President Bio is seeking re-election. He would like you to vote for him. Are you willing to vote for another five years of the same hardships, suffering and violence, with the possibility that they will get worse?
To convince the people of Sierra Leone for their votes, he is going around preaching and boasting about his accomplishments. His focus however is not on what have not gone well these past five years. Despite what we know so far about the scale of state theft by New Direction technocrats, there is a whole lot more that we don’t yet know whose disclosure could wreck the state.
But President Bio is not going to focus on this. He wouldn’t tell you about his failures as a president. He wouldn’t tell you that they failed because the president and his team of technocrats chose to spend all the money that was meant to avoid a failed government regime in what can be described as a criminally negligent way.
He would rather say he has accomplished all he promised in his 2018 campaign manifesto, although plenty of what he is claiming as his accomplishments are projects that were started by the previous government. We are yet to see tangible proof of any finished and accomplished infrastructural development project under this regime. Works in progress is what he would tell the people. But he wouldn’t say funding for such projects were redirected elsewhere, mainly to pay the many civil servants President Bio hired in his newly created government ministries, departments and agencies, including the office of the first lady.
But here is what you should expect if you decide to re-elect President Bio for another five year term. Consider Mile 91, Tombo, Lunsar, Makeni, Pademba Road Prison and 10 August. Up to now the nation is yet to meet the killers of our sons and daughters, husbands and wives at all these locations where state security shot and killed protesting civilians. People are still languishing in jail based on what transpired on those fatal days. The level of uncertainty and insecurity that is prevalent across the country will get worse. We know that when things start going wrong, they do go all the way. Nothing has gone well under the New Direction government. There is no evidence that things will get better.
The past five years have been defined by hardships and suffering across the board. In a recent UN sponsored survey on poverty and access to food in Sierra Leone, eight out of ten homes found it difficult to put food on the table. It follows that for the past five years under President Bio and the SLPP, four out of five families living in your community routinely go to bed hungry. It got so bad money was provided by our development partners to vulnerable families in the interior to meet their food needs. If you decide to re-elect President Bio, are you prepared for more hardships of the sort?
The president and his men crashed into governance after making what the people had thought was a serious case against corruption and financial leakages in government he promised to tackle head on. Corruption and financial crimes in the public space had reached endemic proportions. This was the bane of our governance existence and Bio was going to fix it.
Five years down the line, after all the audit reports and other disclosures on how the public purse had been expended under Paopa, President Bio and his team have ended up being the most corrupt regime in the history of Sierra Leone. Corruption and financial malfeasance have gotten so rife and obviously so embarrassing that our president ordered the nation’s supreme auditing agency, Audit Services Sierra Leone, not to include audits of his and the offices of his wife and vice president in the audited report. By this single directive, the president gave corruption a wider berth, and in effect declared the war on corruption lost.
We have all come to hear of the crazy sums of money this regime has spent that will require some inquiry in the future, including a public debt of $3 billion and counting, now imagine you re-elect President Bio for another five year term, are you ready for the future price hikes that will come about, necessitated by urgings from the IMF as being required if the government is to settle her debts?
The constitution of Sierra Leone is the nation’s most sacred document. It is supposed to be cherished, and changed for the good of the public. After five years under President Bio, we see a bastardisation of the constitution, leaving it more prone and susceptible to abuse, of the type that will leave a questionable instrument to lay fallow for 21 days just to circumvent it being debated and exposed for what its true intention is. Re-electing President Bio will lead to the continued assault on the rule of law, something that is being blamed for the indiscipline President Bio named as the main reason for public figures stealing from the state.
Notwithstanding the above, President Bio and the SLPP are asking you to re-elect them. They say they should do two terms. Well, the two term limit is not your birthright, it is a limitation set on the presidency to avoid dictatorships. You see the architects of democracy had lived under absolute monarchs and were opposed to the institution as absolute power is vested in one hand, which is absolutely wrong.
The president must be reminded that he can only get a second five term like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama if, as he has been claiming, he has done the people’s work and accomplished all the promises of his 2018 manifesto. But if he has failed to do the people’s work, evidence of which is plentiful, then he should expect a one term exit like Donald Trump and George Bush the senior.
Therefore, re-electing President Bio for another five year term after he has failed these past five years, we should expect the worst of all that have happened these past five years that we have been complaining about.