Sierra Leone Faces A Wet Dry Season
By Mohamed Sankoh (One Drop)
Well, the English language was imposed on me in my childhood—both in school where I was not expected to speak “patwa” (our lingua franca) and at home where speaking that language gave my parents the feel-good feeling that they were not wasting their money on their first son’s education at the Buxton Boys Primary School and later at the Prince of Wales.
So, now that I am a man, I have been officially using the English language unsparingly and creatively—in my own One Dropian style! That’s the reason why I coin words and phrases. And that’s also the reason why I create One Dropian similes and metaphors—all to complement a foreign language that was so severely imposed on me that I’m now unable to speak neither my mother’s tongue (Sherbro) nor my father’s (Temne)! But all the same, I still love the English language (Albeit the late Ngugi wa Thiong’o would have accused me of refusing to “decolonize” my mind.).
And some of the things I love to love about the English language are not only its idioms but its funny contradictions. Some of them are so funnily funny that their funniness becomes laughably laughable when one looks at them at first glances! Just take a look at these: “Pretty ugly”; “Found missing”; “Open secret”; “Fully empty”; “Small crowd”; “Clearly misunderstood”; “Original copies”, and “Tragic comedy” to highlight just a few of the many. All of these are so “seriously funny” that their funniness becomes seriously serious anytime one tries to give them a second thought to understand their true meanings.
But today’s One Dropian dropping is not about the English language which is a foreign language to our own languages in Sierra Leone; it is not about English idioms in their idiomatic expressions, nor is it about the English language and its funny contradictions. Today’s One Dropian dropping is about the funny contradictions of Sierra Leone, her current government, and her people.
Whenever anyone asks me to describe Sierra Leone for them each time I Bio-ed or I’m Bio-ing (this is a One Dropian way of describing flying overseas in an airplane) out of Sierra Leone; I always reply: Sierra Leone is a contradiction wrapped with an enigmatic blanket inside a box of riddles! For example, we are now in the wet season when the Bumbuna hydro-power station should be functionally functional in its functionality; yet its turbines appear to be immoveable as if we are in the dry season. And Dr Kandeh Yumkella, the Presidential Energy Lead in the Ministry of Energy, is still parroting mumbo-jumbos in plain English about “Energy Sovereignty” in the midst of chronic blackouts or erratic Christmas Tree-like electricity supplies.
How can Dr Yumkella repeatedly try to strangle himself with a toilet roll when he could have saved us the tragic comedy show by swallowing a cyanide capsule instead? That man is shamelessly shameless in his shamefulness (His is another story for another day)!
But Sierra Leoneans, according to President Julius Maada Bio, are a resilient people. Resiliently resilient indeed! Sierra Leone has a President who repeatedly talks about “plugging financial leakages” but who wastes state resources on fruitless overseas travels like an intoxicated sailor of old. Yet, Sierra Leoneans are so resilient that they cannot even raise their voices in protests or stick up their fingers in obscene gestures of defiance at their Head of State who appears to be using state resources on personal tourism.
It is an open secret that the ruling Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP)’s half-assed policies are fully empty of substance but are high on sound-bites for the small crowd at their Wallace-Johnson Street headquarters in Freetown. Yet, President Bio and his toadies at State House are clearly misunderstanding the “resilience” of Sierra Leoneans—feigning forgetfulness that when majority of the citizens are hungry with bottled-up anger, their reactions can sometimes be unpredictable!
But what is seriously funny is when the Wallace-Johnson Street brigade shouts atop the Sam Bangura Building that their SLPP government has reduced inflation to a single digit. But such economic miracle is miraculously unfelt in the pockets or on the dining tables of ordinary Sierra Leoneans. Commonsense dictates that if a man’s economic status has improved; no one needs to tell him so because he will feel it himself. And for President Bio to be telling international audiences that things generally have improved in Sierra Leone, when majority of ordinary Sierra Leoneans are far worse off today than they were eight years ago, is like twisting a dagger on the wounds of those who are finding it extremely hard to afford an un-square meal a day.
It is also seriously funny how members of the SLPP and government have been trying to convince starving Sierra Leoneans that their lives have improved through the Bio-led administration’s “Feed Salone” fiasco. But I know, you know, and President Bio knows that the “Feed Salone” programme could be likened to a Ponzi scheme. The only realistic thing about the “Feed Salone” programme is its unrealism!
And talking about Ponzi schemes, the SLPP government’s “Free Quality Education” is one of them. Apart from the fact that President Bio and most of his appointees do not even believe in their own “Free Quality Education” programme as they are sending their children to expensive private schools at home and abroad; what is found missing in this Ponzi scheme is our Commander-in-Chief’s faith. In fact, most of the preachers of the SLPP’s “Free Quality Education” are hypocrites who are full of hypocritical hypocrisies!
And while my readers will be musing on my musings in today’s One Dropian dropping, I want them to know that though we are now in the rainy season; the Bio-led administration has created a drought—at State House and State Lodge. So, in essence, Sierra Leone now faces a wet dry season.
medsankoh@yahoo.com/+232-76-611-986; https://nationalistsl.com
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