The Last Hawkish Hawk Has Been Fired
By Mohamed Sankoh (One Drop)
Finally, the final of the finality has happened. President Julius Maada Bio has fired the last of the three hawkish hawks in his last government. Lahai Lawrence Leema, the former Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs, will now be spoken of in the past tense with reference to the current ruling Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP).
By a “Public Notice”, dated 11 August 2023 through the Secretary to the President, Lahai Lawrence Leema was finally benched on the Paopa-ian bench! He was emitting so much political stench that President Bio could no longer stomach the unpleasant smell.
So, in today’s One Dropian dropping, I will be looking at the three hawkish hawks in President Bio’s last government. They are Lahai Lawrence Leema, Professor David Francis the then Chief Minister in the Office of the President at State House and later Foreign Affairs Minister, and Jacob Jusu Saffa aka “JJ Blood” the then Finance Minister and later Chief Minister.
Now, let me start with Lahai Lawrence Leema. Whilst he was Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs, he personified the typical SLPPian bigoted arrogance. He appeared to be no respecter of democratic decency or those who had better heads than him. When he was invited by the August 10th Special Investigation Committee (SIC) to clear his name, Mr Leema showed his trademark arrogance by treating the Committee with contempt.
Mr Leema’s seemingly contemptuous contempt, arrogance, and power-drunkenness were not lost on the Special Investigation Committee which noted, in its final Report, that he did not present himself to the SIC “…despite repeated attempts made to have him provide answers to the Committee”. The Committee had “wanted clarification from him with regards to claims that he made night patrols after the insurrection and during curfew hours in which said patrols, various human rights violations and extra-judicial killings were allegedly committed.” It was for those reasons that the “SIC concluded that as a Minister of State, his refusal to meet with the Committee was disparaging and manifested unbridled impunity….(page 35)”
That’s just a synopsis of Mr Leema’s character. He appears to be a sort of miniature of the SLPP’s confrontational nature and that party’s seemingly supremacist thinking. This was the arrogance he was always imbued with that each time he was being challenged by critics of the Bio-led administration, on either radio or television, he would threaten them with arrests or detentions.
But Lahai Lawrence Leema will now face the reality that political power is ephemeral. He will, finally, realise that those whom he had been looking low upon, when he was Deputy Internal Affairs Minister, are now the ones he has to rub shoulders with. And those critical voices whom he was threatening with arrests and detentions, whenever he was a guest on either radio or television, are still who they are but he is no longer who he was! He has now become another nothing in the nothingness of his nothingness.
Let me shelve Mr Leema for the time being and come to Professor David Francis who I will One Drop-nize as the Naughty Professor from Bradford University.
From the day he presented the “Report of the Governance Transition Team [GTT] 2018” at State House in 2018; Professor Francis set the tone for the Bio-led administration’s hawkish nature. And, sadly, our Head of State gladly and blindly followed him like a sheep being led to the abattoir!
During the presentation of the GTT Report, President Bio was captivated by Professor Francis’s superfluous and bombastic words and phrases such as “infractions”, “egregious”, “economic growth plummeted…”, “facilitating the inappropriate acquisition…”, “unacceptable practice exacerbated…” et al. And our Commander-in-Chief was so carried away by the magniloquence of the Naughty Professor from Bradford University that he forgot that the foundation of criminal procedure, in every civilized society, is to presume that an accused person is innocent until proven guilty by a competent court of law. Even when Professor Francis was yanking tribalism and regionalism from under the State House’s red carpet and flinging them on the table; President Bio did not get embarrassed not for once.
Throughout his tenure, first as Chief Minister in the Office of the President at State House and later as Foreign Affairs Minister; Professor Francis put up the cocky and snobbish aura of a Sabbatical Professor who had no choice but to mingle with “academic dwarfs” (to borrow the phrase of the SLPP Chairman, Prince Harding) in the course, and cause, of establishing a supremacist agenda. Everything he saw, during his official occupancy, was drawn in Green or Red lines. He always saw his SLPP as the giant Goliath who must crush the APCian David.
And with all Professor Francis’s political follies, his opinionated arrogance and his power-drunkenness like Lahai Lawrence Leema; one thing which will always stick on his personality like a sore thumb, and which he would take to his grave, is the issue of allegedly accepting a “bribe of $1.5 million”. Albeit he denied, and still denying, the allegation; but the manner in which the Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC) handled that issue left ordinary Sierra Leoneans more suspicious than clearing him of any wrongdoing.
In fact, it was how that alleged “bribe of $1.5 million” was handled by the ACC that convinced majority of Sierra Leoneans that President Bio’s anti-corruption duel was a sham meant only to go after former President Ernest Bai Koroma and his APC ministers.
Again, let me leave Professor David Francis for awhile and come to Jacob Jusu Saffa aka “JJ Blood” who is said to be one of the architects of the lies and half-truths which the Bio-led administration was, and is still, known for.
Jacob Jusu Saffa is said to have created the phrase: “the SLPP inherited a battered economy”. His sound-bite of “fixing the economy in six months” and later downgraded to “three months” in 2023 is still a captivating fairy tale. His pre-Bio administration’s pledge of solving the “bread and butter issues”, with a flick of his fingers, is still regarded as one of the pledges pledged under the influence of alcohol. Or one of those “jamba tok” in “potes”!
During his tenure as Minister of Finance, Mr Saffa created a larger-than-life personality of himself. Whilst the country’s economy was shrinking; his stomach and neck were increasing in sizes. And whilst ordinary citizens were complaining that they couldn’t afford even a loaf of bread; he was taunting them that they could even put sausages and mayonnaise inside their unaffordable bread.
Jacob Jusu Saffa became so power-drunk, like Lahai Lawrence Leema and Professor David Francis, that he was even allegedly saying that he was one of those who made Maada Bio president of Sierra Leone. He became a personification for the rags-to-riches phenomenon which later became, and is still, one of the defining traits of the Bio presidency! And he created a sort of Mount Olympus at State House, whilst he was Chief Minister, as he thought he was Zeus presiding over the affairs of lesser gods.
But President Bio has finally clipped his wings and those of Professor Francis and Mr Leema. They have now realised that they were not birds but ordinary caterpillars who had thought they were birds. And now their arrogance, swagger, and hawkishness have been replaced with humility and political correctness.
And finally, the final of the finality has happened. The three hawks are no more.
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