The Muslim fast month has come with little fanfare as the people of Sierra Leone say they are too focused on their hardships to notice. It is a month when Muslims around the world fast and do works of charity especially on behalf of the poorest of the poor, which forms the majority of the people of Sierra Leone.
However, politicians and political parties continue to seek the people’s approval via the ballot box. Failing to tell the people how they plan on meeting their needs, they would focus on the people’s lack, for which they would appear as heroes for sorting out, if they sort them out.
We know for certain that President Bio’s regime never sorted anything out, except to make sure that they get maximum exposure or benefit for whatever goodness they managed to do, regardless of who goes to bed full or hungry. Goodness and political gravy points go hand in hand under the New Direction.
Knowing the people’s poor and backward state, for politicians to use the people’s food needs as an electioneering tool has left many calling our leaders seeking re-election and first term tenures as, wicked. They are using the making of all these donations in the month of Ramadan to offset their real or true responsibility to the people and state; their continued improvement on all development indicators.
Many people complaining of hardships under the current SLPP dispensation under President Julius Maada Bio have called the current Muslim month of fast as “Elections Ramadan” saying crooked politicians are using the people’s food and other needs as electioneering tools, which the people say points to their wickedness. This is the condition when goodness is allowed to take on political proportions. The people get the shorter end of the stick while those responsible for their backward condition are celebrated for doing nothing to change the people’s economic narrative.
It would seem as if despite the hardship engulfing the nation, our politicians were all along capacitated to meet our needs, although they failed to use our capacity for the betterment of the country. Help for the downtrodden was always there, albeit ‘the help was not used for the intended purpose’, a turn of phrase that has come to define the SLPP regime headed by President Bio.
Therefore news of politicians and politician hopefuls donating thousands of bags of rice to poor and fasting Muslim Sierra Leoneans have backfired as the people see the donations as wicked in light of their sufferings these past five years under the ruling SLPP government. They complained that although the help was always there, they didn’t receive any reprieve because the politicians failed to use the help for the general good.
Goodness they said has also taken bipartisan proportions in Sierra Leone where politicians use the people’s sufferings to remind them of their need for politicians. The politicians have succeeded in convincing the people that without them in leadership help will never come their way. This is obviously a lie. More than anything politicians need the voters much more than voters need politicians and political parties. We don’t need them to validate us as citizens; they need us to add credibility to their tenures.
According to the WFP of the UN, the Food Security Monitoring System analysis of August 2022 found that 81 per cent of households in Sierra Leone were unable to meet their basic food and nutrition needs. Of these, 15 per cent are severely food insecure, requiring emergency food assistance.
Data from the joint government and WFP market monitoring also shows that the price of imported rice, the nation’s staple food, rose by 40 per cent between January and October 2022, while that of locally produced crop almost doubled, forcing most households to expend over 75 per cent of their income on food.
Sadly, this was the time President Julius Maada Bio and his gang of merry men was busy spending money like there was no tomorrow. The nation was left in the dark as to the real scale of the losses in national spending as the Auditor General and her deputy were suspended thereby preventing them from presenting the report in the House.
It is clear then that the nation should make every effort to assure the people and our international development partners that we can feed ourselves. Instead of spending all this money on growing food, the people will be happy to get cash in hand to get their needs met. The people cannot depend on grown food as present; they need cash in hand. Any money that goes into government get caught and tied up in diplomatic red tape, of the sort that would see the money spent on what it wasn’t intended for, resulting to an embarrassment when the auditors come around.
Far from being impressed, the people accused the incumbent regime of exacerbating the people’s backward material condition. Help was always there, except it was used far from its intended purpose. The concerned voters said since 2018 the men and women making up the incumbent government of Sierra Leone had been equipped to meet the people’s needs although they shafted this responsibility and passed the buck on to donations from the international community including remittances from our citizens in the diaspora.
The situation in Sierra Leone is so serious that recently the African Development Bank and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) approved $400 million and $3.2 million, respectively, to boost agricultural production and provide emergency food and development assistance to poor households and individuals across the country.
Sierra Leonean representatives were recently in Senegal to sign the AfDB grant papers, while the WFP received the $3.2 from USAID aimed at providing immediate food assistance to 68,000 men, women and children in Sierra Leone, the majority of whom are in severe need of food assistance.
So, while the international community was looking for ways to meet our food needs, our elected politicians all along were able to buy 1000 bags of rice, although they shamefully failed to do so to alleviate the people’s struggles. A thousand bags of rice distributed to poor people across the country at 17 bags a month would have taken five years to distribute with thousands of poor and needy people having their needs temporarily met while other moves were being made to bring the situation under effective control.
To think that all along while the people of Sierra Leone from all across the country were complaining of food needs, hunger and suffering, while four out of five households went to bed hungry, when the Nigerian first lady and others were donating bags of rice thereby revealing that Sierra Leoneans are indeed hungry, our local politicians hedged or hoarded their favours waiting for the people to be desperately in need, such as during Ramadan, to or before lending them a helping hand.
The scale and intensity of hunger across Sierra Leone is so palpable we see desperate young men and women who fall victim to stealing being assaulted to the point of their deaths, while we celebrate and even fight each other in the interest of politicians we accuse of stealing while in government.
To wait for Ramadan in the final two months of your five year term to now start donating thousands of bags of rice while all along the people have been complaining even taking to the streets in protest and being told to be aware of politicians using cash violence on them, the SLPP regime has demonstrated what their work on behalf of the people is all about the party and partisans, with the needs and issues affecting the citizens not being prioritised.
Although this has proven to be a Ramadan under hardship, the people say were it not for Ramadan and the charity associated with it, many of them would have been going to bed hungry every day. Their fear is that with the fast month ending and with two more months before the 24 June elections, how will they meet their food needs going forward? This is the people’s current reality, for which they don’t trust the SLPP to be able to change before the elections to ensure them a second term.