April 5, 2023
By Kabs Kanu
Maada Bio and the Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) have created an ugly hyper partisan atmosphere that has divided our people tragically along party, tribal and regional lines and set the stage for another conflict in our country, unless God intervenes.
Maada Bio is the accursed chicken that came home to roost. He should never have been allowed to lay hands on power again after his junta NPRC rule during which he help murder Bambay Kamara and 26 others and also, according to President Kabbah , stole $18 million which he frittered away on wild living and women. Maada Bio came for an encore and the ungodly international community led by the then British High Commissioner, Guy Warrington, and some aggrieved people within the APC paved the way for him to seize power once again.
Bio promised Sierra Leoneans a new direction but look at what he has done to our country. He has trashed our currency, destroyed our economy and all our social, political and economic institutions, and even our parliament, judiciary, the media, police and the army.
Maada Bio has also divided our nation tragically along tribal and regional lines and sowed mutual hatred and enmity between our once united people of the Southeast and Northwest.
Bio has brought unprecedented suffering to our already impoverished people. He has made prices of food, fuel and all basic commodities to quadruple since he came to power in 2018. Not only that. Human rights violations and politically motivated killings have abounded in Sierra Leone during his tenure, as featured in the latest reports of Amnesty International and the U.S. State Department. Sierra Leone is still reeling from the murders of innocent protesters at Tombo Village, Mile 91, Lunsar, Tonko Limba, Makeni and on August 10, 2022, and the massacre of hundreds of prisoners and correction officers at the Pademba Road Prisons.
Maada Bio is not showing any penitence for the horrors he has committed and last Saturday his security forces almost murdered the opposition APC presidential candidate, Samura Kamara at the Mile 38 checkpoint near Freetown.
Maada Bio has been cautioned by the European Union (EU), United Nations Representative in Sierra Leone, British High Commissioner, the U.S. Ambassador and the ECOWAS Parliament but he has not only paid deaf ears to them; he has continued to defy these moral guarantors of good governance, peace, stability and respect for human rights.
Maada Bio does not learn from history. He should remember what happened to Samuel Doe in Liberia, Mouamer Ghaddafi in Libya, Mobutu Sese Sekou in the Congo and Ignatius Acheampong of Ghana. He might think that he is undefeatable and will get away with all the bloodshed and governance abuses, but such thinking is born out of ignorance of past world affairs.
Sierra Leoneans are threatening that Bio and his wife, Fatima Bio will suffer for everything they have done to our people. It is only a matter of time.
Sierra Leone is presently sitting on a timebomb and the question is: Did Maada Bio come to usher in a New Direction or Bloody Direction?
