Of all the absurd claims and outrageous fabrications that have come out of the New Direction camp is that “in just five years President Bio has done far better than 11 years of Ernest Bai Koroma”.
We must all LABOR to tell our people the whole truth, not part of the truth that highlights our presentable achievements while ignoring that the flipside to this far outweighs what we would like to present. This is the art of spin doctors and rhetoricians in political parties and communications companies. This is not what the people of Sierra Leone need at present.
That said, here is the other side to all the achievements that New Direction spin doctors are claiming should be enough to give President Bio another five year mandate.
And if we are to go by the SLPP spin doctor’s statement that for a president seeking a fresh new mandate “if the president has done well, the people will re-elect him for a second term”, then the premise that presidents in Sierra Leone must be given two five year mandates because his two predecessors did two terms is as absurd as absurdity gets.
But absurdity took an even more absurd proportion when the author claimed that “this process of seeking new mandate from the people is a new democratic phenomenon”. We beg to differ: where did this praise singing author ever heard of a president seeking a fresh mandate from the people based on how he or she had performed as “a new democratic phenomenon”?
Seeking a fresh mandate based on how you had performed IS THE PHENOMENON and all that is beautiful about democracy. It lives power where it belongs -in the hands of the voting public -and act as a reminder to the executive (the president) that he operates based on the will and pleasure of the electorates, who can vote him in or out.
Based on the PAOPA supporter’s own admission of the purpose of seeking a fresh mandate, then Ahmed Tejan Kabbah and Ernest Bai Koroma did something well in their first terms to be re-elected by the people for two respective terms. On the other hand presidents such as Donald Trump and John Mahama, for as popularly as they were elected in the US and Ghana respectively, when they went for a second term fresh and new mandate, the electorates in both countries sent the incumbents packing.
Now, to our fledgling democracy here in Sierra Leone, based on the records of how President Bio and his underlings have performed, in just under five years, even excluding COVID-19 and the war in Ukraine, President Bio almost wrecked our economy and the rule and procedure of the law by not only quadrupling our national debt just to pay wages of people his government unnecessarily hired, except to please them, using money sent to save us at a time when the world’s leading economies that sponsor weak governments like New Direction were instituting austerity measures, but our president was and still is the only threat to the rule of law by selectively choosing who to apply the laws to.
When they concern members of the ruling establishment all allegations of corruption despite what the auditor general and her team unearthed we are asked to show proof of them being complicit. But when they concern members of the previous regime under EBK then their accusations became their guilty verdicts.
It must be here stated that neither Ahmed Tejan Kabbah nor Ernest Bai Koroma ever had to beg the electorate for a second term mandate like at present. Both men accomplished what their regimes set out to accomplish: Tejan Kabbah consolidated our peace and set us on a path to prosperity; Ernest Bai Koroma, knowing that government is continuity, continued the fine works of Kabbah’s which catapulted his regime to our most successful and best managed economy ever.
But President Bio in under five years have rolled back all the gains we had steadily, slowly and strenuously been making since Tejan Kabbah by heading in a totally new direction that ended up being the worst and obviously wrong direction as they have wasted more money in just five years for which we have no appreciable level of development to point to as offshoots of what they are claiming as enough to be re-elected. This begging campaign leads to desperation and the making of bogus claims lacking substance.
All of President Bio’s accomplishments can be grouped under one banner: continuity. You are supposed to increase the education budget year by year and hire more teachers to meet the demand for more teachers. But we would have expected you to make sure that the people that provide the service of teaching are well taken care of. An empty sack cannot stand.
We also expect you to expand on providing electricity for the entire country. Meanwhile, have you noticed that since in the history of power cuts in Sierra Leone, we have not experienced the kinds of power failures we are experiencing in Freetown of late to the point that generators are spoiling our ears? We have returned to the days of the infamous Kabbah Tiger generators spewing noise and smoke at every step of the way. The reason why electricity is being expanded to the provinces at a break neck speed is because our investors especially in the mining industry are spending such unholy sums on fuel to power their generators that they risk operating on skeleton staff to make a profit; many would not even come to Sierra Leone because they would not be able to cater for power supply while running their operation and paying their staff and obligations to the communities and government. This will affect our human capital development as these miners will mine the same tonnage per day but using reduced staff there by shortchanging the government on employment and other taxes and revenues garnered from mining companies.
Therefore, the budgetary allocations made by the EBK and Bio regimes are signs of their times. With the place education plays in the advancement of nations, we would have expected this regime to have gone as high as allocating 30% to education.
The New Direction regime and their surrogates in the media cannot claim continuity projects as theirs while they failed us in so many other ways. The New Direction regime failed at the most important aspect of our government: bread and butter issue. All the accomplishments listed by this regime will bear fruit in the foreseeable future; that is why they are called continuity projects. But to go to school, before taking medicine and enjoying your entertainment at home, one needs to eat.
The average Sierra Leonean is more concerned with what he and his family would eat than any other need. This is our primal need in Sierra Leone. This is why bread and butter economics is so important to the people of Sierra Leone. All of a man’s struggles is to first put food on the table as all else pales in comparison.
What President Bio’s spin doctors wouldn’t tell you is that they wasted so much money on things they were not intended so much so that they were forced to take on more and larger debts. After three ministers of finance, two bank governors and auditor generals, with four consecutive Auditor General’s reports on this regime showing glaring proof of financial malfeasance, travelgate and so much reckless spending during the Covid 19 era that all contributed to the high cost of goods and services this regime is yet to bring under control.
Does anyone ever wonder why none of the Auditor General’s reports was ever debated in Parliament? The answer is to save the nation and the president the embarrassment their debates would have caused. Actually President Bio openly admitted that he will not be able to solve our economic issues. Therefore, blaming our economic woes on Covid-19 (that started in 2019) and the Russian war in Ukraine (that started last year in 2022) is a flat out fabrication, or in other words a pointblank lie. They chopped all the money that was meant to assuage all the shocks to the economy that was expected.
Therefore, for someone seeking a fresh five year mandate it would augur well for this regime to openly admit failure instead of trying to whitewash your accomplishments as worthy of being granted such a request. Maybe if the people can trust you they would re-elect you. But if you stubbornly try to overlook all the embarrassing spending this regime have done, the deaths that they have caused since 2018, the palpable hardship and daily power cuts that now go on for hours and hours on end (as opposed to a few minutes here and there circa 2018-2022), even going cosmographically and pointing to the portentous omen of the fall of the Cotton Tree (24 May) a month away from the 24 June elections, there is nothing that will save the New Direction regime from a first term exit.
Based on how you have run this economy, giving another five year mandate to President Bio would only be equated to this regime capturing the state. We would only have ourselves to blame.