This medium warned in the editorial, “ABEKE” (meaning, ‘they are coming’) that now that the elections period is just around the corner, public officials that have long neglected the people that voted them into office will now all of a sudden show overt interest in their constituencies, wards or councils on the pretext that they care for you but knowing same to be false or contrived.
But it would seem as if our warning either didn’t reach the people of Kenema or they are averse to seeing it for what it is. True to expectation, members of a bike riders’ union were recent recipients of a 50 bags of rice and 8000 litres of fuel largesse from the ruling Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) after the beneficiaries admitted that they had been neglected by both President Bio and the majority of the 70 per cent descendants of Kenema making up the cream of the president’s ministries, departments and agencies’ appointments.
In the Christian Bible, the tale is told of Esau selling his birthright to his younger brother Jacob over a bowl of lentil soup. Today, we are seeing the people of Kenema doing the same.
Despite their large presence in government MDAs and overwhelmingly voting for Julius Maada Bio and the SLPP in 2018, Kenema remains one of the most overlooked or neglected areas of Sierra Leone. Four years down the line, Kenema has no new roads, schools or healthcare facilities, and lacks regular power and water supplies. The many political appointments filled by Kenema indigenes aren’t elected officials hence their allegiance is to the one that appointed them, the president of Sierra Leone.
These are the people the president consider so important to his agenda that he expanded the government wage bill and hired them knowing the nation cannot afford to pay their salaries, allowances and other perks, for which he borrowed three billion United States dollars ($3,000,000,000, equivalent to fifty-one trillion leones, Le51,000,000,000,000).
Now that elections are here again, and after ignoring Kenema, his hometown Bonthe and many other areas of Sierra Leone with a majority grassroots support-base, the SLPP is doing as expected: dishing out bags of rice and fuel in exchange for your votes.
Surprisingly the beneficiaries of the 50 bags of rice and 8000 litres of fuel said they overwhelmingly voted for Maada Bio, adding that though they used to see a lot of him shortly thereafter, for a very long time now he and his appointees from that part of the country had been missing in action.
The people of Kenema are here admonished that President Bio knows that he has neglected you. He knows it so much that he decided to use a go-between that you wrongly consider to be an angel. This go-between is being used to massage you before President Bio appears in Kenema. You are being prepared for your role of being Bio’s unofficial motorcade outriders, there to blow your horns and make other merry noises sending a message that all is well with you.
But is all well with you? After you have shared the bags of rice and fuel among yourselves, would they be enough to keep you going for the next five years?
Just like Bonthe and the rest of the country and people President Bio and other such leaders have neglected these past four years, he now needs your votes again, after which you will be ignored until the next elections cycle.
How long can you live like this?
Don’t be fooled, a leopard will never change his spots. The president is not all of a sudden going to change from being uncaring to a caring elected leader overnight. Take the rice, money, fuel, cars and whatever they will give you; after all, the money they used to buy all those things is your money in the first place. You are in desperate need of those things. Not that you should, as your need was created by the many poor management decisions President Bio has made these past years as leader of the nation.
Now, they think that you are so gullible, so simple and desperate that for a bag of rice, fuel and a visit by the president, you will forget all you have suffered under this regime. They think that you can’t afford a bag of rice or fuel on your own, when all along you have been doing it albeit by the skin of your teeth.
The people of Kenema are known across Sierra Leone for being patient and resolute. But please don’t let your kindness be mistaken for weakness, or being forgetful. Don’t accept the insulting assumption by our elected public servants that you are so desperate you will take their gifts, run home happy and re-elect them.
Be here advised that you will be neglected again after your usefulness would have run its course after their re-election.