By Maxwell Cole
Tuesday – 19th December, 2023
The November 26 events appear to have allowed President Bio and his hawkish Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) government an opportunity to run roughshod on the main opposition All People’s Congress and its strongest patron, the former President of the Republic of Sierra Leone, Ernest Bai Koroma. Since the alleged failed coup, President Bio’s SLPP has targeted the former president with all manner of cruelty, harassment and intimidation. They have not only shocked the country and the world by trying to implicate the statesman in the alleged coup plot, but they have also subjected him to scores of hours of questioning, running over a week. They have further announced an array of unfair restrictions on visits to him by close friends and even his family. Then, on Friday 15th December, the Bio-SLPP suddenly activated a controversial corruption case against the former President that had been neglected for over a year at the Court of Appeal.
On top of all of that, this evening, competent sources at the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) and at the Anti -Corruption Commission (ACC), have confirmed that while the CID has notified the former President Koroma that they would resumed their questioning tomorrow Wednesday 20th, the ACC has also invited him for questioning on the same day.
This wave of witch hunt started with one of his bodyguards -Cpl Eddie Conteh- being extrajudicially executed right inside the former President’s residence in Freetown, while several others in Freetown and Makeni detained for over 3 weeks without charge or access to their lawyers. This includes Warrant Officer John Swarray who was reportedly abducted from the former President’s resident in Freetown. Then his security quarters both in Makeni and Freetown were ransacked and looted. This was followed, nearly two weeks ago, by several raids of the residences of his close friends, three of whom were detained until yesterday.
Since he became president in 2018, Julius Maada Bio embarked on a mission to dismantle the main opposition and entrenched himself in power. Everyone with the barest minimum of knowledge of Sierra Leone’s political history, would know that Bio’s desperation to dissipate the main opposition is a lost course from the get go. Nonetheless, all the while, the Bio-led SLPP has been fixated with this diabolical enterprise and in the process created a nation so divided and in terror that could be compared only with the animosity and violence which existed during the war years, the abusive military reigns of the National Provisional Ruling Council (NPRC), which Bio was a part of, as well as the Armed Forces revolutionary Council
If by inviting former Presidnet Koroma to both the CID and the ACC on the same day is to maximise the damage on his hard -earned reputation and to break the statesman, those who know former presidemt Koroma well would say: ‘this is yet another effort in futility’.
