Is President Bio Fooling Himself?
By Mohamed Sankoh (One Drop)
I have told and retold this anecdote. And I will retell it today for the umpteenth time. When I was in Form One Mauve at the Prince of Wales, Kingtom west of the capital Freetown, my mother asked me one sunny Sunday afternoon to go inside our room (“Boys’ Room” as we called it then) and bring out my mathematics textbook so that one of my uncles could “crack some math” with me.
I had gone inside the room and returned without the mathematics textbook. My mother asked me to go again inside the room and look properly. I went and came out without the book. And for the third time she asked me to go and look properly for it.
The point was: not that I did not see the mathematics textbook; the book was right on top of the table where my mother said she had seen it that morning before going to church, but I pretended as if I didn’t see it just because I didn’t want to practise mathematics—a subject I hated!
That my attitude towards mathematics, which I put up that sunny Sunday afternoon at our then No.63 Soldier Street home in central Freetown, could be seen in most—if not all—members of the ruling Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP). Not that they do not know that their SLPP government has still not solved the “bread and butter issues” as promised in 2018; not that they do not know that through economic incompetence their SLPP government is still unable to tame the wayward US Dollar which is bullying the timid Leone; and not that they do not know that the seemingly inept leadership of President Julius Maada Bio has led the country to the sewers and unashamed perpetration and perpetuation of what appears to be organised corruption among the ruling elite, but they are pretending as if these issues are not existing just because they do not want to acknowledge the truthful truth!
And that truthful truth, apart from other truths, is that President Bio appears to be playing the clownish clown who has been clownishly hiding in a thin fog. But now that that fog has cleared, majority of Sierra Leoneans have seen him for what he truly is. He appears to be an epitome of incompetence wrapped inside the “work ethics” of his tribesmen (and tribeswomen, for the sake of gender parity)! And with all the failures and follies which are the defining traits of the SLPP government; with all the gaffes and flippancies of First Lady Fatima Bio on social media and in government gatherings (you could read: “the gatherings of the tribe”), and with all the alleged blatant human rights abuses meted out on the people of Makeni, Lunsar, Tonko Limba and Tombo; President Bio could still muster the audacity to ask majority of Sierra Leoneans to give him another chance to bring another five years of chronic economic hardships on the citizenry of Sierra Leone.
In the last couple of weeks, President Bio has been traversing the southern and eastern parts of the country like a troubadour (Not the one in Dennis Brutus’s poem: “A Troubadour, I Traverse All My Land”.). During those political circuses, he tells his “Up-line” audiences what appear to be outright lies and half-truths concocted with what seems to be blatant arrogance. But what has always been laughably laughable, to me, is when he always dances like a tired “Ngorboi” (You can pardon me if an unadulterated ‘Freetong Boy’ like me got that spelling wrong.) as if he is auditioning to play the Sierra Leonean version of “Mr Ibu” in an upcoming movie!
And those “Up-line” political circuses were climaxed last week Thursday at the Bintumani Conference Centre, Aberdeen west of Freetown, where the SLPP faithful had converged for two days to solace themselves with their own outright lies and half-truths! And the theme for that National Delegates’ Conference was as satirical as it was meant to be satiric. It was, “Towards A Radical Transformation: Counting the Gains Since 2018”. Counting which, or what, gains? How can they count “gains” which they have not gained or will never gain? It is like the SLPPers are convincing themselves that they have succeeded in selling submarines to landlocked countries which they know is impossibly impossible. Yet they have to put up a charade of doing something in their nothingness. A funny lot indeed!
And the climax of that climaxed political circuses was the drive-past of President Bio, at the Aberdeen roundabout last Thursday, holding the hands of his newly re-anointed Vice President, Dr Mohamed Juldeh Jalloh, as his running mate for the June 2023 presidential election and Mohamed ‘Gento’ Kamara as his Mayoral candidate for Freetown. The whole scene, with the rented crowds doing what they were being paid to do, gave me the satiric feeling of looking at the younger version of Chief Nanga in Chinua Achebe’s novel: “A Man of the People”. Except that Chief Nanga is truly a man of his people while President Bio appears to be a man for his tribesmen or tribeswomen (delete where applicable)!
Here is a Commander-in-Chief who thinks he has done a lot for his people but who actually has not done anything worthwhile for him to be re-voted to State House in June this year. Here is a President who boasts about his ‘free” education policy for lesser mortals but wants “quality education” for his own children by sending them to expensive and exclusive private schools. Here is a Father of a Nation who appears to be using the divide-and-rule tactic to run the affairs of his home. And here is a “stainless” Head of State who prides himself as the chief fighter against corruption but whose administration appears to be bespattered with the pervasiveness of corruption.
President Bio appears to be fooling himself that he is not only popular but that he has ruled Sierra Leone justly and bettered the lives of ordinary Sierra Leoneans. He seems to be fooling himself that his administration is one of the best things that have ever happened to, or in, Sierra Leone. And he seems to be living in a fool’s paradise where education is freely expensive and the governance system is coursing in a directionless new direction!
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