Commentary.
By Mohamed A. Jalloh,USA.
Regarding the recent opening of the NASSIT office in Makeni by President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah, it is heartening to learn of the rare apparent good news of the SLPP government’s action to bring relief to the victims of its incompetence and corruption over the past decade — the long suffering people of SL. However, in the interest of accuracy, I am obliged to point out a fatal error in President Kabbah’s following argument for the election of his vice president, Solomon Berewa, as his successor:
"As the Vice President has been my closest associate in fulfilling the dream of establishing this social security scheme, my fervent hope is that you will support him to become the next President so that he can continue where I leave off. This is because the surest way to fight poverty is to ensure that only those who have been intimately involved in programmes to eliminate it are given the opportunity to continue since all they have to do is to fine tune the process."
Even assuming that Mr. Kabbah’s assertion that Vice President Berewa has been his closest associate in fulfilling the dream of establishing this social security scheme (a claim unlikely to be true given Mr. Kabbah’s admission that the dream started prior to the rebel sacking of Freetown when Mr. Berewa was not a member of President Kabbah’s government), that does not lead to the conclusion that Mr. Berewa should be elected president. On the contrary, the only valid conclusion thereof is that VP Berewa should be made head of NASSIT — not of the SL government.
This is because NASSIT does not constitute the entirety of the SLPP government headed by President Kabbah. Therefore, the success of NASSIT is not indicative of the success of the SLPP government. Thus, if Mr. Kabbah is to argue validly that his Vice President Berewa deserves to be elected to succeed him "so that he can continue where" Kabbah left off, such an argument must be based not on the mere record of a sub-agency of the government such as NASSIT, but on the entire record of Mr. Kabbah’s SLPP government.
And since that record is universally acknowledged to be one of egregious failure, with SL having spent each and every year of President Kabbah’s tenure at the bottom of the indices of global development despite receiving more than a hundred million dollars in international aid, electing Vice President Berewa would constitute a vote to continue Mr. Kabbah’s deplorable service to the people of SL.
Finally, because Mr. Kabbah reasonably would be expected to be aware of his own sorry record of failure as President of SL, his failure to properly include it as a basis for promoting the election of his vice president to succeed him is, at best, evidence of his lack of familiarity with the elements of a valid argument.
At worst, it is, sadly, further evidence of President Kabbah’s pervasive malfeasance in dealing with our country’s affairs. In particular, it is evidence of Mr. Kabba’s lack of patriotism —his elevation of his own personal interest in installing a demonstrably incompetent clone of his in the person of his vice president as his successor, above the much more important interest of millions of S/Leonean victims of the clueless duo in alleviating their impoverished condition with a change from the failed policies of the Kabbah-Berewa SLPP government.
Editor’s Note: Moh’m Jalloh, a native of Sierra Leone resident in Maryland, USA, is the founding Managing Director of a financial services firm based in suburban Washington, D.C., USA.
Photo: Mohamed Jalloh, alias Mohm J.
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