MINISTERS RESIGNING ONE AFTER THE OTHER AS MAY QUITS
By the evening of Wednesday 24th July, Britain will have its 77th Prime Minister from the ruling Conservative Party. The process of selecting one goes several weeks back since Theresa May announced her resignation following a lot of disagreements over how she managed the process of taking her country out of the European Union after a nationwide referendum approved that.
With a good relationship with the UK, many policy makers in Sierra Leone are thinking whether this country would catch a cold when Britain sneezes out of the EU in October as promised by the man who looks likely to enter Number 10. Getting ready for that and finding a new friend inside the EU probably require another Bintumani Conference. Yes?
Today, however, our interest in this whole drama is that we want to ask whether faced with a similar situation in Sierra Leonean where ministers who disagree with their president on a policy question would resign like Hammond and others have done in the UK. We went to bed last night thinking about this question and the answer we got is that our ministers will NEVER resign. Here’s why:
1. They really don’t take part in any serious policy debates and so cannot disagree. As far as they are concerned, everything is IN THE WISDOM OF THE PRINCIPAL. King Messi was the man who whipped all his ministers in line on this.
2. For them Theresa May would still be in office. They don’t believe in challenging their party policies in parliament. The SLEXIT would have happened long ago with a mighty rubber stamp.
3. Passing bills without thinking too much about the consequences on the ordinary people is what we are used to down here. How can anybody explain the behavior of the Red Camp in their final days in office when they opened parliament to pass bills at midnight for the first time in our history?
4. For our MPs the negative consequences of the Kambia, Kailahun or Pujehun backstop in the event of a SLEXIT from the Mano River Union of ECOWAS would have been of zero concern to them. The few who have tried to explore those issues would have been drowned out or told to go SPEAK GRAMMAR at Fourah Bay College.
5. Some would simply pull you aside and ask: RESIGN AND DO WHAT? Our reply would be WHAT WOULD YOU DO WHEN SACKED?
IS IT CRIME TO BE ASKED TO DECLARE YOUR ASSETS?
Well things are getting really interesting in Good old Sierra Leone. Ogar Biobele and his colleagues doing the COI are now pushing deeper into the underworld of the men in the dark who ravaged our country during the reign of King Messi. By the time the inquiry ends in October we would have found the answers to the issues of grinding poverty, inequality and disgrace left over by an unrepentant King Messi. In fact the guy believes we owe him the world for which he is threatening to make our country “ungovernable”…Your Majesty be careful what you wish for.
Now see what a simple request for people who served the nation for ELEVEN years to declare their assets has caused. They are planning to prevent that by using the courts of our land. Really? Well we the ordinary people of Sierra Leone who put you in charge of those ELEVEN uninterrupted years have the following things to say to you:
1. We absolutely find NOTHING WRONG with the request by the commission for you to declare your assets. Stop trying to get our sympathy claiming you are being hunted. We are not with you on this.
2. Is there something you want to hide from us or what? Although it is incorrect to hide from the people, you have had more than a year to document and hide your assets at home and abroad; so why this unnecessary noise-making?
3. Be assured that we the people are ready to assist Ogar Biobele and his boys with a list of all dubious buildings and parcels of land you are hiding right now.
4. We are also in touch with our patriotic partners in the major capitals and banking institutions in this world. They are compiling a dossier for us. It will include that house in Chelsea in England and a fat account in Romania of all places.
5. We can safely predict that by October we will have many Ribar Hotels all over Sierra Leone, parts of the Middle East, Europe and America. Our former big men and women will deny owning any of their assets. We will take them over and use them as maternity clinics. They belong to us.
FREETOWN – MASIAKA ROAD TO BE COMPLETED AT THE RAPTURE
At the current pace the road construction project between Wellington and Masiaka will be completed a few days to the next general and presidential elections in 2023. Meanwhile our friends and their local counterparts are behind the walls of the toll-gate compound counting the daily collection with glee and laughing all the way to the bank. The agreement that brought our friends from so far away is in the hands of the Red Camp and was never crafted to get the best for us. When Ogar Biobele and friends pass through the toll gates any time soon, we will hear another round of horror stories. Slowly but surely we are getting totally fed up with the crazy turn this has taken – our patience is running out.
Instead of focusing on finishing off the few kilometers of road, our friends from far away are very much concerned with collecting millions and millions of Leones on the backs of our people, so now we call on the New Direction administration to do the following with that little rogue project on our main arterial road:
1. Please publish the project documents approved by that RED Camp-dominated parliament. The people DEMAND that. We want to see what King Messi did on our highway and who the people continuing his work there are.
2. We want to know the exact completion date, even if it’s a new one.
3. How involved are the local people along the road in the monitoring of the project and whether they have been appropriately compensated for their land and troubles encountered during on-going work.
4. We also want independent experts to check the quality of the road being constructed. We don’t want another Wilkinson Road swindle.
5. Please open the gates of those toll road compounds to the public. We want to know what else is taking please there apart from receiving and processing cash bound for that far away country.
BOGUS OBITUARY ANNOUNCEMENTS - THE NEW PASS TIME
So we’ve reached a point in Sierra Leone where the first thing to do in the morning on waking up and the last thing to do before handing over your soul to your maker in sleep at night is to check whether somebody has released your obituary on social media especially if you are a big political figure.
We really can’t understand why social media hacks have suddenly become so obsessed with speculating about the health of our leaders. We are always told never to wish evil on even those we consider our greatest enemies but this has clearly gone out of the control of those who initiated this macabre sport. Boredom is a really bad thing for human beings and we understand why people would go to strange lengths to break out and do something exciting. But speculating about the health of anybody is unacceptable. We recommend the following for people who want to break out of boredom.
1. Run down to the gymnasium and go through some routines to relax the muscles and then have a drink or two with friends.
2. Try reading some Alice in Wonderland stories plotted around winning political power in 2023. That will be fantastic!
3. Spend some time with people who know the story of how Aliko Dangote made his money. After hearing from them, see how you can use that template to produce Sierra Leone’s answer to that great African.
4. Go to any religious leader and ask them to explain what “your ways are not mine” means. Then you will understand why you are still alive despite thousands of people praying and wishing you were DEAD all the time.
5. Finally, think about where all this fight will end for power and other vanities human beings express in partisanship, unbridled corruption, lies and blackmail. It will end in a grave somewhere you don’t know. That’s a good way to avoid trauma
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