By Suhood Komeh, London, UK. January 20, 2024.
What’s so upsetting about Sierra Leone is the noises of partisan tools. Some of them too tribal to allow their minds to grasp at any smarts, to the fact that the country has been returned to a fossilised 1980s and early 1990s discourse - sham elections; coup allegations; state violence; grotesque lack of accountability; evidence-free arrests; intimidation of dissenting voices and opposition figures; regressive tax policies; unjustified executive-expenditure; economic collapse; governance bereft of ideas, and so on.

Suddenly, we are back to flattering praises of ‘gallantness’ and ‘martial expertise’ in the poorly-trained and disgracefully-paid security forces.

Suddenly, a security apparatus that had wantonly brutalised, killed tens of citizens at the behest of ‘government’, is being rinsed of blood, reintroduced as protectors of a state that brazenly cheated an election outcome. Reordered as defenders of a country where citizens are systematically subdued to dispossession and powerlessness. The audacity of the propaganda.

Thankfully, quite a good number of people can see through the condescending platitudes. They are just not prepared to air their disgust at the lack of respect shown them. Sensibly, a deterrent against being humiliated by the government with arbitrary detentions that require begging, grovelling to them for entitled-freedoms. Thus, legitimising their rogue enterprise.

Sierra Leone is not ready.

A lot of tribal operatives perch themselves on complicit couches, phone in hand, waiting to attack those who make the mildest criticism of the country’s obvious ills. As if they are somehow cushioned from the effects of a cruel and persistent decline.

Over three hundred years since the invention of electricity. It remains an illusion in Sierra Leone (and much of Africa), spoken of in chimerical terms or like something the ‘government’ provides socially - free.

The fact of the matter is this. A lot of those who lament Sierra Leone’s dogged failure to progress do so not because they hope to gain anything from it. For the most, time spent on issues is not to wail virtue, but driven by desperation, and hunger for a genuine and just trajectory they could align themselves with. Nothing else.

At this point, what can Sierra Leone offer, that is of material benefit to most people in their late 40s, and 50s or 60s?

Answer: little to fuck all!

We have a country, perhaps the only in the world, in which entering the capital by land, air and sea, is subject to foreign businesses extracting taxes from us. That people can defend such blatant failure of imagination, is why a third-rate political class is strutting around like they own the country and us!

One shudders at the thought of Sierra Leonean governments having to import water. Nobody would gurgle their mouths in the morning. Let alone bathe.

Amongst a plethora, the gravest, civic-fallacy being the acceptance that a company comprising a few people, can run vital infrastructure in a third world country like ours. But an ‘elected’ government can’t. No sensible person should wonder, that even basic rights and justice for the citizenry, are surrogated to foreign guarantors and incentives.

Sod the Millennium goals. We are failing ourselves, not America or anyone else. Which begs this question:

Who’s fooling who here, the factual critic or the sad tribal supporter?

(C) Rasta Rambles