Happy 51st Anniversary Sierra Leone

Sierra Leone, happy anniversary as an independent nation. We know the past 51 years have been tough on you, but though you may have heard this before, better days may be ahead. You have done a lot for your children. You have provided us fertile land to grow our crops. You have filled your rivers from Moa to Scarcies with fishes of every kind for our consumption. You have provided us fertile palm trees to provide us palmoil for our food and palm wine for our entertainment. You have filled our plantations with cocoa and coffee to sell and send our children to school.

You have provided us mineral deposits in abundance. You have given us diamonds so beautiful they have become the envy of the world. You have given us gold, bauxite, rutile, iron ore and now we have heard that you want to add crude oil as one your abundant blessed gifts to us, what can we say, but thank you.

You have given us the best weather anywhere on earth. We are plagued by neither the extremes of heat nor the extremes of cold. All year long we can walk on the streets of Segbwema and Freetown with songs in our hearts and a spring in our step. We do not know drought or famine. Every year you give us so much rain that we sometimes pray for you to send some to the poor people of Somalia and Ethiopia.

You helped us build good schools, from Wesley Segbwema to Saint Francis Makeni, Bo School to Grammar School, QRS to Methodist Girls High, Njala to Fourah Bay College you have help teach your children the knowledge and skills to go forth in the world and make the sky their limit. From academia to the United Nations your children have excelled. 

You have given us great men. Milton Margai, Siaka Stevens, Sorie Ibrahim Koroma, Ahmed Tejan Kabbah, Davidson Nicol, Arthur Abraham, Eustace Palmer, Lightfoot Boston, Cyril Foray, Strasser King, Salia Koroma, Bai Bureh, James Jonah, Salia Jusu Sheriff, Abdulai Conteh, Akiwanda J. Lasite, Modupe Taylor Pearce, Isaac Wallace Johnson, Kandeh Yumkella,Sir Banja Tejansie, David Kekura Jimmy Jajua are all sons that have made you proud and shown the best you can offer to the world. 

You gave us great women trail blazers; Madam Yoko, Sallay Satta Gendemeh, Yasmin Jusu Sheriff, Shirley Gbujama, Zainab Bangura, Constance Cummings-John, Ella Koblo Gulama, June Holst Roness, Elizabeth Lavalie, Amy Kallon, Isata Nyambe, are all daughters you should be proud of.

You have done all that a mother can do to provide for her children and yet still today we continue to wallow in poverty, destitution and despair. We continue to sleep hungry, to cue for fuel, to have banks deny us our own savings. Some of your sons have over the years repaid your generosity with callousness, corruption, stupidity and greed, and for that we are extremely sorry.

The past 50 years we have failed you. Instead of coming together to build you, we have thieved and warred. Those in power have fallen prey to the temptation of easy money and loose women. We have fornicated, whored and engaged in adulterous behavior. We have stolen and lied. We have burnt and coveted each others property and attacked and murdered our brothers. We have hacked the limbs of the innocent and smeared their blood on the faces of the streets of Freetown. In essence we have sinned and through you we ask the Almighty God for his forgiveness and patience.

As we enter another tumultuous period in our history, we pray to the Almight God for divine guidance. May he expose and shame those who are planning evil and mayhem. Just as we have dragged our malevolent neighbor Charles Taylor to justice may we also accumulate the evidence to lock up any human being that plans evil in your land, no matter which area of the country he is from or what political party he belongs to, as before party there was you, Sierra Leone.

Give us the strength to expose wrong and the audacity to speak to power. Give us eyes to see evil when it occurs and the voice to talk again. No longer will we sit in silence and see others doing wrong while we go to our Mosques and churches and wait for your intervention. We will use our cellphone cameras to record wrong and use Facebook to expose them.

Sierra Leone Happy 51st Anniversary!