Why President Koroma Rewarded Musa Tarawallie’s Loyalty
SLPP opponents and critics of the ruling All Peoples Congress (APC) Government have turned it into a cheerful but malicious hobby of damning everything good that President Koroma has in mind for this country’s overall development, including his selection of a cabinet to man the affairs of the state. (Photo: Lands Minister, Musa Tarawallie)
It is fact that whenever President Koroma makes an important national appointment intended to forward his development plans for the country, a grumpy pro-opposition SLPP press quickly finds ways and means to discredit the President’s motive.
Thus it is that a certain segment of the print media has taken lately to publishing articles that erroneously maintain that the Shears-Moses Report on political violence that wracked the nation after the 2007 elections in places like Freetown, Bo, Kono, Pujehun and Tongo Fields during the period of the Agenda for Change indicted the then Minister of Internal Affairs, Musa Tarawallie, as a key perpetrator.
However, the Attorney General and Minister of Justice, Frank Kargbo, from a very educated legal point of view, has come out to defend Musa Tarawallie by stating categorically that the Shears-Moses report has no constitutional basis for recommending that he should be barred from holding any public office for five years.
All the bad press that over the years has been cascading on the head of Musa Tarawallie stems from the simple fact that he was originally a staunch Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) supporter who was close to the 2007 presidential flag bearer, Solomon Berewa, but chose to defect with others like Charles Margai to set up the People’s Movement for Democratic Change (PMDC) as a direct reaction to the nepotism, autocracy and, undemocratic and way and manner the then ruling SLPP conducted the party’s affairs.
Musa Tarawallie’s political sojourning ended with his abandoning of the PMDC too to join ranks with the APC because of the leader Charles Margai’s monopolization of the leadership and affairs of the party.
It would have been good if those who have turned it into a pleasurable pursuit to target the cool calculated, hard-working Musa Tarawallie for calumny and castigation to try to get to know him first as a fellow human being.
SLPP’s hate of him stems from the fact that Musa Tarawallie is a honest, straight-forward person who cannot compromise with the hypocrisy and deceit that characterizes the leadership of the SLPP.
So when he chose to leave them before the 2007 elections, the SLPP started a wicked campaign of damnation against him, among other things saying he is not educated and that President Koroma had no right to make him a minister in his government. Yet was this same SLPP that was complaining that President Koroma had appointed no South-Easterners in his cabinet.
Because the SLPP perceived Musa Tarawallie as a defector who had taken valuable SLPP secrets with him to the SLPP, they both feared and reviled him.
Consequently, everything imaginably vile was concocted against his personality to get President Koroma to drop him from his cabinet. But to his credit, Musa Tarawallie took it all quietly and magnanimously while continuing to perform diligently the ministerial functions President Koroma had assigned him.
The campaign to “damage” Musa Tarawallie’s personality and image got worse when prior to the campaigns for the 2012 elections, the pro-SLPP press reported that Musa Tarawallie had rented a house in New London in Bo city and had housed armed, drugged thugs there to unleash havoc among SLPP supporters.
However, it is to the credit of President Koroma that he remained deaf to all the unfavorable news spewing forth from the SLPP propaganda mill against his Minister of Internal Affairs. Today, under the Agenda for Prosperity, President Koroma has rewarded Musa Tarawallie’s loyalty to him and the APC Government as Minster of Lands, Country Planning and the Environment, a tough ministry that needs an equally no-nonsense political leader.
By Moisa S. Keikura
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