Normally it is expected for governments to be run on a platform of national unity or cohesion, going as far as forming governments of positive compromise. But not the parties we have been electing to run our government of Sierra Leone.
After four years on the helm, what we have been experiencing with the current party running our government that goes by the very forceful and undemocratic moniker of “PAOPA” is a government of national humiliation that has been embarrassing the good people of Sierra Leone. Barely a week goes by without some revelation about how civil servants including the president and his wife have either been spending our money in ways they shouldn’t have or bypassing procedures that govern how our governors are supposed to behave.
Talking to young and old about the current state of affairs in our New Direction government of President Julius Maada Bio, it has finally dawned on them that politics is not about emotions or sentiments, neither is it about tribes or regions or political parties. Things are just too hard and dear. They have come to realise that politics is about the reality on the ground; about what we are experiencing. Far from being sentimental or emotional, the people of Sierra Leone have finally woken up to the fact that the country is a business and that they hire the party through their votes to run their business. When a party fails to deliver on their promises that moved the people to vote for them or is running our business at a loss by stealing from our savings, then we have to replace that executive with someone speaking to our issues.
The people of Sierra Leone have been following democratic processes around the world and seen how people vote in the interest of the nation as opposed to a party, tribe or region. A young man cited the past U.S. presidential elections that ushered in President Joe Biden and deposed the incumbent Donald Trump. While Trump and any other American seeking the Oval Office are limited to two terms, the people of Sierra Leone have come to realise that a president can only be reelected if he delivered to the people’s expectations. The same states that Donald Trump won that gave him the edge over Hilary Clinton in 2016 were the same states he lost to Joe Biden in 2020 that saw him kicked out of the White House after just one term. Those states were and still are Republican states, but in the interest of the United States of America, they voted Democratic because Donald Trump after four years had not delivered on his promises. As a matter of fact he had so polarised the United States that the country and people were opening old sores they rather see continue to heal.
Coming back to Sierra Leone, people from across the political, tribal and regional divides, young and old have said President Bio and his Sierra Leone People’s Party have done nothing in these past four years to make them consider voting for him. Far from uniting the country and making things easier, Bio and his team of department, ministry and agency heads have created deeper wedges among the people and have made worse the corruption, lawlessness and violence that they were supposed to be erasing from our public space. Far from his promises in his 2018 Manifesto, they say Bio and PAOPA have made a mess of things.
Today, the country is at a crossroads, and the decision we make as a nation on Election Day, whether in 2023 or 2024, will either make or break us. If we make the right choice, we could see the start of our dream of a modern nation state with all the trimmings; if not, we would just keep sinking into lower levels of absurdity in governance that would lead the international community to question the seriousness of the people of Sierra Leone to vote for leaders with the ability to change things for the better.
Without making a list of all the humiliating things President Bio and his team of educated Diaspora Sierra Leoneans have been doing to us, just last week it was revealed via the 2020 Auditor General’s Report that the chief education officer in the ministry of higher education, holding a doctorate in philosophy, was replaced without proper procedures with another CEO, also with a PhD that doubles as the ministry’s consultant, outside the procedures for hiring such. What is humiliating and insulting to the good people of Sierra Leone is the fact that the outgoing CEO and his replacement were both receiving salaries from the government. Adding insult to injury, the old CEO was making Le30 million, while the new is receiving Le70 million plus pay as the consultant. Can anyone explain to the struggling people of Sierra Leone how two doctors of philosophy can receive all these sums of money without the decency to inform someone in government that they were receiving monies that they shouldn’t have? See how our philosophers behave? See how our philosopher president is behaving?
The time has come for the people of Sierra Leone to own up and admit that we have been hiring thieves to run our business; that the only way to divest ourselves of such people is to hire another set of citizens to make sense of what President Bio and his team have been doing these past four years. The next presidential, parliamentary and local council elections will be the people of Sierra Leone versus President Bio and all those he hired to steal from and humiliate us to the international community. The time for sentiments is over; the reality on the ground is that no matter what party you belong to, we have been suffering as a whole, things are very difficult and our business has failed. It is high time for a new CEO and team to run our business or government.