President Julius Maada Bio, whom many are now calling a dictator ‘for doing exactly as he pleases as opposed to what he should be doing on behalf of the people he works for’, will deliver to MPs and the nation his last session farewell speech in Parliament today.
The Constitution of Sierra Leone vested powers in the Head of State to address Parliament and the nation on the State Opening of any session where he will unveil his accomplishments and his next strategic plans.
For the president’s first speech, he delivered over 150 pages of his plans for the betterment of the country. But as his number of years in governance progress, and his plans coming to naught, the number of pages the president delivered during his speeches has also been falling. MPs and members of the public attributed the drop in the number of pages of the president’s speech to him not having anything new to tell the people or boast of as all of his plans have failed abysmally.
The failure of the president’s plans and actions, for which we have so many reasons, has led to his speechwriters cutting and pasting lines and paragraphs of past presidential and other speeches all in the hope of painting a picture of development activities that are lacking in actuality.
It may be recalled that MPs lampooned the president’s speechwriters calling on them to ‘stop the cut and paste’ culture that had come to describe many of the president’s speeches.
Some MPs challenged and described some paragraphs of the abridged version of the president’s speech delivered in Parliament as an abstract of the exact statement and words of former President Ernest Bai Koroma.
MPs made the disclosure on 6 July 2020 when making their submissions during the debate on the president’s speech in the Well of Parliament. Some pointed out that President Bio’s speeches lacked consistency and are engulfed in plagiarism, which is a serious crime in the art of writing, and in the country.
They said some of the abnormalities in the president’s speeches were not caused by the president, as he is not to be blamed for such problems. Opposition MPs said the blame should be attributed to the drafters of the president’s speeches, going as far as advising the president to start using experienced people, especially the Speaker of Parliament, Hon Chernor Abass Bundu, I.B. Kargbo, among many others to prepare his speeches before delivering them for the public’s consumption.
This, they say, would ensure that mistakes and the ‘cut and paste’ culture become things of the past. What has also been bothering Opposition MPs about the president’s recent speeches is the inconsistency and failure of the Minister of Finance to put together credible data for the president to use, adding that the figures highlighted in the president’s speeches are quite different from the ones the minister delivered to the people of Sierra Leone and all those who had listened to him speak.
According to MPs, data are key in governance. They admonished the government to give data analysis of their speeches because it will help clarify where they started and the achievements they have made thus far. MPs intimated that the utilisation of experienced people is central to speechwriting, especially when it involves the president, who delivers policy statements when and wherever he speaks.
During the debates of his speeches, MPs referred to the years of President Julius Maada Bio’s rule as wasteful and urged the administration to improve on their strides to boost the economy, or change their governance strategy if they want to succeed.
It can be recalled that President Julius Maada Bio’s first State Opening Speech was voluminous, containing almost 150 pages. However, the numbers of pages shrank to 20 pages during the last Presidential Speech on the State Opening of Parliament. Today, many are asking based on his lackluster performance these past four years, how many pages should we be expecting from the president, what exactly is he going to say for his four years of reckless spending to the point where his government seems to be leaking money all over the place.
Meanwhile, Speaker Chernor Abass Bundu, who responded to the many inaccuracies and inconsistencies in the President’s speeches, said Julius Maada Bio should not be blamed for the lacunas in his speeches, which blame he threw on the relevant MDAs who submitted their own versions of facts and figures to the writers of the president’s speeches.
The Speaker, who was very much concerned about what MPs had to say about the president’s speeches, continued that MDAs are primarily responsible for the abnormalities in the president’s speech in any given situation.