SLPP Politicians are not strangers to corruption!!
By Chernoh Alpha M. Bah
Between 1996 and 2007, corruption was so rife under the SLPP government of Tejan Kabba that the then anti-corruption commissioner, Valentine Collier became frustrated with theiving ministers like Okere Adams, and others to the extent that he called parliamentarians “sick men in crutches” for failing to checkmate the corruption of the SLPP at the time.
Remember, it was during the days of Kabba and the SLPP that the ACC supported musician
Daddy Saj to produce his most classic song ever: “Corruption E do So”.
Artists like Jungle Leaders, Emmerson Bockarie, and Innocent started their music careers as anti-corruption and anti-establishment artists fighting against the corruption of the SLPP under Kabba. SLPP’s corruption helped produced a new genre of anti-corruption music of all sorts in the Sierra Leone cultural space.
By the mid 2000s, even international donors were already disgusted with the wanton theft of post-war development funds meant for social reconstruction —-NaCSA and Sababu Education projects were centers of this grand public theft. In 2005, for instance, a donor conference scheduled to be held in Paris, France to discuss additional budgetary support for Sierra Leone’s new development agenda was cancelled because of the SLPP’s unsatisfactory handling of donor money, especially funds covering the second term of the Kabba era between 2002-2005.
Toward 2007, the corruption of the SLPP was the dominant point of conversation on the streets, a discussion spearheaded largely by cultural performers. Emmerson Bockarie and “Innocent” defined largely the outcome of the 2007 elections in favor of the APC and Ernest Koroma, a party that many hardly imagined would return to power after its overthrow 15 years earlier.
Why is this context important?
It is important because the national conversation on corruption since the SLPP returned to power in 2018 tends to make people forget that there was massive corruption in the public service even before Koroma came to power.
The political history of Sierra Leone over the course of the last sixty years can’t be told without this unpleasant story of grand corruption in the public service across every regime.
But what makes the Maada Bio situation different is possibly the simple fact that at no time in the recent history of our country —at least within these 60 years—- has any government presided over the kind of theft that we have seen in these three years of the Bio regime. For instance, no government has recorded a revenue loss that is more than the overall GDP of the country: US$5.5 billion dollars as we experienced in FY2019 with Leadway and the non-payment of appropriate taxes on timber exports. In just 2019 alone, Maada Bio’s record on financial Indiscipline and frivolous public spending has surpassed all presidents we have had in Sierra Leone —-from Siaka Stevens to Ernest Koroma.
This is not an exaggeration. The evidence is now right in front of the country. It is upon us to decide what we have to do with this monumental scandal. Our country is faced with a serious national crisis!
SLPP supporters, including beneficiaries of this grand corruption under the Bio regime, who are trying to defend this monumental scandal must understand that they are worse than the devil if they want to pretend that all the glaring details of grand theft by officials of the Bio administration is after all not anything worse than what we have seen in the past 60 years of our “independence”.
Is this the *New Direction* that Maada Bio promised the people of Sierra Leone?
