MR. MOHAMED SESAY IS FULL OF PMDC MALICIOUS LIBEL
By John Ernest Leigh
A local rag sheet of a newspaper and published by Mrs. RUF Sylvia Foday Sankoh continues to publish her series of libel against me. In her most recent libel, she published untrue and malicious statements authored by one Mr. Mohamed Sesay of Philadelphia and the PMDC leader in the area.
I am told that Mr. Sesay had his libelous statements published in Mrs. Sankoh’s rag sheet because he knows that I do not read that trashy paper as I have so stated on a number of occasions. He thus believes that I may not be aware of his false accusations against me. However, friends have brought his article to my attention.
I now write to rebut the principal falsehoods written by this Mr. PMDC Sesay as published in Mrs. RUF Sankoh’s rag sheet – a tiny circulation newspaper in Freetown that is widely referred to in my circle as the RUF Rubbish Lie-Lie Times.
Mr. Sesay’s piece in is full of self-serving lies; wild, baseless allegations and trashy statements by a man who was kicked out of his home by the very RUF he writes for.
First, Mr. Sesay falsely wrote that I denounced my supposed “American citizenship for a diplomatic assignment” and so I am “currently wallowing in the sad state of unemployment that I find myself”.
My response to this falsehood is as follows: (i) I was never an American citizen at any time. (ii) I have never denounced my citizenship anywhere at anytime. I retain the Sierra Leone citizenship I obtained at birth.
Further, the Kabbah Administration is not the only employer in the world. I am fully employed as an attorney at law and living it up nicely in New England in my own home. I am also very busy managing my investments.
Finally, I am not a citizenship harlot of the type familiar to Mr. Sesay who would opportunistically renounce an acquired citizenship only to renounce it and revert to his original citizenship for cheap employment purposes in his old country. Such shameful opportunistic harlot conduct invites disrespect and contempt for all Sierra Leoneans abroad. The civilized way to behave is once acquired by choice any new citizenship should be for keeps – forever.
Second, Mr. Sesay then goes on to falsely allege that I once conceded that government vehicles, drivers and petrol are used by VP Berewa for his political campaigning.
This Sesay man is lying for I never “conceded” any such thing at any time any where. I made it known in response to public questioning that when I traveled with VP Berewa in Port Loko and Kono Districts in May, he made it known every town or village he went that he was on government business to open Health Clinics, Markets and Schools and to take and answer questions from the assembled public on government activities and plans. I fact, contrary to Mr. Sesay’s bogus claim in that RUF Rubbish Lie-Lie Times, I repeatedly argued that Mr. Berewa’s use of government vehicles for government business was legitimate.
Third, Mr. Sesay continued with his reckless lies by claiming that I immigrated to the United States due to my inability, unlike him, to compete for admission to the “prestigious” Fourah Bay College. This Sesay man is famous for allowing his mouth to run recklessly all over the place without his knowing the facts. He is a lying fool.
Here are the facts. I initially went to the USA for further studies on a student visa. Upon the completion of my studies, I returned home only to be disappointed by backward leadership. I returned to the USA eighteen months later.
During my secondary school days, Fourah Bay College was definitely prestigious but I was never interested in attending Fourah Bay College at any time or even going to a country like Britain for further studies. This was because I wanted to study – and I did study – Banking and Finance. Such sophisticated subjects weren’t thought at FBC and there were no plans to introduce the teaching of such subjects anywhere in Sierra Leone.
And even if Banking and Finance were taught then at FBC, I wanted more than a mere college education in a dull environment as FBC. I wanted the excitement to be in a rich dynamic country full of practicing financiers and bankers who I could learn from instead of learning from lecturers whose education is mostly from textbooks and with no practical real life experiences in a world class market economy. The education I wanted is exactly the education I got!
Moreover, I was over-qualified for admission to Fourah Bay College at the time. For your information, I came to America with seven subjects at School/”O’ Level Certificate and three “A” Levels – each obtained in a single sitting. Furthermore, I was armed with an unassailable USA SAT (college admissions) scorecard.
Finally, let’s face it, FBC was once prestigious but it has seen far better days. Our task now is to correct the injustices and fiscal abuses heaped on FBC, etc.
Any body who today believes that FBC was still a prestigious place of learning at the time Mohamed Sesay became a student there during the 1980s, needs his head screwed on correctly. Ever since the students’ strikes in the late 1970s when Siaka Stevens retaliated by slashing FBC’s budget; and given the continued erosion of the exchange value of the national currency, the Leone; the damage done to staffing by the RUF war of plunder and destruction – among other things – FBC has headed steeper down hill.
Fourth, Mr. Sesay’s next wild and erroneous claim is that I never returned home to actually live and work towards nation building. Mr. Sesay writes ignorantly.
After obtaining an MBA degree and after a twelve-month internship at the Chase Manhattan Bank, I returned home as stated above. A co-worker of mine at the Bank was Alhaji U.N.S. Jah, current SLPP Chair. I served as a Senior Research Officer at the Bank of Sierra Leone. I quit after eighteen months or so because I saw poverty-expanding policies (exchange control, anti-foreign investment, SLPMB’s incompetent export monopoly, corruption, favoritism & tribalism, etc.) being put in place by the SL authorities. I argued against such policies to no avail and also to my peril.
Even so, I told my bosses that those policies will lead the country to failure and widespread poverty. I boldly predicted that if they persist in pursuing those selfish policies, poverty will be so endemic that many highly educated people won’t be able to write a check for $100 in time to come. And that is exactly what has happened. Today, poverty and the hardship are most profound in our country.
I quit the Bank of Sierra Leone because I wanted my own children to have an equal or better education than myself and I felt that if I stayed behind, I won’t be able to pull off such but would instead be pulled down by selfish and wicked national leadership.
Fifth, Mr. Sesay has a lame excuse for immigrating to Philadelphia. He self-servingly claim that he migrated to the United States by a “push factor – the war”. He boasted that prior to his migration he put in “ten years of inputs as a civil servant and continue to work for Sierra Leone everyday.”
The “push factor” as Mr. Sesay puts it was not the war at all. The war was merely the end product of years and years of terrible, poverty-expanding, corrupt, incompetent, unfair and rubbish governance (with a few exceptions here and there, of course).
Mr. Sesay was in the middle of all this willful maladministration of our country for ten full years by his own reckoning but he had no clue at all of the egregious abuses heaped upon our people by the pre-war governments. He cared nothing about public suffering as long as he prospered.
Some in the civil service oppressed others, taking gross advantage of the poor people of Sierra Leone like some lawyers that practiced Open-Call law. The tax-paying, high-employment international sector in SL was expelled by wrongheaded policies and corrupt practices. Those were the foolish politicians, so dense that they killed the goose that laid the golden egg without giving it further thought.
From the way Mr. Sesay argues, one can tell that he might have contributed to the decay of our country or was so shallow he did not know about the massive wrongdoing flying before his face. He was blind to the on-coming catastrophe that kicked him out of his home.
After having departed SL because of the things to come, I was not going to return to a worsen situation. So, I made a nice life for myself and my family in both Nigeria and the USA. Hence, I have been a self-made, independent man for over thirty years. This benefited ungrateful wretches like Mr. Sesay and his kind. Because of my personal economic situation I (with help from others) was able to keep the SL Embassy functioning at full capacity during the AFRC/RUF interregnum and to successfully checkmate Johnny Paul, Foday Sankoh, Charles Taylor and a whole host of coupligans and their patrons.
We also negotiated TPS USA immigration benefits so that ungrateful wretches like Sesay could stay in America without being deported back to his brutal and foolumunku coup mongers.
Sixth, Mr. Sesay claims as “fact” that “the SLPP government to which John Leigh is now struggling for belonging has failed the nation”. Mr. Sesay is lying again as regards my intention. I am not like him. The fact is I am not struggling to belong to any government for I am a heavy and effective critic of the government. But this cannot be interpreted, as was obviously done by some flunkies, that I automatically must quit SLPP and join their immature political grouping.
Seventh, Mr. Sankoh boasted ventriloquently that “the government lacks accountability as evident in the utilization of public funds and logistics like fuel and vehicles for private and personal aggrandizement as encapsulated in John Leigh’s statement.”
Clearly, the current SLPP government is not perfect. I have criticized them heavily in the past. They have done some things poorly. They‘ve also done a number of things properly; nor did any of my statements ‘encapsulate’ allegations of private and personal aggrandizement of “logistics like fuel and vehicles”. Mr. Sesay is not truthful.
My response to this falsehood is as follows: (i) I was never an American citizen at any time. (ii) I have never denounced my citizenship anywhere at anytime. I retain the Sierra Leone citizenship I obtained at birth.
Further, the Kabbah Administration is not the only employer in the world. I am fully employed as an attorney at law and living it up nicely in New England in my own home. I am also very busy managing my investments.
Finally, I am not a citizenship harlot of the type familiar to Mr. Sesay who would opportunistically renounce an acquired citizenship only to renounce it and revert to his original citizenship for cheap employment purposes in his old country. Such shameful opportunistic harlot conduct invites disrespect and contempt for all Sierra Leoneans abroad. The civilized way to behave is once acquired by choice any new citizenship should be for keeps – forever.
Second, Mr. Sesay then goes on to falsely allege that I once conceded that government vehicles, drivers and petrol are used by VP Berewa for his political campaigning.
This Sesay man is lying for I never “conceded” any such thing at any time any where. I made it known in response to public questioning that when I traveled with VP Berewa in Port Loko and Kono Districts in May, he made it known every town or village he went that he was on government business to open Health Clinics, Markets and Schools and to take and answer questions from the assembled public on government activities and plans. I fact, contrary to Mr. Sesay’s bogus claim in that RUF Rubbish Lie-Lie Times, I repeatedly argued that Mr. Berewa’s use of government vehicles for government business was legitimate.
Third, Mr. Sesay continued with his reckless lies by claiming that I immigrated to the United States due to my inability, unlike him, to compete for admission to the “prestigious” Fourah Bay College. This Sesay man is famous for allowing his mouth to run recklessly all over the place without his knowing the facts. He is a lying fool.
Here are the facts. I initially went to the USA for further studies on a student visa. Upon the completion of my studies, I returned home only to be disappointed by backward leadership. I returned to the USA eighteen months later.
During my secondary school days, Fourah Bay College was definitely prestigious but I was never interested in attending Fourah Bay College at any time or even going to a country like Britain for further studies. This was because I wanted to study – and I did study – Banking and Finance. Such sophisticated subjects weren’t thought at FBC and there were no plans to introduce the teaching of such subjects anywhere in Sierra Leone.
And even if Banking and Finance were taught then at FBC, I wanted more than a mere college education in a dull environment as FBC. I wanted the excitement to be in a rich dynamic country full of practicing financiers and bankers who I could learn from instead of learning from lecturers whose education is mostly from textbooks and with no practical real life experiences in a world class market economy. The education I wanted is exactly the education I got!
Moreover, I was over-qualified for admission to Fourah Bay College at the time. For your information, I came to America with seven subjects at School/”O’ Level Certificate and three “A” Levels – each obtained in a single sitting. Furthermore, I was armed with an unassailable USA SAT (college admissions) scorecard.
Finally, let’s face it, FBC was once prestigious but it has seen far better days. Our task now is to correct the injustices and fiscal abuses heaped on FBC, etc.
Any body who today believes that FBC was still a prestigious place of learning at the time Mohamed Sesay became a student there during the 1980s, needs his head screwed on correctly. Ever since the students’ strikes in the late 1970s when Siaka Stevens retaliated by slashing FBC’s budget; and given the continued erosion of the exchange value of the national currency, the Leone; the damage done to staffing by the RUF war of plunder and destruction – among other things – FBC has headed steeper down hill.
Fourth, Mr. Sesay’s next wild and erroneous claim is that I never returned home to actually live and work towards nation building. Mr. Sesay writes ignorantly.
After obtaining an MBA degree and after a twelve-month internship at the Chase Manhattan Bank, I returned home as stated above. A co-worker of mine at the Bank was Alhaji U.N.S. Jah, current SLPP Chair. I served as a Senior Research Officer at the Bank of Sierra Leone. I quit after eighteen months or so because I saw poverty-expanding policies (exchange control, anti-foreign investment, SLPMB’s incompetent export monopoly, corruption, favoritism & tribalism, etc.) being put in place by the SL authorities. I argued against such policies to no avail and also to my peril.
Even so, I told my bosses that those policies will lead the country to failure and widespread poverty. I boldly predicted that if they persist in pursuing those selfish policies, poverty will be so endemic that many highly educated people won’t be able to write a check for $100 in time to come. And that is exactly what has happened. Today, poverty and the hardship are most profound in our country.
I quit the Bank of Sierra Leone because I wanted my own children to have an equal or better education than myself and I felt that if I stayed behind, I won’t be able to pull off such but would instead be pulled down by selfish and wicked national leadership.
Fifth, Mr. Sesay has a lame excuse for immigrating to Philadelphia. He self-servingly claim that he migrated to the United States by a “push factor – the war”. He boasted that prior to his migration he put in “ten years of inputs as a civil servant and continue to work for Sierra Leone everyday.”
The “push factor” as Mr. Sesay puts it was not the war at all. The war was merely the end product of years and years of terrible, poverty-expanding, corrupt, incompetent, unfair and rubbish governance (with a few exceptions here and there, of course).
Mr. Sesay was in the middle of all this willful maladministration of our country for ten full years by his own reckoning but he had no clue at all of the egregious abuses heaped upon our people by the pre-war governments. He cared nothing about public suffering as long as he prospered.
Some in the civil service oppressed others, taking gross advantage of the poor people of Sierra Leone like some lawyers that practiced Open-Call law. The tax-paying, high-employment international sector in SL was expelled by wrongheaded policies and corrupt practices. Those were the foolish politicians, so dense that they killed the goose that laid the golden egg without giving it further thought.
From the way Mr. Sesay argues, one can tell that he might have contributed to the decay of our country or was so shallow he did not know about the massive wrongdoing flying before his face. He was blind to the on-coming catastrophe that kicked him out of his home.
After having departed SL because of the things to come, I was not going to return to a worsen situation. So, I made a nice life for myself and my family in both Nigeria and the USA. Hence, I have been a self-made, independent man for over thirty years. This benefited ungrateful wretches like Mr. Sesay and his kind. Because of my personal economic situation I (with help from others) was able to keep the SL Embassy functioning at full capacity during the AFRC/RUF interregnum and to successfully checkmate Johnny Paul, Foday Sankoh, Charles Taylor and a whole host of coupligans and their patrons.
We also negotiated TPS USA immigration benefits so that ungrateful wretches like Sesay could stay in America without being deported back to his brutal and foolumunku coup mongers.
Sixth, Mr. Sesay claims as “fact” that “the SLPP government to which John Leigh is now struggling for belonging has failed the nation”. Mr. Sesay is lying again as regards my intention. I am not like him. The fact is I am not struggling to belong to any government for I am a heavy and effective critic of the government. But this cannot be interpreted, as was obviously done by some flunkies, that I automatically must quit SLPP and join their immature political grouping.
Seventh, Mr. Sankoh boasted ventriloquently that “the government lacks accountability as evident in the utilization of public funds and logistics like fuel and vehicles for private and personal aggrandizement as encapsulated in John Leigh’s statement.”
Clearly, the current SLPP government is not perfect. I have criticized them heavily in the past. They have done some things poorly. They‘ve also done a number of things properly; nor did any of my statements ‘encapsulate’ allegations of private and personal aggrandizement of “logistics like fuel and vehicles”. Mr. Sesay is not truthful.
All things considered, I prefer to work with my party than switch to another party, especially one full of flunkies, drop outs and remedial dunces. Again, all things considered, Berewa is my choice as our next president to succeed Tejan Kabbah.
After having responded as above, it is clear that people like Mr. Sesay rely for 99% of your news from rogue newspapers such as the RUF Rubbish Lie-Lie Times. Such people are naive types who accept at face value whatever rubbish is published by our local press.
But people like Sesay and the RUF rag sheet must understand that when neighbors perceive that the people of a country are led by dunces, flunkies and remedials, some of those neighbors like Charles Taylor may invade to plunder and dismember the weakly led country.
There are diplomats and visitors in Freetown from foreign countries who know the difference between what is happening in the country and the trash that is published by rag sheets. So be careful. Do not take newspapers at face value for you will be misled.
Eight, Mr. Sesay boasts that he writes the Queens English while I include Krio in my writings. Mr. Sesay should stop his unwarranted boasting. If he truly understands proper English he would have understood what I meant by “someone who operates within the Sierra Leone Philadelphia ghetto” instead of boasting about his shabby degrees and his non-ghetto residence.
Finally, Mr. Sesay like others before him, made much about my recall from Washington as ambassador because he has absolutely nothing else negative to say about my public record. He might in time get to know the true reasons why. Suffice it to say that he should recognize that many excellent public servants in Africa are done away with for no good reason.
Does Mr. Sesay known how many good people were sacked, jailed or killed by Messrs. Charles Taylor, Idi Amin, Mobutu, etc.?
Does Mr. Sesay known how many no-good people were appointed, promoted and favored by Messrs. Charles Taylor, Idi Amin, Mobutu, etc.? Now you know why several African countries are extremely backward and poverty stricken, full of disease, sickness and death.
My point is simple: those sacked, jailed and killed are not necessarily evil people. Those appointed, promoted and favored do not necessarily act in the public interest. The sackers might be the evil ones keeping you and your people in backwardness and poverty.
Thank you for your attention. – JL 6/21/06
After having responded as above, it is clear that people like Mr. Sesay rely for 99% of your news from rogue newspapers such as the RUF Rubbish Lie-Lie Times. Such people are naive types who accept at face value whatever rubbish is published by our local press.
But people like Sesay and the RUF rag sheet must understand that when neighbors perceive that the people of a country are led by dunces, flunkies and remedials, some of those neighbors like Charles Taylor may invade to plunder and dismember the weakly led country.
There are diplomats and visitors in Freetown from foreign countries who know the difference between what is happening in the country and the trash that is published by rag sheets. So be careful. Do not take newspapers at face value for you will be misled.
Eight, Mr. Sesay boasts that he writes the Queens English while I include Krio in my writings. Mr. Sesay should stop his unwarranted boasting. If he truly understands proper English he would have understood what I meant by “someone who operates within the Sierra Leone Philadelphia ghetto” instead of boasting about his shabby degrees and his non-ghetto residence.
Finally, Mr. Sesay like others before him, made much about my recall from Washington as ambassador because he has absolutely nothing else negative to say about my public record. He might in time get to know the true reasons why. Suffice it to say that he should recognize that many excellent public servants in Africa are done away with for no good reason.
Does Mr. Sesay known how many good people were sacked, jailed or killed by Messrs. Charles Taylor, Idi Amin, Mobutu, etc.?
Does Mr. Sesay known how many no-good people were appointed, promoted and favored by Messrs. Charles Taylor, Idi Amin, Mobutu, etc.? Now you know why several African countries are extremely backward and poverty stricken, full of disease, sickness and death.
My point is simple: those sacked, jailed and killed are not necessarily evil people. Those appointed, promoted and favored do not necessarily act in the public interest. The sackers might be the evil ones keeping you and your people in backwardness and poverty.
Thank you for your attention. – JL 6/21/06
