By Ibrahim Alusine Kamara
Sierra Leone continues to go down the path of ugly history as a result of incompetent individuals cramming the realm of state governance, without any iota of shame.
But rather than being repentant for having thrown the citizens into the chasm of misery in their daily lives, because of their ineptitude to effectively man the affairs of the country, these individual jokers, parading the nooks and crannies of government, continue to feed the general public with unpardonable lies with brazen impunity.
Even as they have returned the country’s capital city to the days when it was labelled the darkest city in the world, the paopas continue to lie, instead of telling the reality about the electricity situation under their watch, stemming from the inability to pay a whopping sum of about forty-eight million dollars ($48,000,000) to the management of the Turkish Karpowership, the power providing contractor. The individuals do not just stop at telling untruths but are said to have now resorted to committing fraudulent dealings with contractors, who, amid the government’s lack of the finances to bankroll public services, are confirmed to have pre-financed the provision of a lot of the same.
The government of the Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) led by Julius Maada Bio promised the people of Sierra Leone heaven before assuming state power, but it has now become clear that he has landed them in hell! In the height of the 2018 election campaigns that ushered in Julius Maada Bio as President, he promised to fix the “bread and butter” issue within six months of assuming the Presidency. Shortly after that as power exuberance could have it, President Bio suddenly announced an undertaking to construct a bridge across the Atlantic Ocean from Freetown to Lungi. Further, along the line, President Bio assured Sierra Leoneans of establishing a bakery in Freetown to curb the high cost of bread, amid the promise to provide millions of jobs for the country’s young population.
On top of that, he promised his compatriots food sufficiency to come from the Tormabum Rice Project, including good road infrastructure, medical amenities, and other goodies in all sectors. However, every little promise by President Maada Bio and his SLPP, critics say, has turned out to be designed to trick the conscience of Sierra Leoneans into appreciating the Paopa regime tagged as a “New Direction” Government.
Over and above, President Bio rolled out a flagship programme of his government popularly minted as Free Quality Education (FQE), but just months into the questionable second term of his Presidency, the FQE, which he claimed to be causing parents and guardians to save tens and more millions of Old Leones, has suddenly gone defunct. Now, reports are fresh and viral, etching Bio’s government of ‘Paopacy’ in the records for reportedly issuing bounce cheques to outstanding contractors who have pre-financed project activities and providing goods and services to both the public and the government. It was gathered that the Paopa Government owes many contractors colossal sums, running to several billions of Leones. This ugly development has reportedly incapacitated most of the said contractors, to the point that they were perplexed and no longer able to function effectively. They only now have their hopes placed on the repeated assurance of payment that turned out to be unfulfilled pledges by officials at the Finance Ministry.
Meanwhile, when the cheques were issued to the contractors by the Ministry of Finance, their long hope turned out to be a sudden shockwave in their business sojourn, as the said cheques proved to be bounced and eventually rejected by their various bankers. If this is not barefaced, one wonders what it is! The issue remained the talk of the town at press time, with well-meaning citizens expressing dismay at the Bio government for what they referred to as self-sabotaging behaviour. The citizens say this manner of dealing with valued contractors is not just scandalous, heartless, and petty, but could be viewed as fraudulent and a way of scaring away potential contractors from doing business with the government.
