically. To prepare just one square meal a day for your family is now an impossibility.
Even bills for basic services like electricity, water and top-ups for telephones have gone up drastically.
People are straining to survive in Sierra Leone. Wives are quarreling with husbands every day because the family chop money is not enough to do anything, according to housewives. Children, the human capital the SLPP brags about developing , are going to bed hungry. They go to school without lunch and walk long distances to school under the rain. Even the so-called Free Education the SLPP government is bragging about, is not free. Children are dropping out of school because their parents cannot afford to pay their fees.
Instead of addressing the suffering spreading throughout the land, President Bio and his extravagant and flamboyant wife, Fatima, are busy traveling all over the globe, wasting precious national resources and telling whopping lies to the world that Sierra Leone is heading to a new and better direction .
What kind of new direction is this, where children and their parents and guardians go to bed hungry every night ? What kind of new direction is this where electricity is very irregular and the city and towns are in darkness ?
It is a new direction of starvation, squalor, suffering and darkness, many Sierra Leoneans complain in the social media.
