By Kabs Kanu
It is very, very annoying and nauseating to see the ill-shaped President Julius Maada Bio consciencelessly going around expatiating impunity of the most prurient, vulgar and sinful type, pretending to be the President of Sierra Leone, when he is not. Maada Bio stole the Sierra Leone in broad daylight and seems to be getting away with everything.
The good thing that God ever did for some of us was to have taken us out of Sierra Leone. If a man like me had the living in Sierra Leone today, the results would have been catastrophic. There is no way that I would not have vented my anger for the needless killings of my people and bloodshed by Maada Bio, plus his horrible human rights abuses, lawlessness, disdain for the constitution and morality, his brutal abuses of the opposition, elections robbery and impunity.
President Maada Bio is so annoying and waxing worse in his blood and corruption-stained tyrannical and lawless rule in Sierra Leone that only God knows how some of us would have responded.
But as we say in Sierra Leone, talk go, talk cam, Bio’s impunity owes itself to many immutable and indisputable factors: The impotence of the opposition All People’s Congress , the shameful lack of patriotism by civil society, the media and intellectuals and the hypocrisy of the international stakeholders and moral guarantors ,including the United States of America.
I say this with charity to all and animosity to nobody. The truth must be said.
Bio is holding the APC’s feet under the fires of suppression, oppression, bullying, blackmail and stagnancy because the very APC has become a cowardly and disunited political party , riven by internal jealousies and infighting among its leaders, power-consciousness, self- perpetration, wicked over-ambition for the presidency in 2028, disgraceful dissonance in ambition and lack of a spine and backbone.
How can a whole political party have its members arrested unlawfully by the SLPP just for demonstrating at the party’s headquarters on the day moral guarantors and the international stakeholders of the Tripartite Committee were meeting with the party executive and the APC remains spineless and not discharging the fire and brimstone of an oppressed political party (to have them released)? They are just releasing weak and boneless public statements.
Whoever bewitched the APC? This is not the APC we grew up to know. Bio has no time for your press releases. The only language Bio will ever understand is PEOPLE’S POWER.
If the SLPP had been in the opposition and were being mistreated and bullied by a Maada Bio as is happening to APC today, would Sierra Leone have been governable by now? You know it would not have been so.
Maada Bio knows that the APC is impotent and that is why he keeps taking advantage of the party since he came to power in 2018. Could this be also happening because it could be true what some people are complaining that the party executive may have sold out to President Maada Bio? Has Maada Bio bought the APC?
Whenever social media or party activists and radicals call for a massive nationwide demonstration against the needless killings, human rights abuses and lawless leadership of Maada Bio, the very APC executives and supporters of electoral justice go all out to thwart it. And it is even astonishing and very annoying to hear that the very police who arrested APC supporters last Tuesday at the party headquarters were called out by the APC Executive.
What is the APC looking for in Sierra Leone?
And while the very political party is being mistreated (the APC) is not showing any serious inclination to free itself, look at the hypocrisy, double standards and stinking connivance with Bio by international moral guarantors and stakeholders, including the U.S!
Bio thumbed his ugly nose at no one but these very moral guarantors themselves last Tuesday when his security forces came out to show their tyrannical proclivity under the very noses of these international stakeholders by arresting the APC demonstrators! If Bio had not expected these moral guarantors to back him in his undemocratic and tyrannical oppression of legitimate dissent to the arrests, would he have carried them out? The demonstrators misjudged the moment. They believed that the guarantors and negotiators were serious people and Bio would have been afraid to show his dirty garments of tyranny under their noses. How mistaken they were. They did not know that the moral guarantors were actually surrogates of Maada Bio.
Since the APC members were arrested, what have the moral guarantors done to have them released? They saw it happening? Did they question it ? Has the American Ambassador, who is the mouthpiece of the international moral guarantors, come out in protest against the unlawful arrest of the APC supporters on Tuesday? Has he demanded their release?
Bio is snug in the belief that not only is the APC weak and impotent but even the international community are secretly, deviously and hypocritically backing him. And we have been warning the U.S. and international community against fostering such impunity in a despicable dictator like Maada Bio. But they are not listening. The U.S went and signed the Millennium Challenge Corporation $480 million Compact grant with the Bio government. It was the greatest betrayal of the Sierra Leonean people by the United States of America! It was a crying shame to America.
Nothing reinforced the belief that even the moral guarantors and international stakeholders are a sellout than the statement they released after coming to Sierra Leone and meeting with the unserious and direction – less APC, SLPP, civil society and other local stakeholders to monitor progress so far made in the implementation of the recommendations of the Tripartite Committee and the Agreement of National Unity.
Is this statement a true reflection of what is going on with the Tripartite Committee recommendation and the cursed Agreement of National Unity? How many recommendations have the Bio government implemented or shown a serious commitment to implement? Politically- motivated cases have not been dropped; MPs, Mayors and councillors who called off their withholding of service and returned have not been given their backpays; political detainess are still languishing behind bars. In fact, the SLPP said they cannot account for over 300 of them. Did the moral guarantors and stakeholders ask what happened to them? Yet in this asinine press statement below, they are declaring that they are satisfied with progress so far gained in the implementation of the tripartite recommendations. What progress? It is all lies and dishonesty.
By the way, where are the ECOMOG forces that were supposed to have landed in Sierra Leone on September 15 to help implement the tripartite recommendations and enforce the Agreement of National Unity? We hear that President Bio has even delayed their arrival because he wants their number reduced to only 300; that they be deployed only at Lungi and their mission changed to mere advisers. What did these moral guarantors say or do about it? NOTHING! Their mission was dead on arrival. So, what are these moral guarantors also looking for in Sierra Leone?
As for civil society and the media, the least said, the better. They are neither moral guarantors themselves nor watchdogs for the people .Of the nearly 30 print newspapers in Sierra Leone, only few newspapers like the NATIONALIST, THE FORUM, THE OWL, THE NIGHTWATCH , AWARENESS TIMES, C4D are asking the SLPP Government difficult questions. All the rest have been bought by Bio and are lapdogs and government praise-singers. What a shame for a country once regarded as the FLEET STREET of West Africa for robust, pro- people journalism.
The Sierra Leone civil society is the most disgracefully sold out entity to a fascist and anti- people government in the whole world. Controlled by drunkards, tribalists, hawkers and money- mongers, criminals, brown envelope opportunists and conscienceless hustlers, they do not advocate for the people. They all support human rights abuses, killings, political repression, lawlessness and misgovernance in Sierra Leone. They are led by shameless imbeciles who care only for their pockets. It is a disgrace to Sierra Leone.
Of course, professional bodies and the intelligentsia have since washed their hands off the destiny of their country. Sierra Leone is the citadel of pseudo-intellectuals and pseudo- intellectualism in Africa. What a shame for a country once hailed as THE ATHENS OF WEST AFRICA. Unlike Liberia, Ghana, Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya etc. where the intellectuals and professional bodies are very vocal and defensive of the welfare of the people, Sierra Leone’s intellectuals live to eat cassava leaves, chase small girls on campuses and around the country and sell grades to students. The so-called BOOK PEOPLE of Sierra Leone are good for nothing. This is one of the reasons for the rise and success of the blood- thirsty tyrant Maada Bio.
SHAME ON SIERRA LEONE
