Is President Bio Honest?
By Mohamed Sankoh (One Drop)
I won’t say he is a liar; for courtesy’s sake. And, also, for the euphemistical fact that Big Men don’t lie; I won’t say he is good at telling children’s bedtime stories.
But I will simply say: President Julius Maada Bio, the Head of State of the Republic of Sierra Leone, is a tongue-in-cheeker. He always plays with the truth in such a way that even kindergartens will giggle in disbelief at some of the “facts” which the President always says are facts!
Some of the things President Bio, normally, says have been achieved in Sierra Leone under his watchful watch are so outlandish that the eccentricities in those assertions always provoke laughter where laughter could have been a sign of bad taste! At times, whenever the Commander-in-Chief addresses the nation, I get the feeling that I have not been living in Sierra Leone for the last three years uninterruptedly. For some of the proclamations he makes are so far from the realities that they appear to be insultingly insulting to the ears.
But for someone who seems to be surrounded by pseudo-intellectual clowns, who think they are in a circus, President Bio has always been cheered by those clowns to continue to wallow in his magniloquence (I’m beginning to copycat the bombastic bombasts of the former Bradford University Professor. If theirs is unable to provide basic “bread and butter” but words; we will eat words and belch them!). And the “Supreme Leader” of Sierra Leone (I guess we are now in North Korea) seems to be enjoying his own verbosities.
So I’m not surprised that in his latest speech, “on the occasion of the State opening of the fourth session of the Fifth Parliament of the Second Republic of Sierra Leone in the Chamber of Parliament”, President Bio engages in many tongue-in-cheeks. Those tongue-in-cheeks are so comical that it now appears that even mad people at the Kissy Mental Home (locally called “Kres Yard”) are creating fun at his expense!
If comic relief is not intended by the President, how could he claim that, “…We have increased electricity generation and transmission capacity over the last year…. We now generate sufficient electricity in Freetown…?” Where is the “generation” taking place? Certainly, it can’t be Kingtom or Blackhall Road Power Station. Little wonder that each time school children in Freetown, the capital, light candles or “Chinese Lamps” to study in their homes, or citizens put on their generators to power their offices or business places, they make fun of President Bio’s “increased electricity generation.” Poor Bio, his government has generated more than sufficient electricity but the problem is how to transmit it. If so, then why not sell some of those “generated” electricity to neighbouring Liberia and possibly Ghana because the ruling Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) “…inherited a defective and decadent transmission and distribution system that is incapable of evacuating and transmitting the power that is generated” (in President Bio’s own words to Members of Parliament last Tuesday).
That word, “inherited”, again. I only hope that we won’t be told, in a Presidential Address someday, that the SLPP inherited the Africanist Press’ allegations of grand corruption by the First Family and some of their Yes-Sir-Madam pseudo-intellectuals?
Looking at the18 May 2021 Presidential Address in its entirety, one notices that the “Supreme Leader” and “Commander-In-Chief of the Republic of Sierra Leone Armed Forces” (these titles sound like we are living in a Stalinist state but even Russia’s Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin is now shying away from such absurdities) has not said what he has achieved in his three years’ rule. He is only telling us what he hopes to achieve in his last two years as if he is reading his “2018 New Direction” Manifesto. That speech, under review, is replete with phrases such as “My Government will…”; “My Government is committed to…”; “My Government has put in place….” and “Measures will be considered for making our democracy more inclusive and more representative….” These phrases are futuristic than indicative of things that have already been achieved!
Despite President Bio claims that his “travels to foreign nations and my engagement with partners have all borne fruit”; the Africanist Press has been providing us with the cost of sowing those seeds. And when one juxtaposes the cost of the seeds and the eventual harvest, then it would have been far better if the President had stayed at home than giving drab public lectures at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the name of building partnerships. But I can understand the President’s attempt at strenuously trying to refute the Africanist Press’ allegations. It is a truism that even mad people at the Kissy Mental Home can justify their madness by showing extreme madness! So, “we move” and “we fly” with the Per Diem-nization (another One Dropian dropped word) of seeking foreign partnerships.
And from the “Human Capital Development” section to the “Gender, Women’s Empowerment….” segment, in President Bio’s18 May 2021 Presidential Address; one sees a Commander-in-Chief who appears to be still fumbling in the dark as to how to go about the implementations of some of his core policies. Little wonder that President Julius Maada Bio always stammers while delivering his speeches despite he is not known to be a stutterer. The point is: The truth cannot be hidden in a fog because it will be a matter of time for the fog to defog.
It is on that note that I will end today’s One Dropian dropping with a quote from Cicero, the Roman statesman and philosopher, that says “A liar is not believed even though he tell[s] the truth.” But I’m still trying to understand why Sierra Leoneans, in Sierra Leone, always turn their faces in disguised laughter every time President Bio is quoted to have said, “…We [the SLPP government] have increased electricity generation and transmission capacity over the last year…. We now generate sufficient electricity in Freetown…” I’m not laughing but dead serious!
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