There is a vacancy at State House as today, President Bio’s first term ends. Is there any chance of his presidency going further than 24 June 2023?
This is the question posed by voters who reminded that today, Tuesday 4 April 2023 marks five years to the date retired Brigadier Julius Maada Bio was pronounced President of Sierra Leone. Between today and 24 June 2023 we have a caretaker regime whose tenure will be determined based on the outcome of the presidential elections slated for June 24.
Citizens that came to Nightwatch Newspaper to remind us of the end of President Bio’s first five year mandate said in 2018 at the official end of President Ernest Bai Koroma’s second term, President Bio then in the opposition said he would not recognise President Koroma as president, he referred to him as a caretaker regime. Bio’s definition then was not wrong. Therefore it follows that we have a caretaker regime at State House, whose tenure ends at the tallying of ballots on 24 June.
To those who have enjoyed or benefitted from this regime in terms of jobs, positions, contracts and the like the five years came and went too soon. But for those who have suffered as a result of the poor handling of state resources, which hardship is spread across the board leaving no district or region unaffected, the five years have been slow and arduous. They have been made to suffer because of negligent management decisions and actions coming from State House, Parliament and government’s ministries, departments, and agencies (MDA’s). The hard-pressed citizens say every decision made by President Bio and his surrogates were made in the interest of the vote controller, and not to alleviate the people’s backward and poor material condition. Promising to make things better President Bio and the ruling SLPP have only succeeded in making things worse.
After twenty years of peace across the country between the presidencies of Ahmed Tejan Kabbah and Ernest Bai Koroma, whose focus in a nutshell were on maintaining our hard won peace at all cost and effective management of the economy, respectively, it is however evident that President Bio’s tenure has been marred by violence against the people by police and ruling party gangsters, tribalisation of the civil service in favour of people from ruling party strongholds, assaulting the constitution he was supposed to defend against all threats, corruption of the sort that would make the late Siaka Stevens blush, and so much more that the SLPP, in retrospect, has only succeeded in reversing all the gains in democracy and governance made by the two previous regimes.
Based on their performance, the people of Sierra Leone, irrespective of their political, tribal or regional affiliations and allegiances, re-elected Presidents Kabbah and Koroma. These men didn’t spend too much time trying to convince people that they had done their jobs and had fulfilled them as promised. Their proofs were in the works that they had evidently performed. But for this regime under President Bio, what have they done to warrant that we give them another five year mandate?
For the ruling SLPP government to all of a sudden be claiming that they have fulfilled all they had promised in their 2018 manifesto points to their desperation to convince voters to re-elect them. Although the people are yet to hear from the main opposition APC debunking all these claims being made by President Bio, we would like to hold their main boasts, the Free Quality Education, the anticorruption fight, the new airport terminal at Lungi up for criticism.
Far from being free evidence abounds of students and their families paying principals to ensure that their children form part of the coming year’s student body. The quality of education being offered at government and government assisted schools is highly questionable as the people providing the education, the teachers, have been complaining since 2018 about their poor terms and conditions of service.
Teachers have confided in this medium of not only going months without their salaries, but of not receiving the teaching materials and other perks that were promised them, especially those going to teach in remote and hard to reach places. The teachers who were supposed to be so prioritised that their interests would have taken centre stage have routinely complained of neglect by the authorities, despite the huge budgetary allocation to education, something the regime boats is at 22% of the budget. Teachers that confided in this medium said they are yet to feel the impact of such budgetary allocation in their lives.
President Bio and his governance team lost the anticorruption fight at the release of the 2018 Auditor General’s reports. From that time on, the 2019, 2020, 2021 audit reports and all other such inquiries, including the CARL perception survey on who the people of Sierra Leone consider the most corrupt government institutions and the Africanist Press investigations, all the way down to President Bio directing the Audit Service Sierra Leone not to include audits of his and the offices of his wife and vice president in the past year’s audits, have all pointed to one thing; Bio’s government is the most corrupt government in the history of keeping tabs on corruption in public spending. Although they came to put an end to corruption, President Bio and the ruling SLPP have only succeeded in making corruption less of the threat that it truly is to governments of Sierra Leone.
All the effort, time and money put into the airport terminal at Lungi that we are still in contention regarding it being a brand new airport or a facelift of the old, would have been worthy had keen attention also been paid to the physical look of Lungi, even the condition of the government ferry because no sooner you leave the confines of the airport your senses are assaulted by the level of poverty you see on the road leading to Targreen.
The citizens say they have had enough of failed promises, violence, corruption, tribalism and politics of exclusion. If President Bio wants another five year mandate, we need him to show step by step how he and his regime fulfilled all they had promised in 2018. They need to assure the people that they have concluded all the committees and tribunals. Failing to do so, which no one is naïve to think he can do otherwise, we see the need for President Bio and the SLPP to convince people to re-elect them, as his works these past five years have not been exemplary.
Going by his works, the people say they don’t expect President Bio to come out victorious on 24 June, adding: “The only way the SLPP can reclaim State House is through state sponsored actions that will be against the will and choice of the voters of Sierra Leone, which makes it necessary that we ensure that all who have registered to vote are allowed to vote and that their votes will be counted.”
All across the country people say they don’t trust the ruling government under President Bio. They said for the past five years he and his government have done as they saw fit even passing laws and spending money to fulfil their party’s agenda in government while sidelining the people’s agenda. They said that they cannot trust that President Bio and the ruling party government have their best interest at heart because everything that they are doing at present is just for the people to re-elect them.
President Bio’s term ends today. Is there any chance of his rule going further than 24 June 2023? Only time will tell…