By KABS KANU
It is a shame. Sierra Leone’s President Julius Maada Bio and his flamboyant wife, Fatima Bio, are traveling all over the world enjoying free government money while their people are suffering back home with electricity blackouts, prohibitive and escalating food prices, shortages of all basic commodities, a diabolical and tragic Kush drug abuse , human rights violations and every inconceivable social and economic deprivation .
Even health care delivery is no longer assured Sierra Leoneans. Go to Sierra Leone and see the number of women, children and men dying needlessly in the country’s dilapidated and medicines-depleted hospitals and clinics from preventable diseases and curable health problems. Not a day passes without lamentations in homes that have lost loved ones. Not a day passes without stunning death news from Sierra Leone on social media. People are dying in droves in Sierra Leone and the ruling Sierra Leone People’s Party ( SLPP) is doing nothing about it.
Even as we are writing this front page comment, little girls and boys are scouring the city with buckets and water containers looking for fresh clean water because the taps are not running. There is no clean, affordable water and the Guma Valley Dam officials have warned of critical water shortage this dry season.
Pe
ople labour for their subsistence whole day in Sierra Leone and have nothing to show for it. The prices of food have blown through the roof. Rice, the country’s staple food, has become too expensive for the common man and people can no longer afford even one square meal a day because the prices of foodstuffs have escalated beyond their reach. Just hear the prices of other basic commodities like palm oil, pepper, ogri, greens , salt , fish and meat and you wonder how Sierra Leoneans are able to put food in their mouths everyday.
Everything is in the thousands while a bag of rice is approaching one million leones. In the midst of these problems, cities and villages are in pitch darkness at night because there is no electricity. The government has not paid the Turkish Karpowership supplying electricity for over a year.
The salaries of civil servants and government workers are delayed and paid in arrears. Many government employees abandon their jobs everyday to go and hustle for their living.
You would think that with the country at the brink of collapse, the President would stay home and try to fix the problems. Not President Maada Bio . The lure of foreign travels and the exorbitant personal benefits and per diems he and his wife are accruing from them is stronger than their commitment to their suffering and dying people. The most frequent news about President Bio and his government are not socioeconomic and political developments but his wasteful travels all over the world.
President Bio is a sadist who enjoys watching himself inflicting pain on others. He is taking advantage of the haplessness, hypocrisy and cowardice of the Sierra Leonean people. He does what he likes to them because he knows that they are cowardly and timid and unable to rise up against him.
Recently, the latest fad in the Bio itinerary of ripoffs of the Sierra Leonean people is a criminal scheme to bribe universities in the U.S. and the UK to invite the president and his wife to come and delivery lectures .
Universities in Western democracies that should be citadels for upholding truth and lofty values are now being used by the Bios craftily to invite them to give lectures, with the suspicion that criminal proteges of the couple are being bribed to grease palms of some authorities in some American and British universities with the country’s meagre resources to facilitate these money-making lecture trips. The heartless Bios are corrupting not only themselves but agents and vulnerable university facilitators around the world to also give them honorary degrees.
What self-respecting and honest university will invite President Bio and his corrupt, vigilante-advocating wife to give lectures on democracy ?
But why should anybody be surprised with America ?
BABYLON, THE GREAT HAS FALLEN ! ! ! !
SHAME.
SEE OUR EDITORIAL ON MAADA BIO’S LECTURE TRIPS.
for public lectures… This is really unfair when the state economy is nothing to write home about and top of our challenges now is youth dying cause of drugs addiction (Kush).. I am really disappointed that this is the government I voted for…
must rise oneday!!!
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