President Bio despite campaigning on the platform of Free Quality Education sprang surprises before world leaders and Sierra Leoneans when he pronounced during his inauguration ceremony that his administration is launching three peaceful wars on Poverty, Corruption and Lawlessness.
Added to his highly ambitious Free Quality Education Scheme, the President had also boasted to combine this project with three wars.
He was quite confident that he would take on the three wars headlong within his five-year term in office.
His military background and the activities of the NPRC of which he was a very strong member, were factors rife enough to send the message to everyone that he has the ability to deliver on the high spate of indiscipline and lawlessness that have taken over the country across all sectors in the country.
Gansterisim and clique violence are on the increase in schools and communities leading to killings, maimings and other felonious offences.
The Police had lacked the wherewithal to handle such offences.
The situation was also the same in all other sectors including the civil service where productivity levels are very low largely because civil servants turn up late for work and also leave earlier.
A very senior citizen has noted that if even the President had simply campaigned on discipline he could had simply won the 2018 elections.
Few weeks after he took over, we heard announcements of a number of measures by his administration which were geared towards sending the message that it was not business as usual for civil servants who turn up late for work, ride against the traffic, the misuse of government vehicles by officials and so forth, and the increasing clique violence and gansterisim.
The President also introduced a number of measures which were to ensure that fiscal discipline was maintained such as control of the wage bill, holding of workshops and seminars in government premises instead of hotels and other private entities and so on and so forth.
These so called measures were not able to stand the test of time and suddenly the country descended back to the status quo.
Civil servants now turn up for work late than ever before, the country’s wage bill has gone up, Ministries and Agencies have left their well furnished and renovated conference rooms to hold seminars in private institutions, the rate of lawlessness is to the point that Sierra Leone has to play a whole international match behind closed doors just because irate youths attacked the Liberian National Team in Freetown.
The Police is more politically conscious now rather than addressing their primary responsibility to fight fear and the fear of crime.
The rate at which Ministers had travelled before though ban was alarming and the figures we are getting as the overall cost of travelling by the government could be well enough to pay our starving teachers.
The issue of fighting poverty is even not worth mentioning for the simple fact that we are not able to push through this stringent measures as Magufulli of Tanzania has done, who is also in an African country like ours.
The Tanzanian President has provided a perfect example for his Ministers and other Government officials to follow by not traveling out of the country.
He has maintained that he has quite a number of Ambassadors in most countries and their business is to represent his government at international conferences and meetings.
The savings the country has made are quite significant. The argument that President Bio has inherited a country whose image is in crisis and hence he needs to travel abroad to rebrand the country and lure more investors, is a farce that can no longer be accepted by the people of Sierra Leone.
The ordinary Sierra Leonean has continue to suffer amidst the President’s fight on poverty as things are skyrocketing by the day.
The Central Bank as well as the Ministry of Finance are engaging in high expenditure projects and not allowing the economy to grow.
They have failed to roll out economic policies that will simply have a turn around on the economy.
The Minister of Finance has been blamed for failing to provide the much needed solutions he had boasted about during the campaigning.
Dr. Kandeh Yumkella of the NGC has maintained that government needs to avoid the extra expenditure and grow the economy with diversification in the agricultural and manufacturing sectors which, according to him, have huge potentials for growth.
The NGC leader has opined that the Bio government has not shifted from the normal ways of doing things as more jobs are still created for the boys thereby increasing the wage bill.
The fight against corruption is working but its sustainability is being questioned.
The new ACC boss is still to face the litmus test after doing a year in office.
He has brought new life into the fight against corruption brining new ideas and initiatives at which corrupt officials are now asked to refund stolen monies along prosecution and other related approaches.
The test of the ACC will be fully rife when the first 2018 Auditor General’s Report will be made public by the AASL.
But on the whole, the President has had more on his table to chew with regards the three wars and many are doubtful whether the President would make any meaningful headway with these wars.