President Koroma's New Year Message, High on Rhetoric, Scarce on Substance.

President Ernest Koroma

President Koroma's  new year message to Sierra Leoneans amply demonstrates why he was such an effective insurance salesman. Insurance is mainly about selling things to people they will either never use or they may never have any real use for. If everybody who buys insurance end up getting the benefits they were promised, the insurance companies will simply go out of business, and that is all there is to it. The president's message simply sells a lot of things that simply are not there.

The only way any sane Sierra Leonean will believe all the claims our president made in his 2012 new year message is to drink a pack of Totapak, close your eyes and pretend you are in heaven. If you take the presidents message with a grain of salt, that will not be enough, you will have to take it with a bushel of sugar to really believe the lofty claims in the message.

President Koroma is either blissfully oblivious of the real situation the common man is facing in Sierra Leone, may have surrounded himself with people who only tell him what he wants to hear, or he is telling people only what they want to hear.

The APC government has of course succeeded in certain areas, but much of the successes touted by the party are just the completion of projects started by others. All APC's tangible successes over the last years has been finding more avenues for continued exploitation of the nations vast natural reserves for the benefit of the few.

What success is there really to brag about if Sierra Leone becomes the largest per capita exporter of iron ore while people are now paying 3 times what they used to pay for a bag of rice just 3 years ago. What is the benefit of landing the fiber optic cable to a man who cannot feed his own family.

The president claims to have created thousands of jobs. Where are these jobs, in Mogadishu? Surely they are not in Freetown as there are thousands seeking them as I write and they are nowhere to be found. The president claims to be establishing agricultural business units in every chiefdom, a claim I will only accept after a willful suspension of disbelief, as the truth is that most rural chiefdoms in Sierra Leone continue to be havens of poverty and underdevelopment. With APC's political interference in chieftaincy elections, most chiefs will be willing to claim that president Koroma has plans to send a man to the moon, if only to keep their jobs.

The truth of the matter is that the current government is behaving like a teenage boy given a million dollar bank account. The limited resources of this poor nations are being spent in a fashion that most economists will  simply describe as irrational. Take all the millions that was wasted on the Income Electrix saga. What was the use of spending all those millions buying all those bogus electricity generators when the money could have been simply spent on the completion of Bumbuna. It is such lame political gambits that are currently the main threat to Sierra Leone's development and prosperity as they simply imply a lack developmental focus.

The president's new year message is simply high on rhetoric and devoid of much needed substance. With rampant and unbridled official corruption and drug smuggling scandals now tainting the image of Sierra Leone as a nation, the very fact that the president makes little mention of these makes the whole agenda for change sound somewhat superficial and susspect. Declaration of periods of fasting is a poor excuse for national policy to tackle these serious challenges. God is there for each and every person and with the high cost of food, the president does not need to encourage most people to fast, fasting is simply a tool for survival, as when there is not there, you cannot force there to be there (way e nor day, e nor day...)

Alex Mansary APC new breed

With the serious decline in the nation's educational institutions and the record poor results of students at international exams, the fact that the president devotes only a phrase in a sentence to education in his lofty speech is a simple indication that when it comes to this most important sector, APC simply has never care about education and is not now about to do so.

J. S. Momoh The Godfather

After four years Sierra leoneans expect more than just whitewashing the face of mud structures. What is needed are sober and coherent policies that will put the nation on the path to sustainable development. APC has the tools;  the people are hardworking, the people are on board the train, the youths are fired up, but unfortunately, the government is asleep at the wheel. Election year messages aimed at making a  monkey think it can enter a beauty contest will simply not be enough. The agenda for change is here, and EBK and his team should either get on board or the train will leave them at the station. The time for bogus promises is over, the time for sunstantive action is now. Or you will start looking like him