Nine months into the reign of President Bio and thehis New Direction Government one will be tempted to ask the question, whether the Sierra Leonean electorates will vote President Bio again come 2023.
The answer will obviously differ concerning who you talk to across the country’s polarized political divide. For the ones in the opposition APC they think that, in fact, their victory was stolen from them as a result of an international conspiracy led by the British Government and other critical international financial institutions, who had merely starved the country and the then ruling APC party of the much needed funds very close to the March, 2018 elections.
SLPP supporters, on the other side, believed their President has delivered on his Education flagship project, which had remained a doubt amongst opposition supporters. They are of the opinion that the President has historically put measures in place to curb wastages by developing the Treasury Single Account and that his government has single handedly funded important development programmes mainly from domestically generated revenue without a single external support.
Other set of Sierra Leoneans, who are very neutral and mainly critical of both the APC and SLPP, believed that the New Direction, like the APC, have failed to provide the new direction they promised in many areas. The new government is believed to have used tribalism and regionalism in political appointments with the South Eastern Region bagging the lion share in cabinet and other appointment issues. They have dismissed a huge number of Sierra Leoneans who they believed belong to the opposition APC; they have embarked on frequent overseas trips abroad with bloated delegations just like the old, etc.
Many believed the SLPP like the APC have not been able to institute the real change expected as the economy remains in shambles with all the huge revenue mobilization and the recent IMF resumption of the Extended Credit facility Programme. The country remains hugely divided as result of the very contentious elections that saw the government come to power.
For these reasons and a number of others, this set of Sierra Leoneans believe the SLPP’s New Direction, just like the APC, is never an option for the development of the country and hence a third force is necessary for the development of Sierra Leone. How will we arrive at getting this third force when the new kids on the block, the NGC and the C4C, appear to head in the opposite direction in the political divides.