What absolute trash, what sickening hypocrisy!
In November 2009 John Benjamin in his capacity as national chairman of the Sierra Leone Peoples’ Party (SLPP) addressed a formal letter to the head of state his Excellency President Ernest Bai Koroma listing a number of concerns. Among those was the India rice saga in which our government requested rice from the government of India at concessionary price to help the suffering people of Sierra Leone. The request was readily granted and a local company Harmony Trading was nominated as agent for the government of Sierra Leone. It was rumoured, a rumour later confirmed by the managing director of Harmony, that the company received a duty waiver of $1million from the National Revenue Authority (NRA) to import the rice, some of which found its way to Dubai. Other issues concerning failure to follow procurement regulations were also raised in Benjamin’s letter in which he invited comments from his Excellency, or an appointment to discuss the issues. His Excellency responded weeks later at a news conference in State House by dismissing the whole affair with a wave of his hand. Comments about that in the media were mixed depending on which newspaper one read.
I have written before that IBM Kamara the acting managing editor of the Standard Times newspaper is a prolific writer, both as a columnist and as an editorial author; he has specialized in drawing the President’s attention to wide ranging issues with repetitiveness that sometimes bothered on boredom. Some time last year in a classic example of flattery and sycophancy, and at a time when the effect of the economic downturn was hitting the people most hard, he wrote that President Koroma had transformed the lives of his people for the better. I expressed dismay that anyone would make such ironic statement at that time.
Now, suddenly out of the blue and weeks after President Koroma’s news conference and an even longer period from when the SLPP chairman wrote his letter, IBM Kamara has come out with another clanger. In the Standard Tmes of Tuesday February 2, under the heading “Did we learn any lessons from the Makeni convention etc?†(that is the APC national convention) he accuses John Benjamin of callousness, of putting political party or self before mama Salone.
He believes that John Benjamin should have adopted a more civilized and democratic procedure by channeling his letter through the civil society movement or Parliament. In short, he is questioning, no, challenging the prerogative and right of the chairman of the country’s main opposition party to raise an issue directly with the leader of the ruling party who is also the head of state and refers to the action as being absurd and diabolic. Can readers see the effrontery and impertinence of praise singers like IBM Kamara? What absolute trash! What sheer and sickening hypocrisy!
Here we have a man who has told it as it has unfolded, who has continuously admonished is Excellency to take bold and decisive actions to carry out his reform agenda. Even as he is on the crusade, unless he is simply on an intellectual exercise, the President announces that he has caught the culprits with their hands in the cookies and that he the President has all the documentary evidence of their corrupt practices, at which stage there is absolute silence, tension rises to a crescendo, and what happens next? Silence only to be broken by pa threatening the known miscreants with the consequences of any repeat action and then walks out in a huff. One expected the great soothsayer and columnist who has accused the rest of us, President included, as not having learnt from experience, turns the focus of his frustration on John Benjamin’s well-intentioned letter, which had already been treated with contempt by his Excellency. That this same IBM Kamara sounds not only sanctimonious, but laments over the failed Attitudinal Change Agenda. Ar sorry for mama Salone
Talk about the “Devil Incarnate,†read the falsehood about former President Tejan-Kabbah and Dr. Fadlu-Deen being at each other’s throat over a building, or of a sealed CONDOM and a piece of BISCUIT being found in a factory sealed bottle of star beer respectively from Sierra Leone Brewery. Read the next edition of Puwauii. Â
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