By Our News Analyst
After an understandable interlude adherents to the column would welcome his return to writing though they may not expect his message to be exactly of the same import as it was under the APC that he served at State House. Oswald hails from Bonthe District but he had the franchise to belong to the APC that is not in the stronghold of his home. That is an evidence of magnanimity illustrating that if every Sierra Leonean thought across regional lines there would scarcely be any tribalism or regionalism in Sierra Leone.
The man reasons in bombast and prevaricates in metaphors. It does not denote arrogance. It is just a matter of writing style. It should be remembered that style is the man himself. If you contend with his style you might as well quarrel with a person for walking as proudly as if he owned Freetown. The choice of his caption in his latest column was PRESIDENT BIO: ANTI CORRUPTION WAR VERSUS NECESSARY ‘RESS, GARI, EN PAH MINE’ URGENCY. You could easily agree that this is down to earth. He just hit the bail on the head. He has the foresight to see that no matter what is discovered and recovered from the previous government it is their rising living standards that matter to them. Whether the APC stole $100 billion has little or no resonance with them. They care less. They want three square meals a day instead of the one oblong one or none which they have been having lately. He wrote that the findings of the Commissions of Enquiry are bringing to light alarming instances of brazen probable corruption. How True!
He seemed to have an axe to grind with the powers of the Anti-Corruption especially in their mode of fighting corruption. Indeed the matter of paying back to the ACC and walking away free in fact smacks of corruption. Why shouldn’t there be custodial sentences? Is it a matter of the miscreants clutching loans from the Consolidated Revenue Fund while development stalls for lack of funds? He makes the startling statement that “If just 50% of Blood Money stolen from the people of Sierra Leone can be retrieved by the ACC under the Bio administration it would go into tens of millions of dollars.
He ended his piece as he started by stating succinctly that “War on corruption by the Bio Administration is for his aides. They have to know that for the majority of poverty-stricken Sierra Leoneans nailing former corrupt APC government officials is less important than their being able to eat adequate ‘ress, gari en pahmine.’ President Maada Bio must grapple with the URGENCY of the people or…
Having being led up the garden path Oswald could return to base without qualms.