Instead of making plans to exit the national scene, upset Sierra Leonean citizens who said the president’s actions made things very difficult for them these past five years, say President Bio is busy making pleas to be given a second term mandate as president of Sierra Leone. The citizens who said if the president had an iota of embarrassment left in him he would have stepped aside from the entire election process and have another member of the ruling party to carry the party’s flag for the June 24 elections, have called on President Bio to: ‘Please exit State House!’
The concerned bipartisan group of registered voters said because President Bio failed to fix the economy, ‘he has failed in his mission and hence does not deserve a second term’. They said, like Donald Trump of the US and all other one term presidencies from around the world, President Bio should go back to the drawing board to see what went wrong, fix it and then come back for another chance at the presidency sometime in the future, other than for the 24 June elections.
The citizens said they are upset with President Bio for being so blinded to the people’s real condition coming from his failed handling of the economy that he expects them to have been happy and well fed these past five years under his stewardship of the economy that they would forget all their difficulties and re-elect him next month.
The majority of the cross-section of Sierra Leonean citizens that spoke to Nightwatch Newspaper said instead of asking for a re-election, ‘President Bio should gracefully and graciously exit State House’, as he has failed to fix the ailing Sierra Leone economy. They blamed the condition of the economy on the president’s actions that negatively affected the economy going as far back as his first executive decisions.
Apart from all that have happened during Bio’s five year tenure including but not limited to lack of respect for the rule of law, the police shooting of innocent civilians in opposition dominated areas, ‘their biggest failure is not making any positive impact on the economy despite their many 2018 campaign promises to tackle and solve the corruption crisis in the country’ the citizen voters said.
From some of his first action as President of Sierra Leone we can see that Bio started wasting instead of saving to fix the economic mess he claimed he inherited from President Bai Koroma’s regime. Instituting the GTT report from which the commissions of inquiry were set up, the massive sacking of seasoned civil servants who were replaced by people from the south east of the country, expanding the already stretched government wage bill by the new hires and establishment of new ministries, departments and agencies, cancellation of the London Mining contract that resulted to a lost court case in a London Court, and so much more resulted to huge strain on the economy, for which a massive debt of $3billion was needed to offset government’s unnecessary expenditures.
And despite the hundreds of millions of dollars in support the country received to stand up under the economic and other shocks to the system during COVID, no significant move was made by the ruling party government to seriously change our economic reality.
The citizens pointed out that had the president and his New Direction technocrats spent the nation’s purse on the intended purposes there would have been no need for the rise in the prices of fuel, the US dollar, and basic goods and services.
‘If donated monies were spent as intended and subsidies left in place they would have offset all the outside factors that affected our economy as a result. Apart from admitting that he inherited a failed economy that we now know has been our best since independence (that is, EBK’s), President Bio and his team had five years to fix things but couldn’t. Therefore, after changing four Ministers of Finance in one term and what happened to be a runaway Bank Governor, the economy is worse than ever. Our economy is sick and would require a doctor of economics to heal it,’ the citizens surmised.
The Sierra Leonean citizens said all the above-mentioned issues led to the regime taking on huge foreign debts that moved the IMF to insist on austerity measures. Donor support was also suspended as donors were concerned with the scale at which their donated monies were being used for the unintended purposes by vote controllers.
‘Despite all the denials of not being involved in corrupt practices by the New Direction regime, the Auditor General’s Reports from 2018, 19, 20, 21 all point to massive looting of state funds. The audit exercise got so embarrassing that the president decreed that his office and the offices of his wife and the vice president be left out of audits from the nation’s supreme auditing services. By this single order from above President Bio announced the loss of the war on corruption, the legalisation of corruption thereby sending a message to his subordinates that they should grab all they can while the SLPP gravy train is on the tracks,’ they noted.
The upset citizen voters said by failing to stabilise the exchange rate between the leone and the dollar and the price of fuel, which prices affect the price of everything else, the Bio regime planned on fleecing the state for their first term and consider the people gullible enough to believe their lies and re-elect them to continue further damaging the economy for a second term.
‘At present the prices of fuel and the exchange rate between the US dollar and the leone are three times what they were in 2018. If prices were kept the same by this regime based on how well the international community had responded to our expected needs under COVID, the resultant rises in the prices of goods and services were necessary to make enough taxes to pay off our debts. This situation persists and we know that the incumbent regime cannot fix the economy. We need a doctor to save the economy,’ said the aggrieved Sierra Leonean voters.