Sierra Leone presidential hopeful Alie Kabba’s New Year message of hope to the people

Alie Kabba

Sierra Leone Telegraph: 1 January 2017

Fellow Sierra Leoneans, I want to wish you all a truly happy and hope-filled 2017. May the peace and blessings of the Almighty abundantly flow in the direction of those who are genuinely doing everything to make our country a better place for all of us: the tireless healthcare workers; under-resourced civil servants; underpaid teachers, police and army; long-suffering farmers and fishermen; sun-baked petty traders; tragically neglected students; as well as jobless youth and hope-starved citizens, silently crawling and dying on poverty-stricken streets of our cities, towns and villages.

For 50 years and counting, following independence from the British, our country continues to be tossed around, shredded with disdain and tortured to tatters by a rotating gang of greedy and corrupt politicians.

Truth is that the vast majority of Sierra Leoneans — the suffering 99% — have justifiably lost all faith in a clueless and unpatriotic ruling class that forever promises heaven on earth, but always succeed in delivering so little to lift the nation out of excruciating and dehumanizing poverty.

Year in and year out, the unbearable burden of ordinary Sierra Leoneans is increasingly reloaded with all manners of man-made calamities and monumental policy failures of those who shamelessly parade as leaders.

It is crystal clear that under the current APC government, the murky air of national pessimism and the disabling lack of trust in the system, keep mounting with each passing day.

Our national confidence and self-esteem are being brutally assaulted, and our expectations in creating possibilities have been eroded to such a low depth that it has become absolutely normal for us to always expect the worst and accept the mess around us with servile smiles.

Over the years, we have witnessed State offices become tribalised territories. Government positions have been transformed into personalised enclaves, where the favoured few sit tight and lay eggs that hatch into vampires to feed on the blood of the people.

They wantonly misuse their positions in line with the frivolous fancy of the occupier, who expects the nation to clap and dance in naive gratitude to their slave masters.

Those who refuse to join the croaky circus are marginalised and maligned, or simply left to languish in the dark dungeons of overcrowded prisons and derelict police cells.

The very fact that the paralytic corruption in governance is so blindingly brutal, should give more impetus for the opposition to unite now as a matter of patriotic duty.

SLPP must urgently end internal feuding and quickly heal self-inflicted wounds with a renewed focus on the issues that matter to ordinary people.

For me, the general despondence and total lack of faith in this suffocating system, represents the greatest indictment against the ruling class, which has savagely sank our spirits and sapped our confidence in our collective capacity to be architects of a prosperous nation.

But, as a nation, we must find a path to rise up above the rot in spite of the obstacles in our way.

We must never forget that we hail from a place that was once known as the Rice Coast of Africa for our agricultural production and innovation.

We were once the Athens of Africa for our learning and intellectual vitality; and we are still endowed with abundant natural resources, not yet completely looted and wasted.

Our potentials, both natural and human, are limitless. We need to dream. We need to believe. But, most of all, we need to believe in our dreams.

So as another year rolls in and another election date looms closer, it is my fervent hope and prayer that, we will take our destinies into our own hands and work to live the glorious dreams of our people, by voting out the corrupt and greedy cabal along with its rapacious vocation to loot at will and destroy our collective dreams.

Let us make the years to come truly happy ones for everyone, by rejecting the politics of division and misery.

Let us be bold enough to defend democratic values and construct the foundations of a brave new future with everyone in, no one out; everyone up, no one down.

Forward to Victory!!

Your humble Servant
Alie Kabba

8 Comments

  1. Mr Alie Kabba, I know you mean well for Mama Salome! and I personally have respect for you among all the pending SLPP presidential aspirants. But can you tell us how much these four important public service departments workers were paid during the past SLPP government in order to substantiate the first paragraph of your new year’s message to the people of Sierra Leone.

    1. How much the police were paid during SLPP Gov. and how much they earn presently with APC. (don’t forget the bag of rice )?

    2. How much the soldiers earned during the SLPP, and how much they earn presently with APC. (don’t forget the bag of rice )?

    3. How much the doctors and nurses earned during the SLPP compared to APC government of today?

    4 How much teachers and Lecturers were paid during the SLPP, and how much they are paid today with APC ?

    Please Mr Kabba if you believe in democracy and freedom of speech, if you believe we are all sierra Leoneans and have the right to speak on the above issues. please answer the above questions for the benefit of all. Thank you.

  2. Whoever is not hooked by Alie Kabba’s speech must have a psychological problem. It touches on everything which is either lacking or there is not enough of it in the country. The brunt of it is borne by ordinary people who have been reduced to a life of hopeless penury, the tunnel of which has no light.

    The tunnel came into being in 1967/68 when APC and Siaka Stevens were swept into power.

    No leader since then has been able to reverse anything in a remarkable way with the country going through a hellish civil war to further push it into the abyss of backwardness, to the extent that foreigners who come to settle among us have little respect for us. They quite simply come to rob us dry, while putting a few dollars in the pockets of our so-called leaders.

    The culture of our leaders – not caring for the country, as I have already alluded in the second paragraph, took roots in the Stevens era and has not abated.

    Stevens came to power with the promise of working for the common man. People of my father’s generation fell for it. Although I was a boy at the time I can still hear the voice of late my father urging people to get behind Sheki for a better future.

    And he was ready to take on anybody who did not have a good word for Siaka Stevens. By the time he relinquished power to Momoh and subsequently passed on, Siaka Stevens had become anathema to my father.

    The crowning moment of my father’s change of heart came with the execution of M.S. Fornah and others in 1975. “N’thoff n’pon” [meaning the country is finished] – my father declared in a melancholic mood. He became intensely distrustful of all politicians.

    Selected Momoh could not do any better, though some of us had felt that having got out of the thumb of Siaka Stevens, and with his military background, he would pick up the country by the scruff of the neck and rigidly slant it in the direction of progress.

    But he turned out to be another weakling whose military/political career was abruptly ended by Tom Nyuma [Allah/God bless him] and others.

    SLPP came along eventually after the military boys’ stint. They did not have to do much campaigning to win State House, as the memory of APC’s disastrous years were still fresh in the minds of the electorate. But they had learned nothing in the decades they spent in the Siberia of politics to which Siaka Stevens had sentenced them.

    The civil war which had erupted within the party [SLPP] since the passing of Sir Milton in 1964, raised its head again after being dormant for close to three decades. Together with corruption and the withdrawal of donor funds, SLPP once again found themselves in the cold in 2007. When will they learn ?

    Their defiance of the old man [Sir Milton] in 1964 to let John Karefa-Smart become Prime Minister should his (Sir Milton’s] absence become permanent will continue to be a curse on them till they find a way of appeasing the late man, because it heralded the fragmentation of the party to which even Siaka Stevens had belonged.

    I have written all of the above to make the simple statement that as much as Alie Kabba is saying all the right things at the moment, we must be extremely cautious to allow the lessons of history to guide us.

    Let us remember that Ernest Koroma came in with all kinds of promises including a permanent supply of electricity and water. Apart from some other infrastructural projects where are we? Corruption still reigns supreme – a huge drain on everything.

    Power has a strange and insidious way of causing not only myopia, but a lack of peripheral vision too, helped by sycophants surrounding a president.

    What I want to see is Alie Kabba teaming up with Charles Margai [who dragged me into the Ernest Koroma camp in 2007], Kandeh Yumkellah and others to finally remove the shackles which APC and SLPP have had on the nation since the 60s.

    I just cannot stomach the two major parties. All they have brought us is grief. They are twins with identical DNA.

  3. I think based on your speech, you might be among the few that have our country Sierra Leone at heart. I hope people will not be blinded by the detractors. Our country Sierra Leone is in great darkness.

  4. Thank you, Alie Kabba. Your message captures the pain and hope of the people. It is powerful, moving, honest, truthful, and inspiring. THANK YOU.

    It is pathetic that APC propagandists are busy attacking the messenger because they don’t like the message. Their singular aim is to divert attention from the suffering of the people. Unfortunately for them, there are many of us smart enough and ready to counter their baseless attacks.

    I believe that Alie Kabba’s message will not be ignored by all concerned patriots if we want a Sierra Leone in which the voiceless majority poor will have their fair share of the wealth, which is now concentrated in the deep pockets of the few in power and their associates.

    Our country is in deep crisis today because we lack courageous people with the fortitude to condemn hare-brained politicians.

    Alie Kabba is the one shining exception with a long history of fearless leadership and principled commitment to a radical progressive vision for Sierra Leone. Like him or not, he is someone to keep on our radars because he has what it takes to be a formidable political force in defining the future of the country.

    Happy New Year, Patriot Alie Kabba. Keep up the good work. Your support base is growing every day, for your admirers see in you the best hope for a fundamental break from what you rightly called a clueless and unpatriotic political class.

  5. Godwin koroma, from the content of your post I am hard-pressed to assume that you are a Sierra Leonean. And being a Sierra Leonean, I should suppose that you have some general idea (however vague) about the RUF war, provided you were not born long after the war and provided you have a modicum of interest in the affairs of our country.

    However, if you are one of the very few who are genuinely ignorant about the worst mayhem inflicted on our country, instead of feeding on the crap being cooked about Alie Kabba by his APC detractors and other agent provocateur within our Sierra Leonean political circles I would advise that you consider the following points to aid your personal research.

    1) If Alie Kabba had anything to do with the RUF war, as alleged, he would have most definitely being one of the leaders if not THE leader. Especially so when it is being alleged that he was “the architect” of the war.
    Do you not consider it strange that someone who is accused of such a malevolent responsibility was never SEEN or HEARD fighting for/with the rebels or advocating on their behalf, by any one at any time before, during or after the said event? Was Alie Kabba a “mumu” ghost who was seen in the war only by two faced APC liars?

    2) How come NO ONE (neither perpetrators nor victims) ever saw Alie Kabba anywhere near Sierra Leone throughout this period in question? Not even when the rebels finally came to town and took the reins of governance together with the Johnny Paul AFRC “SOBELS” in tow?

    In fact it may interest you to know that throughout this period Alie was in America fighting hard for the rights of disadvantaged immigrants.

    3) Talking about the TRC, you may or may not know that the TRC report is the most authoritative verdict on the war. It is a thick document which was produced out of the painstaking efforts of an OBJECTIVE group of learned people which included international investigators of established standing. Their report listed the names of individuals forming the leadership of ALL the warring factions. Thjere is no name like Alie Kabba, because there was no Alie Kabba involved. Period!

    Secondly, after interviewing over 200 witnesses the TRC, in their wisdom, decided that Alie Kabba did not know about the war “even to be invited as a prosecution witness”.

    4) If Alie was “involved” he could have been invited arrested and tried. Alie was not HIDING! Alie was not more powerful than people like Hingha Norman (who was a sitting Defence Minister at the time of his arrest), or Charles Taylor (an ex Head of State). So you cannot argue that the TRC was somehow “scared” of approaching or arresting Alie

    Please also note the following:
    A) The RUF is a registered political party with its head office in Freetown. If you walk in there and ask them they would tell you who was or is RUF. Men like Ambrose Golley, our current APC Ambassador to South Korea who was the spokesperson for RUF during the war, or SOBELS like Leather Boot who is a key bodyguard/enforcer for EBK.

    B) The main aim of this silly tales that even serious APC members are ashamed to be associated with, is to smear the reputation of a fearless patriot and distract attention from the ills being inflicted by this rogue APC regime on our helpless people

    C) The advice is that instead of APC stooges muddling away in lies and libel, they should actually be running away from their mountains of corrupt and nefarious practices which actually gave birth to the war in the first place.

    Alie Kabba is a radical progressive nationalist who is focused on working to reverse the rot and the decline that is being presided over by the corrupt and greedy ruling class. His goal is to restore the lost glory of our country and enhance the dignity of our people by creating political awareness and effecting policy changes.

    We know that the APC doesn’t like that. But it is the condition of our people that interests us, not the likes or the dislikes of the corrupt APC cabal.

  6. I think it is high time Alie Kabba tells Sierra Leoneans his version of his alleged involvement in the rebel war. He must not keep this matter secret. He needs to refute this dangerous allegation in order to win peace loving Sierra Leoneans like us.

  7. The ringing voice that gives meaning to the word “opposition” with salient truths that many shy away from!

    Alie Kabba is no stranger on the Sierra Leonean political scene. What is strange for most Sierra Leoneans is the advent of a man who is willing to risk everything to call things by their names! Someone willing to say what the people really feel!

  8. No wonder this man is under threat. He speaks our minds…..He means so well for his people… May God in heaven grant him His victory… May the enemy never have the last say or triumph in his life. And may he continue to see Gods hand in anything he finds to do.

    A prosperous, blessed, Godly and fulfilled life is wished for Alie and his family, this year and in many more years to come.

    Happy New Year!

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