Open letter to President Maada Bio on his failed FEED SIERRA LEONE empty campaign

By Paunga Abentuous Marnor – Sesay

Mr. Maada Bio,
President of Sierra Leone—this letter comes to you as an agonizing cry and a burning indictment on your catastrophic failure to make food security more than an empty campaign slogan. You stand before a nation where more than 82% of your people sleep hungry and farmers have become prisoners of poverty, all while you parade hollow promises and broken dreams across our screens.

How, Mr. Bio, can you claim to “Feed Salone” when no one—even a fool—can figure out who owns the land beneath their own feet? Our land laws are a tragic joke; tribal chiefs play gatekeeper while honest families lose their inheritance overnight. You talk about reforms, yet in every village, confusion and corruption thrive. Does it take a true leader to allow tribal authorities to negotiate and sell land that does not belong to them? Or is it simply your lack of intelligence that keeps 60 years of Sierra Leoneans suffering without clear titles?
Would you ever invest in a business where your ownership could be snatched away by the whim of a chief in the dead of night?
You have not fixed this. You have not even tried. Your inability to tackle this most basic problem proves the poverty of your own vision. Are you so shallow, so fundamentally lost, that you cannot see how failing to clarify land ownership is the first brick in the foundation of national prosperity? How many more generations will watch their gardens snatched away because tribal negotiations trump individual rights?

Move past land, and we find no financial system. Sierra Leone’s rural banks are little more than empty vaults. Not a single provincial bank can finance a farm worth talking about, not in Bo, not in Makeni, not anywhere. Our rural districts limp along with little more than pocket change, and when a hopeful farmer seeks a loan for machinery, seeds, or expansion, he is greeted by locked doors. Can you, Mr. Bio, explain how your government will “transform” agriculture when there is nothing to invest and no institution with the strength to lend? Are you THAT clueless to how market economies function, or do you simply refuse to learn?

You promised irrigation, tractors, and modern tools, but the reality is sorrowful. Farmers wield broken cutlasses, battered hoes, and empty hopes. The few tractors your government managed to show off at ribbon-cutting ceremonies have long since broken down, and now they sink into the weeds like your promises. Is this leadership?
In Bangladesh, India, and China, government-backed support means foreign farmers ship rice to Sierra Leone for less than our own people spend to harvest theirs. Why is it that the mighty President of Sierra Leone cannot figure out even the basics of enabling local farmers to succeed? Is it ignorance, apathy, or simply mindless incompetence?

Let’s talk roads. Travel from any farm to the market and you find tragedy at each bend. Bridges that collapse under the lightest load, roads that vanish each rainy season, harvests that die halfway to the city. Your government claims to have invested in infrastructure, but in reality, you have invested in futility and false hope. Are you, Mr. Bio, so daft that you believe markets and farms can thrive when there is no way to connect them? Or do you simply love to watch your people haul spoiled goods on their backs while the nation imports rice by the shipload?

Everywhere in Sierra Leone, corruption slides its shadow over every effort. You have awarded contracts to friends, watched agricultural funds disappear into the pockets of you and your cronies, and let advisors promise transformation while rural families choke on the dust of their own labor. Latest World Bank reports paint the picture: slow economic growth, rising debt, and a surge in food insecurity. Eighty-two percent of your citizens now face hunger daily, and still, your administration cannot put together a single coherent policy to arrest this disaster. Tell us, Mr. Bio, does it take a genius to realize that corruption kills more crops than drought or famine? Or are you too busy posturing to notice your own ministers siphoning away millions meant for seeds, roads, and training?

Now, as food prices soar and wages shrink, your beloved “Feed Salone” is exposed for what it is—a hollow spectacle masking a broken social contract. Rural families are forced to spend their savings on rice that could have been grown locally but can now only be bought at global prices. Does it trouble you, Mr. Bio, that you have turned Sierra Leone into a nation of beggars—not because we cannot work, but because you cannot lead?

All the while, you point fingers: at former President Koroma, rival politicians, global markets, and now in the video posted below this letter, even your citizens themselves. Never once do you contemplate that perhaps, just perhaps, Sierra Leone’s misfortunes come from the man at the helm. Is this the mark of a leader, or the desperate flailing of a man out of his depth? Do you even understand the meaning of public service, or is the presidency nothing more than an expensive seat from which you deny your own realities?

The conclusion is clear, Mr. Bio. The story of your time as President is a story of failure, inertia, and devastating incompetence. You have not only missed the mark, you have wandered into the bush without a map or a torch, dragging the hopes of millions behind you. Sierra Leone deserves a mind fit for complexity, a will strong enough to uproot corruption, and a heart capable of feeling the agony of empty stomachs. Sadly, you possess none of these. Every missed meal, every spoiled harvest, every farmer betrayed by bad law, bad roads, and worse government—these are your monuments.

Brilliance in leadership is not just about vision—it is seeing what is broken and mustering the courage to fix it. That brilliance, alas, is missing from your time in office. As African wisdom reminds us: “A blind king leads blind subjects only until they all fall in the ditch.” Sierra Leone stands on the edge of that ditch. The people wait, hungry, for someone to see, to act, to lead. Will you finally dare to grow up and admit the monumental disaster you have sown—or will you stumble onward, blind, as the nation falls deeper into hunger and despair?

My little boy Maada Bio, remember rice does not grow on speeches. Fertility does not spring from propaganda. There is no harvest in hypocrisy. The villages whisper your name not with respect but exhaustion, for you have become a parable of squandered chances—a man walking backward while calling it progress.

A true leader feeds his people; a pretender feeds on their desperation. Mr. Bio, when the books are closed and your reign becomes a cautionary tale, may the children of tomorrow point to your portrait and say: “Here was the man who tried to feed Salone with empty hands and empty promises, and starved even the hope that remained.”

I remain Paunga, the brain that once made people think you were capable of fixing Sierra Leone. Since I cancelled my confidence in you, the nakedness of your incompetence has continued to lay bare.