Ernest Bai Koroma in Kailahun
Those who follow this column regularly may recall that there are a few things about which I like to boast without any attempt at false modesty. The first is that I like to describe it as it is rather than make any attempt to lace up my accounts with fine words and phrases just to make them acceptable to those who prefer to wallow in flattery.
I have over the years cultivated the habit of speaking with candour and without falsehood of any kind. I did say that people of Kailahun district would receive his Excellency Ernest Bai Koroma as President and head of state of our country. I boasted that it would be as only the Kailahun people give to their head of state. I also added that most prominent citizens of the district who live outside including ME would be there to receive him. The visit has come and ended and it is for the President and members of his entourage to judge about the degree of our welcome and the success of the visit itself.
I must give it to the President that he strove hard, though not always successfully to maintain a bipartisan position in his utterances. There were moments when one detected that the leader of the APC was addressing his party faithful or trying to woe the opposition SLPP. It would be fair to say that the people heard him with an open mind, but if I were His Excellency I would conclude that while the people warmed up to his personality and charisma, I would not conclude, let alone rush that the people had opened their hearts to the APC.
In Kailahun town, he attended the 40th day funeral rites of the late Maada Dr. Salia Jusu-Sheriff, it was the only place where, not his Excellency, nor the minister of local government but from an egocentric duo who introduced naked politics into the proceedings. But it was understandable as they were more interested in drawing attention to themselves than to the life and times of the late man as extolled by the minister in his customary presentation for the funeral rite.
I did say that the President did attempt to stay a middle course but he slipped when it came to stating the main purpose of his visit, which was to commission the beginning of the construction of the first phase of the Kenema to Koindu road. He said that the APC had constructed the road from Bo to Kenema and said it was there again to complete the project with the proposed extension as no other government had done so. This was meant to be a jibe at the SLPP; but the President refused to tell his audience everywhere, that once the road got as far as to Kenema, it was labeled “abandoned and forgotten;†and for the remaining 23 years of APC rule it was not even regravelled. To infer that the SLPP had not done so would be begging the question. Did the APC have to contend with a prolonged civil war, with the task of internally displaced persons, refugees and total destruction of life and property? Was not the SLPP totally involved with resettlement, rehabilitation and reconstruction even as the war raged? By the way who commissioned the study on the road or got the first sixty-three million US dollars for the first phase?
The behaviour of newspapers like the African Champion continues to amuse me and remind me of the people of Christ’s days on earth. When he attended dinners they said he was a glutton and when he healed they said he himself must be a devil etc. I alone have been (mis)quoted as not wanting the President to visit Kailahun; I and others planned to “fake†his Excellency by asking the people to turn out in their numbers in order to deceive him. What a mentality. It always amuses me when fellows who sound so condescending in their writings demonstrate that they cannot stand the irritation of their raw nerve areas being touched.
Here was IBM Kamara using the most insulting expressions on John Benjamin and yet cannot take it when his action is described as trash and hypocritical. Therefore, he retorts with insults and slander; in this, he joins the special anti-Puawui brigade. Do he and his type believe that insults would sway me from my objective? Does this erudite writer understand some of the words and phrases he uses in an effort to bring people down?
It was the Standard Times Philip Neville who came out with a slanderous story many years back that I possessed a new red Mazda two-door car. That it was a gift from Michael Fletcher in appreciation of me, (the Foreign  Minister of Sierra Leone) for having nominated him as honorary French Consul to Sierra Leone. To think that such people lack the elementary knowledge of how such things are done leaves one wondering whether they are not charlatans after all. However, the truth is that I have NEVER EVER been in possession of a Mazda car of any description.
Maybe I abandoned my hospital for politics. I invite these pitiable people to enquire the role of the Nongowa Clinic in Kenema and its environs even after my departure or after my abandoning it. Action Against Hunger (Faim) would educate them on the role of the hospital for undernourished and sick children of the war. Africare were so impressed that they put up a special building for that. Maybe the likes of IBM Kamara have never heard the name Dr. Aniru Conteh who looked after all those lasser fever patients in the NONGOWA CLINIC before facilities were later available at the Kenema government hospital. Do they know that at the height of the rebel war the Nongowa was the only health facility that remained open throughout the war? Dr. Nancy Gibson of the University of Alberta and her daughter would educate my friends that the hospital compound was home to more than a hundred internally displaced people most of who were from the Kailahun district. They ought to visit my Banya Street residence in Kenema to see what we suffered from having ninety displaced people cramped in there. And all the time the Philip Neville’s and the IBMs were scheming how to Pull Down Others. Let them be advised that their insults will not deter me from speaking my mind about their characters.
I may not have been a good Foreign Minister in the eyes of these ignorant chaps. But I did more than once get a pat on the shoulder from Thomas Pickering a very respected senior Assistant Secretary of State in the US Department of State, or much nearer home from the former Executive Secretary of ECOWAS; there are any more. At this stage I am getting angry with myself for letting unproductive characters to needle me into boasting; just fancy IBM Kamara asking when I was last in Kailahun! More anon!
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