SLPP’s Demise Begins
By Mohamed Sankoh (One Drop)
The countdown to the eventual demise of the ruling Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) government has begun. It began last Saturday when the registration processes, for next year’s multi-tier elections, began countrywide with hundreds of thousands of citizens showing enthusiasms to be part of a would-be regime change in 2023.
And judging by the long queues in parts of Makeni, Binkolo, Magburaka, Kamakwie, Lungi, Western Rural and eastern Freetown; it seems the “terrorists” and “insurrections” (borrowing from the SLPP government’s official line of thought) are very much determined to make President Julius Maada Bio an “OTP” (One Term President).
But President Bio has been breast-beating himself that he has fulfilled all his 2018 campaign promises and that what he is now dishing out to majority of the suffering masses are bonuses. And he has always created his own feel-good moments by ramming down the throats of ordinary Sierra Leoneans how ungratefully ungrateful they are after all what his government has done for them.
In his national broadcast of 12 August 2022, the Head of State reminded ungrateful Sierra Leoneans that his “Government has undertaken specific economic mitigation, recovery, and resilience measures that have kept essential food items and fuel on the market, kept businesses running, and maintained public services and regularly paid salaries”. He even shocked the ingrates that his “Government has reduced fuel and transportation prices twice in the last month alone. This is in addition to other social safety payments and cash transfers to poor and vulnerable populations and microfinance loans to women and youth”.
Except President Bio wants to convince ordinary Sierra Leoneans that they are either living in Wonderland or Utopia; he pretty well knows that the realities of those phantasmagorical assertions are just economically economical!
For if that picture he painted, on 12 August 2022, is the reality in Sierra Leone; then the events of August 10 would not have taken place in the first place. What I think is really wrong with members of the Bio administration is their knack for creating lies and believing in those lies! They have always been brutally dishonest on issues that require a little bit of honesty and trueness to one’s self.
And it has always been a sort of an insult for President Bio and his toadies to keep on treating majority of Sierra Leoneans like kindergartens. They keep on thinking that whatever their actions, or inactions, majority of Sierra Leoneans would still allow themselves to be led to the abattoir in 2023 through the same lies that made them committed the sin of ushering in the directionless “New Direction” in 2018.
And I keep on asking myself whether President Bio has found time to read through his 2018 Manifesto dubbed the “People’s Manifesto”. If he hasn’t; let me remind him that in it he promises “a New Direction for Sierra Leone as a united, peaceful, progressive, dynamic, confident, enterprising and happy nation where the people have unlimited access to jobs, food, education and health services and where there is equal justice and equal opportunity for all”.
Now, going back to those lofty promises and the realities in present day Sierra Leone; I’m wondering whether President Bio truly believes that his government has really “united” a once peaceful and progressive nation. You and I know that Sierra Leone is more divided today along tribal and regional lines, than she was five years ago, simply because of the seemingly supremacist policies which the Bio administration appears to be implementing with unashamed alacrity!
It is no longer a secret that in Sierra Leone today, citizens seem to be only assured of “unlimited access to jobs” if they appear not to have certain names from certain regions. This is one of the realities which supporters and sympathisers of the ruling SLPP do not want non-SLPPers to highlight by evoking the ghost of pre-Paul Kagame Rwanda. But the point is: citizens normally comment on the things they see and feel—even if those things are unpleasant to the ears of those who do not want those unpleasant things to be said. And if it is a fact that most of the seats in the “court barray” are filled by the chief’s clansmen; I don’t think it is morally wrong for lesser mortals in the village to say so. We just have to speak, and write, the truth and shame Lucifer!
Under the current SLPP administration, there seems to be justice and opportunity only for supporters of the SLPP not for citizens in parts of Makeni, Binkolo, Magburaka, Kamakwie, Lungi, Western Rural and eastern Freetown. One of the horrible things that have ever happened to Sierra Leone in modern times is the ushering in of the “New Direction”, which has proven to be directionless like driftwood. And those who voted for this mess in 2018 should first ask the Almighty God for forgiveness and atone for that grave sin by out-balloting the SLPP government in 2023.
Every time I meditate on President Bio’s national broadcast of 12 August 2022; I feel insulted. For how can the Commander-in-Chief claim to have “kept businesses running” when in actual fact businesses are closing down in droves because of high taxations and the implementation of half-assed economic policies? Can the President tell me which parts of the country where “social safety payments”, “cash transfers” and “microfinance loans” were doled out to women and youth? Certainly, those “women and youth” cannot be those in parts of Makeni, Binkolo, Magburaka, Kamakwie, Lungi, Western Rural and eastern Freetown. Because if they had enjoyed such “economic mitigation, recovery, and resilience measures”; they would not have taken their “ungratefulness” to the streets to the extent that they were being referred to as “terrorists” and “insurrectionists” by their benefactor(s)!
It is amazingly amazing that after four years at the Rudder of State, it is only now that members of the Bio administration are appealing to Sierra Leoneans’ sense of patriotism and national identity. It is only now that the issue of tribalism should not be discussed though it appears to be palpable in Government’s Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs). And after four years; it is only now that we are told that members of the All People’s Congress (APC) are jealous of President Bio simply because he has been indefatigably travelling overseas to seek foreign investors.
I wonder what the Head of State would have thought had he been given a White House invitation.
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