Sources within the ruling Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) have intimated this medium that the president’s wife, Mrs Fatima Maada Bio would be solely responsible if the party fails to reclaim State House or make gains in the number of seats in Parliament.
Speaking to this media house during the past Resurrection weekend they said either by neglect or a ploy, President Julius Maada Bio has allowed his wife to assume roles that no first lady in the history of the SLPP and the country has ever had or been allowed to play.
The trio said Fatima Maada Bio has gotten so powerful in the party that she doesn’t allow elected members of the party’s National Executive Committee (NEC) to fully dispense the duties of their office, citing interference from the first lady that the president treats with levity.
The first lady’s influence has gotten so expansive that they accused her of sometimes not allowing the president to answer phone calls from certain partisans, including ministers, MPs and especially from the grassroots. Unless you are in Fatima’s good books, even accessing the president may be impossible.
They accused the president of not only being impervious to advice, they alleged that many of his decisions stem from what or how Madam Maada Bio feels or thinks about the matter.
‘Most of the time we do not have access to the president. The first lady sees herself as the gateway to the president; anything she says goes. She chooses who the president should talk to and who to ignore. We are really walking on egg shells around the president but more so around his wife. Should you be in Fatima’s bad books, you should be counting your days in the president’s good books. This has gotten so out of hand we believe that if we lose 2023, Fatima would be solely responsible. She has stepped on some serious toes in the party these past four years. She has caused so many divisions within the party. Sadly, no one saw this coming. But they say “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”. She has been corrupted by power in a land where our presidents act as kings,’ said a female member of the trio.
They said the first lady is trying to influence the party in a way that she and her husband would be relevant long after they had left the scene.
‘But because she knows absolutely nothing about governance, politics and such, she is just running all over the place making a mess of things. I think she got it in her head that she got the president elected in her unofficial role as campaign manager. We all know that Alie Kabba gets that credit, but not in Fatima’s head.’
A ranking SLPP NEC member said, ‘every election that she got overtly involved in resulted in failure for us’, calling her action coupled with the elections failures as ‘a serious cause for concern’.
He added: ‘From the Constituency 110 election to the Koya and Kailahun elections, we performed miserably. Judging by how those elections went and our current preparations for 2023, the president should really shorten his wife’s reach. People are not happy with the role that she is and wants to play in the party. She is not in the NEC and cannot even assume to decide or have an influence on who should get what position in the party. Things have gotten so bad even strategists cannot access the president to strategise on important issues.’
The proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back came with the election of Madam Hawa Foray over the popular and very effective Madam Fatmata Sawaneh that has created very deep chasms in the party, more so in the women’s camp.
He said the current SLPP women’s leader is ‘unpopular, inexperienced and ineffective because she was forced on the party as Fatima’s choice. We feel like we in the NEC have no saying in how the party is being run; not even on election matters ’.
The trio said they are not confident of Bio’s return to State House, neither the SLPP getting a majority in Parliament ‘no matter how many new ministries, departments and agencies we establish. This government is spending money in areas that are useless, even spending taxpayers’ money on an office for the first lady who is neither an appointed nor elected civil servant’.
‘So while Bio has been running our economy as if the country is his personal piggy bank, we now have a situation on Tower Hill where the president is surrounded by people coming from his wife’s choice of who should be what in the party. She has driven many stalwarts into the background, because if you rub Fatima the wrong way, you will be in her bad books, which spells doom for your political ambition. This has to stop. We cannot allow this country to go back to the days of Siaka Stevens with his government of patronage where grown and educated people did things just to please the president, not because they were right for the people and country,’ they admonished.