By Ibrahim Alusine Kamara (Kamalo)
The President Julius Maada Bio Paopa government has again hit rock bottom, keeping sealed lips over 1,114 metric tonnes of rice amounting to 21 ships, gifted by the government of the People’s Republic of China to the people of the Republic of Sierra Leone.
It emerged during a radio interview to showcase the reforms in the agricultural sector when the Minister of Agriculture, Henry Kpaka, affirmed they have received the aforementioned quantity of rice as a gift from the Chinese government to Sierra Leoneans over these three years.
But why the Paopa government decided not to tell the nation when the gift was trickling in during the said three years’ time has left tongues wagging and suspicion among suffering Sierra Leoneans, who say had it not been by a coincidence, they would not have got any wind of it all.
More dismayed is the fact that while the rice gift was being received from China, the government could be callous and cruel enough to allow a bag of rice to be sold to the grieving masses as costly as nearly one thousand New Leones (NLe1000) or one million old Leones (Le1,000,000) in the Western Area, and more than this in almost every part of the provinces.
Not only that, but the popular talk downtown now is that the Paopa government stealthily sells the rice to rice importers in the country who in turn sell it to the Sierra Leonean public exorbitantly as if they imported it.
This is the second scandal hovering over the paopa government about covert dealings with rice gifts to Sierra Leoneans from China. The first was also a huge consignment of the commodity to enhance Sierra Leone’s school feeding programme for pupils.
However, a cabal of top operatives in the Bio government had the temerity to embezzle this ‘school feeding’ rice, thereby depriving the school kids, many of whom are the age equals of their children and grandchildren. Even the intervention of the Anti-Corruption Commission was void of the potency to bring to book and beat the hell out of those state gangsters parading as true representatives of the people!
It can be recalled that under the Government of late President Alhaji Dr. Ahmad Tejan-Kabbah, the late President Muammar Gaddafi’s Libyan government gifted Sierra Leoneans two ships load of rice. But this gift also was never made known to the public until Gaddafi himself visited Sierra Leone and spilled the beans at the National Stadium shortly ahead of the 2007 general elections.
President Kabbah was ending his second tenure then, but his promise that no Sierra Leonean would go to bed hungry by the end of his second term had turned out to be a mere fallacy. So, Gaddafi’s revelation about having gifted Sierra Leoneans two ships load of rice without their authorities bringing it to their knowledge completely eroded trust and robbed the people of the courage to allow the SLPP continuity in governance.
The SLPP eventually signed their government’s death warrant when during the election rallies, some of their campaigners went haywire, littering seed rice all over the streets, and mocking the people to go to “Bommeh” if they wanted to consume rice.
In the view of many Sierra Leoneans, the mismanagement of the Gaddafi rice saga amid mockery against the people by SLPP operatives was a factor that inevitably accelerated the SLPP’s electoral defeat at the hands of the All People’s Congress (APC) party in the 2007 general elections.
It, however, remains someone’s bread and butter if they care to know that history is repeating itself!
Already, this revelation of a new gift of 12 ships of rice to Sierra Leoneans without letting them know about it, serves well SLPP regimes as not being bedmates with transparency and accountability in terms of dealing with gifted rice. And, the authorities’ fondness to keep themselves with the citizens incommunicado over such windfalls could be the basis for labelling SLPP government officials as racketeers, morally degenerated, and atrocious, though they represent the people to better their lives!
Meanwhile, Sierra Leoneans are demanding the Paopa government to come clean of how the China rice gift has been utilised, and why the commodity is still expensive at this time in the face of such a windfall.