What is all the boast about?
I hadn’t read the official mouthpiece and propaganda machine of the ruling APC party newspaper “We Yone” for some time until the November 1st edition. The reason is simple; the newspaper consists mainly of articles culled from the main Diasporas pro APC on-line newspaper Cocorioko, which is written and edited either by people who have lived abroad for a while, or those who are anxious to draw the attention of the decision makers of the party to themselves. The November 1st edition carried a few such writings. The very outspoken national chairman of the opposition SLPP John Benjamin is the victim of most of the contributions. It is in his zeal for the SLPP and his outspokenness that his detractors find it uncomfortable to live with which forces his detractors to display their ignorance or more correctly their absolute disregard for the truth. These people continue to write as if John Benjamin is a power-hungry contender for the SLPP Flagship position. When they refer to his insatiable desire for power, they forget that he has deliberately disqualified and removed himself from the leadership contest. They would also save themselves much embarrassment were they to read the party’s revised constitution which is available from the government bookshop for a paltry four thousand five hundred Leones. The national chairman is disparagingly referred to as a ‘coupist’ and without any shame they ignore the heroic role of his younger brother late Captain Ben Hirsch who was brutally murdered by ‘sobels’ during one of his missions against the RUF in the rebel war. This occurred in an area where THERE WAS NO REBEL ACTIVITIY. In support of this, the rebels would have carted away all the arms which were still intact in the land rover vehicle and probably hijacked the vehicle itself. The statement that takes the cake for unconcealed bias is the reference to Idriss Kamara who is presented as having being recruited by the others. They forget that it was the same Idriss Kamara that earned the title of Frank Bruno or Mohamed Alie by getting Strasser down with a left upper cut to the jaw in the palace coup. (Photo: Dr. Sama Banya)
There are at least three pages devoted to the current report of Transparency International which has moved Salone fourteen places in three years. One could sense the feeling of cock-a-hoop and jubilation in the front page of the newspaper. But seriously what is there to dance about? Here are a people who are caught with their hands in the cookie jar because of persistent rampant corruption and yet they are jubilating at the sometimes arbitrary figures of an international report. Why do they not urge the ACC to expedite its investigations into the other matters raised at the SLPP news conference?
Readers may recall that when I mentioned the failure of the government at the time to investigate the GST tax receipt contract on the SLBC’s Tea break programme, the minister of information almost went through the roof. I wonder what he has to say or whether he would look me straight in the eye and scream again, now that the ACC has shown an interest in the matter.
I didn’t realize that for a people the majority of who neither held power nor were they contractors under the erstwhile SLPP government to agree to pay 50 million Leones as candidature fee was a sign of corruption of that regime. That is what a staff reporter for the We Yone newspaper wrote about the very successful aspirant presentation rally in Waterloo over the weekend? In any case only 10 million Leones has been demanded and paid so far. But were those photographs of the occasion fakes or is the APC continuing to be jittery at the SLPP’s resurgence? They ain’t seen nothing yet.
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