It was told to this medium that the palm tree on the SLPP flag is synonymous with peace, tracing the use of the palm tree to a peaceful Christ entering Jerusalem on a donkey with people laying palm fronds in their path. To many that know the party, it was established on the foundation of peace and democratic governance. Today, this is not what we know about the SLPP. It has now morphed into a party of thugs using any and every undemocratic means to ride roughshod over anyone that gets in their way.
For a quick aside, although then toxically ethnic, the SLPP of yore was a peaceful and democratic political party that went by set procedures and rules, especially the party’s and national constitutions. President Kabbah had changed the ethnicity narrative with him being a northerner and Mandingo instead of the south-east centred party the SLPP was. Kabbah had what we would call a rainbow nation in his parliament with the likes of Alfred Bobson Sesay, Kanja Sesay, Okere Adams, Alpha Timbo, Chernor Abass Bundu, thereby creating an ethnic balance by spicing up the party and moving it away from the tribalism that had gripped the nation.
The party of intellectuals was far from the political thugs and half-baked babblers that have now captured the SLPP. In 2012, hungry for power the TORMENTOR introduced political thuggery and drove staunch SLPP supporters from the party into the waiting hands of the APC. After failing in 2012 and bypassing the sacred SLPP constitution on those seeking the party’s flag or colours, he returned in 2018 to PAOPA take power, a move akin to a wolf in sheep’s clothing as it was the TORMENTOR showing his true colours as forcefully taking power to regain all he had prematurely wasted since 1996.
The SLPP we are seeing under President Bio is not what the SLPP is and was all about. It is evidently a fragment of its former self. Far from expectations, under President Julius Maada Bio all we see is him misusing the party with those capable of challenging him conspicuously quiet. But why have ranking members and stalwarts of the SLPP allowed Bio to ride them roughshod; that is, completely ignoring the opinions, rights, or feelings of others? Why has the SLPP allowed Bio to achieve success by ruthlessly running roughshod over anyone who gets in his way?
Bio was finally able through his thugs from the defunct Kamajor and Westside Boys to drive away people with the potential and background to not only rescue the party but also the nation including but not limited to Med K., KKY, Munda Rogers, Dr Denis Bright and others.
The metamorphosis of retired soldier Julius Maada Bio from the TORMENTOR in 2012 to PAOPA in 2017 has been long in the making. It is an observation of rhetoric that actually defines the orator, and, if we had a culture of truly appraising those stepping up to the plate to lead the nation or assume any public office, this would have long come out. But political analysis such as this was and still is lacking, even from those trained in the humanities and social sciences.
If this had been done, the people of Sierra Leone would have been reliably informed to not even consider voting for him from among the list of sturdy SLPP partisans with the requisite training and work experience to be president of Sierra Leone. When one considers work experience and training, Maada Bio is seriously deficient to assume the highest office in any land, especially when his CV for the 22 years after he agreed to step down in 1996 is bereft of any such requirements for being the CEO of a nation state. We hired an inexperienced hand as Chief Executive, which we are now regretting.
Before now, Sierra Leoneans weren’t really clued up on the history of the man who had left Sierra Leone, especially the hardships and difficulties he had experienced while in self-imposed exile, especially his belief that the nation owes him for going through such. Using the TORMENTOR moniker or pay-line, SLPP convention delegates didn’t consider that the term is synonymous with him being a “nuisance, bane, plague, pest, annoyance, irritation, pain in the neck”, all of which we are experiencing under his four year stewardship of the state that has set many “this has never happened before” records in our governance history.
For the 2012 elections, SLPP convention delegates erroneously chose Bio over people such as Dr Kadi Sesay, who was, just like Dr Juldeh Jalloh, more educated, trained and qualified than Bio. Like Dr Jalloh, Bio used Dr Sesay hoping to use her clout to capture the state. The TORMENTOR, it was said, had returned a broken, broke and vengeful man who had squandered all he had set sail with into the 1996 sunset and was being supported by a lot of the people that surround him today, including his wife.
Today, Sierra Leone and the SLPP is struggling under the weight of a violent and un-procedural and heavily ethnic based regime that has brought back all the banes (TORMENTS) of our national existence to the fore such as corruption, financial leakages, political and security sector thuggery, constitutional bastardisation, education malpractices, killing of people wanting to exercise their constitutional guarantees of voting and peaceful assembly or protest, and so much more.
Bio has finally succeeded capturing the state, reclaiming whatever monies he had squandered and much more (based on the 2018, 2019 and 2020 AUDIT REPORTS on how the executive have been spending our public money without substantiating how and showing us on what they had been spent). The SLPP is being ruled by fear, with partisans, even his advisors afraid to correct him and letting him have his way for fear of reprisals. Bio is told what he wants done, instead of the right thing to do. By surrounding himself with his south-eastern team, he is hoping to use ethnicity to reclaim State House, after which the country would be heavily indebted, ethnically polarised and more corrupt and violent than ever before.
But many who still yearn for the return of sanity, dignity, integrity and democracy in the SLPP are calling on their partisans to return to their senses and make sure that Bio and his gang are not allowed to go beyond 2023, warning that as the nation is finally united against bad leadership, they will be forced to see the SLPP as the problem, for which the party will find it very difficult to return to power long after Bio and his PAOPA faction would have set sail from whence they came after losing 2023.