By Kabs Kanu
The President of a country is not ruling in isolation . HE HAS A SYMBIOTIC RELATIONSHIP WITH THE PEOPLE. He was given a mandate by the people to rule them and make the important decisions in their lives .Political Science teaches us that a mandate is one of the most important sources of power for a President.
A President carrying the mandate of the people owes the people many obligations . Since he makes the important decisions in their lives, they have to know his whereabouts and the status of his wellbeing at all times.
Let us put it in another way, using the layman’s terms. The President is the Father of the nation. We all know what fathers meant to us . Imagine if Daddy, the breadwinner and the controller of the family suddenly disappears from sight without the knowledge of the family ? What do we expect from the family ? Sit down comfortable and gape , expecting things to fall in place ?
PRESIDENT BIO
In our days, fathers used to run away, some for debt, to escape woman palaver or serious lawsuit or disgrace Thank God, our own fathers stayed the course did not run away. Imagine, given the close-knit, traditional family in which I grew up , where our father controlled our today and tomorrow, if my dad had gone missing even for a day ? The trepidation, anxiety and panic would have been indescribable. Therefore, a father cannot go missing and not expect a big stir and tongue-wagging .
So, if you are a president, the father of the nation, to suddenly become incommunicado without telling your people where you have gone is unconscionable and bizarre. If you are a president enjoying the mandate of the people, you don’t go missing in action for a week without anybody knowing your whereabouts. You do not create a power vacuum in an unstable country like Sierra Leone. The people will talk. The people will ask questions. The people will speculate.
It is therefore obnoxious , distasteful and an attempt to bully the people to describe public speculation over a sudden disappearance of the president as “bad-heart”, wishing evil , idleness or peddling fake news. Agnes Dugba Macauley and Yusuf Kekehtoma Sandy should have done better. It is not the speculating citizenry they needed to have bashed. It is the system of government that is broken and does not take the people seriously enough to provide tangible and respectable explanation why a president can suddenly go missing without the knowledge of the people. Attacking the same public is a testament to the extent we go to abuse the general public over the exercise of their own rights.
And as we talk, the President is still nowhere to be found.
What do you expect the public to think ? There is only one plausible reason that a powerful man like the president can go missing from public view for a whole week, without explanation.
Now, we are being told he is taking a well-earned rest and that he is not distracted by fake news. But is there not something wrong here ? Who did the president tell about his leave ? Any ambassador or government official who says he is not obliged to tell anybody is a scam artist . The public deserved to know .that their president was taking a break from his duties. President Bio is obligated to the people to keep them abreast of all his activities because they gave him their mandate to rule. Not to have done that is a clear manifestation that he does not know that he is the president of a country.
