The end of every politician’s term in office or active politics is greeted with one question: How will the people remember me?
Consequently, in the United States, for example, at the end of a president’s second and final term, he or she is expected to establish a library or museum where people can learn more about their term including extra biographical material.
This is where a former president’s communications team would dump every piece of paper, picture, gifts and policy decision among others for public consumption.
Since we are not expecting a library or museum from Bio, what is Bio’s legacy, not based on what he had promised, but based on his performance?
In this vein, how will posterity view the tenure of retired Brigadier-General Julius Maada Bio after his disastrous first term including a second term everyone except the president and his party have insisted should not be allowed to continue?
“Bio’s legacy is a trail of blood, criminalising anyone in the public that would want to talk some sense into him, violence and thievery of the public purse and the people’s mandate to lead as President of Sierra Leone. Looking back at how the party government performed during the first term, 2018 to 2023, it is an indication of how a president can polarise a society to the point where very clever people are willing to risk their reputations and future careers by subscribing to a lie that the incumbent had won the 24th June, 2023 elections,” informed a former SLPP member of the Fifth Parliament.
For someone that should have been a shoe-in to get his name among the nation’s list of her greatest leaders, the ranking SLPP executive said Maada Bio has worked himself into a state where he has ended up alienating himself from the public and is only seen with grassroot members of the party during political campaigns and other party-led functions.
Let us start the record letting with the advent of Julius Maada Bio who had traded his military suit for those of a politician’s.
He came in hoping to become president via the ballot box instead of through the barrel of a gun that had twice aided him in the overthrow of his superiors, first alongside Captain Valentine Strasser in removing Joseph Saidu Momoh, and the very Strasser much later.
“Sadly, the barrel of the gun has dominated Bio’s second coming. There used to be a certain number of attempts allotted to each SLPP member to seek the party’s flag and contest for the Office of the President.
After trying and failing before 2018, Bio should have been an ex-officio member of the party entering the retirement class. But, Bio was not finished with the SLPP,” said the former MP.
Pitching in, a member of the main opposition, All People’s Congress (APC) enlightened us saying by going against the party’s constitution on seeking the flag and highest office in the land, Bio demonstrated real disrespect for the rule of law and the procedures that are expected to inform our elected and other leaders how they should behave in relation to their terms of references.
That was Bio giving us insight into the first characteristic or definition of his legacy: no respect for the rule of law.
“Since then, Bio continues to record success after success for most of his government’s plans and actions……. Regardless of how his plans would or are affecting people, Bio continued to take more land than the inch he was initially allotted. He has had his way with the other branches or arms of government, many of whose heads are all appointed by the president and expected to do his bidding if and when the time comes. These appointed ministers, department and agency heads can be likened to sleepers, government killing machines that are activated by a phone call to either get rid of or sabotage someone with the potential to cause problems for the incumbent having his way,” said an APC politician.
As if what had been revealed by Bio’s plans were not bad enough, Bio accomplished his party getting a majority in Parliament when he orchestrated the removal of ten (10) duly elected members of parliament belonging to the APC and replacing them with the ten runner-ups from the SLPP through the judiciary instead of a bye-election as prescribed by the constitution hence the law.
For a president that was elected on a platform to address the indiscipline that leads to lawlessness, Bio’s obvious disregard or disdain for the procedures that would ensure respect for the rule of law was a shocker to most as the nation had looked up to him as a former head of the military to inculcate the spirit of discipline in a society steeped in the lawlessness that politicians had encouraged among the people they consider “party gangsters.”
For his political agenda going forward, Julius Maada Bio must have regarded that following the law by the letter would trash his plans, so stealing or manipulating the law to reflect his aspirations became his forte.
“You see president Bio knew that he needed a majority in parliament to get his plans off the ground, something going by the book was not going to accomplish for him. He therefore decided to steal SLPP’s way into a majority by removing the 10 APC parliamentarians. That thievery resulted to the Speaker being imposed on the House, by extension, the people of Sierra Leone. So at the start of his 2018 tenure, Bio had accomplished “winning” a disputed election he “won” with 103 per cent of the vote, removed 10 duly elected parliamentarians by the courts and had a speaker imposed on the House as a result of the president’s intrigues,” said the APC member.
The men continued that Bio’s thievery was exposed when the Auditor General started doing audits of the SLPP (Sierra Leone People’s Party) after the Audit Service Sierra Leone (ASSL) had to shift their focus from the former regime under President Ernest Bai Koroma to the one being led by president Bio.
Well, before the 2018 audit report, the auditors at the ASSL were the darlings of the ruling party. Lara Taylor Pearce and her subordinates were hailed as astute auditors of the highest calibre and integrity. They had proven Bio and his party’s claim that the regime under EBK was “a criminal racketeering enterprise.
But no sooner than the supreme auditors started auditing the PAOPA / New Direction regime that disclosed large scale, even orchestrated corrupt actions by vote controllers in the regime, Lara Taylor Pearce and her subordinates became arch nemesis of the regime.
The scale of thievery that was unearthed by Lara and her auditors was so vast that it ended up embarrassing the President who after the 2021 report that showed some very reckless and plausibly criminal use of the people’s money, even by people at offices of the president, his wife and vice president’s, shamefully ordered Lara not to include audits of the aforementioned offices in the report.
That order spelled the end of the Bio regime’s war on corruption. The man that declared a war on corruption and financial leakages was the same one to surrender to them.
The men said that Bio’s thievery has continued with his insistence that he had won the 24 June elections which result announcement has left the country divided along political and moral lines.
Politically, those that support Bio regardless of the facts and questions surrounding his win are as adamant as him that he had won the presidential election.
Morally, the whole nation is being made to look like children who are either refusing to call a spade a spade or not sure of what a spade is.
“At the end of the day, Bio’s legacy is hinged on the barrel of the gun that he had tried to avoid in his return to head the government of Sierra Leone. The scale of public theft orchestrated by Bio and his appointed heads of ministries, departments and agencies including an enlarged government wage bill for which the nation had no money to pay such salaries, necessitated a rise in the hardship and suffering experienced by the poor people of Sierra Leone.
Their hardships forced the poor people onto the streets for which they were shot and killed in cold blood by the guns that were bought with their taxpayers’ money to protect them and the country.
The barrel became very prominent and has remained so ever since members of the regime’s state security officers shot and killed protesters in Makeni, Koidu, Mile 91, Lunsar, Pademba Road Prison, 10th August, 2022 and 11th September, 2023.
If president Bio was hoping on a glowing legacy after leaving Fort Thornton, based on the intrigues of the past five years circa 2018, his has been, according to the above and much more that posterity will adjudge: one of blood and money, stolen money.
Accordingly, Bio will be remembered by the very issues he came to address: corruption, violence and indiscipline.