Sierra Leone as at now, going forward needs a real and serious a leadership with the required capacity and knowhow to reform the country and redeem the people from the current socio-economic decadence and bad governance.
Sierra Leone is today majorly affected by the bad governance, fiscal impropriety, financial mismanagement and economic bondage Julius Maada Bio and his Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) have imposed on the small West African nation in the last five years.
His change agent dream was killed long before he even settled down to start work at State House. Under his rule as a president, cost of living has become seriously challenging for the masses, compared to what it was before he took up office in April 2018. The era most people hoped was going to be prosperous with economic boom, has become shocker to majority if not all Sierra Leoneans, who have had to see unprecedented spate of rise in prices or inflation and flying foreign exchange rate of the Leone to the peak of now changing One Hundred United States Dollars to over Two Million Leones. That is not a change for good. And the leadership presiding over this current economic malaise and dire hardship in Sierra Leone is not a change agent. A revolutionary with positive change strategies for the betterment of his/her people must be able to fix or solve problems. This is exactly what Bio failed to do in his maturing five-year misrule.
Bio who is now in his last few months in office, promised to do so much economic reforms with developmental goals, which were not actualize throughout during his tenure. Bio’s misrule been characterized with the imposition of abject poverty on Sierra Leoneans, occasioned by inflation, legitimately caused by high government public expenditures, on overseas travelling, offering him ill-advises that led to the gross mismanagement of the fiscal and finance sector, under the supervision of the Ministry of Finance and the Bank of Sierra Leone, all of whom conspired against nation and swindled taxpayer’s money of their pay masters’ personal luxuries and wealth creation at home and overseas.
Lies! An agent of change can’t behave in such a dishonest manner. Change agents do not reverse or stall the progression of their country, such as how Sierra Leone has been taken into the woods and to the war days of the 90s by President Julius Maada Bio and his bunch of incompetent SLPP stooges since April 4, 2018, to date. Retrogression is not the work of an agent of change.
Reflecting vividly on Bio’s New Direction campaign manifesto promises of 2018, many hopes were raised for a better livelihood of all and sundry. But sadly, for the people, five years down the line nothing has really changed for the better under Bio and his band of failed SLPP hustlers and scammers. Rather things have continued to go from bad to worse in all sectors with the economy now battling its life on a life support machine, as the government has rendered the people poorer with degrading standard of living.
It is certain that only the legacy Bio and his fake New Direction will be leaving with Sierra Leoneans after 4 April this year are bad governance, imposed poverty, gross human right violations and abuses, divisive nation along regional and tribal lines as well as political cleavages, disregard for constitutionality and democratic values – the list of anomalies is endless. These among several awful conducts under the bad governance of the SLPP and Bio are not good to talk about as they have reversed gains made over the years by his predecessors. The governance profile of Bio represents no change. And it also tells Sierra Leoneans and the world that President Julius Maada Bio is not a true representative of change in the real sense of the word; rather he is a mishap and a double failure who deserves no re-elections come Saturday June 24, 2023. His administration in the last five years has changed nothing in Sierra Leone save for mayhem and hardship for the country to an unbearable economic status that is urging people to flee their country of birth for other places seeking a better living standard, which were not the expectations of the people when they voted him into office.
Further on his failures, the Bio rule, apart from his lack of capacity to build and improve the nation, he also failed to transform the economy, which has long been noticed from his recycling of ministers at the Finance Ministry to State House. Bio came in with Jacob Jusu Saffa who has been busy all the time propagating the bread-and-butter slogan with the hope of solving the country’s economic challenges but was the first public servant that publicly accepted economic failures in the finance and fiscal management of the country.
Jusu Saffa told the nation in an interview with Radio Democracy FM 98.1 talk-show programme that Sierra Leone economy cannot be easily reformed even in the longest possible time, clearly exposing his incompetence and failure in handling or addressing the situation. That too was never a change by the look of things. Hence Julius Maada Bio with his New Direction has failed Sierra Leoneans for the second time. He deceived the people in 1996 when he had wanted to hold on to state powers on the pretext of trying to bring about democracy. And he has failed again under a façade of democracy. Bio therefore only represents negative change and not a change for good. Hence Julius Maada Bio is not an agent of change and must not be re-elected for a second term.
