A rejoinder to Cherinoh M. Bah’s frivolous opinion piece
By Abdulai Braima
Chernoh M. Bah of the pointless opposition NDA party, a self-styled “socialist” Chief with a typically notorious bourgeois bearing, is a sort of funny guy.
He is one of those flighty political theorists who jumps from pillar to post before landing in a hole. When a man creates negative ideas in his own head and proceeds to feed on them, it starts to spill over the brim of comicality when he tries to force-feed those ideas to the unsuspecting public in little spills of poisonous spite.
In his latest post, couched in a sorry string of one-sided eruptions, the only “wedge” I see in Mr. Bah’s article is something lodged in the head of Chernoh Bah.
The problem with Sierra Leone, it must be emphasised, is not with the ordinary masses. Not at all! It is with the discordant singsong chattering of detached delusional elitists like Chernoh M Bah!
Words like “tribalism” and “regionalism” are just elements in the divisive toolbox of all-knowing smooth-talking elites who frequently employ phrases that are deliberately designed to format the tune of negative sloganeering into revulsive theories. These discordant beats, although having no relevance to the ordinary man or woman, have always, sadly, been latched upon by a certain group of politicians who have never tired of ruining our nation.
Let us face the facts here: you do not even have to go as far back as George Washington. The pronouncements of former president George Bush Jnr promising that the vile terrorists who lit up buildings and murdered people in America “will soon hear from us” and his subsequent speech at the UN should give us some idea on how to treat despicable murderers and arsonists. Even president Obama did not go so “softly” with people who see murdering others as their preferred mode of “political expression”. Criticising President Bio for a “hard-hitting speech” against those who speak the language of hate and employ violence as their instrument of choice, should sound terribly unfair in anyone’s opinion. No president or state would allow any group (whether they come in the form of misguided youths or in the guise of a political outfit) to manipulate the population through gratuitous violence, coordinated or “spontaneous”.
Chernoh M. Bah is an obsessive theorist who masquerades as a journalist while creating and decorating endless falsehoods to hide his political desperation. In his latest outpouring, Cherinoh claims (without the skin of a proof) that there is a “wedge between foreign diplomats and Sierra Leone’s president” as a result of the president’s recent robust speech during which he sternly warned the terrorists, who have been busy burning houses and murdering Sierra Leoneans while openly boasting about their dastardly antics on social media forums.
Chernoh claims to have “leaked” papers that spell out a decision by diplomats to “boycott” (note his curious next phrase) “the president”, for how long, he did not state.
What he did not also state is that it is very normal, in fact highly expected, that the least that any democratically elected leader should do is to make hard-hitting statements against those who use TERRORIST ACTIVITIES to “express their political views”. Chernoh should do well to listen to the speeches of other leaders whose countries face (or have faced) similar violent outbreaks. In neighbouring Guinea, when the RUF started toying with incursions into Guekedou, the late president Lansana Conte openly promised to “sacrifice any district” which harbours rebels. As was evident in that, and many more examples, leaders do not just “SPEAK OUT STRONGLY” against violent rebels or terrorists, they hit them hard, again and again. From presidents George Washington to Barack Obama to Donald Trump, the lesson is clear and unfailing: speak to those who are bent on destroying the state using a language they are best familiar with and chasing them wherever they may want to hide. Who best can fit the description of a “terrorist” than those who arrogantly march into a community clinic (housing women in labour and caring for HIV patients) and light up the whole place? Who goes into a police station and burns it to the ground? A terrorist? No? Chernoh, you may conveniently describe such acts as “political expression” I call it blatant terrorism, or at least the beginings of a bloody rebellion that is no different, in its potential impact, as the worst that terrorists dish out. Haven’t we been here before?
When these hoodlums were busy burning down our maximum security prison facilities, terrorising the people of Lunsar and the people of Tombo and sending messages to other people in other regions to join in the killing and looting spree, you were the very “critics” accusing the government of “losing control” and “not taking security seriously” while failing to condemn the terrorists. Now the president has only SPOKEN out against the KILLERS. He has not even acted yet against those who were happy burning the country and suddenly you have found your own critical voice? What a painful hypocritical positioning?
Where is your “evidence” to back up your “diplomatic boycott” claims?
Well, Chernoh, I know that this is not the first time that you are making wild claims and this is not the first time that you are attributing your sources to “leaked documents” which are only available to your sole self. And this will not be the last time you would use that stale trick. That is the easiest, if not the sickest, trick in the game for those who come out with unverifiable quotes that can neither be credited nor can they be proven to be credible. Like any class A drug, the aggressive self-posturing is a streak that is heavily addictive.
Chernoh’s self-massaging articles will always hide behind “exclusive sources” or “leaked diplomatic correspondences” or some other unnameable “sources” in the hope of escaping scrutiny. This is a man who enjoys making wide claims and throwing out heavily opinionated conjectures expecting it to be swallowed as kosher. Yet he has the vexatious effrontery to posit that president Bio has offered “no evidence to substantiate such serious (terrorism) allegations”. What EVIDENCE does Chernoh require? Should the videos be sent to him in braille?
It is pretty clear that the premise of his entire LIE in this “diplomatic Wedge” article vacillates around the outrageous claim that “the multilateral and foreign officials in the country” refused to meet with the president. Cunningly, he tags his LIE with the qualifier “apparently”.
Chernoh, if you are claiming that you are privy to “leaked diplomatic correspondences” that inform your tantalising allegations, why the “apparent” cap? Or can you not read and properly understand the “leaked correspondence” to enhance precision?
What we have here is, undoubtedly, a very clever writer, but he soils his intelligence, sadly, with a huge dose of disingenuous propositions.
The man claims to have “leaked” documents from unnamed diplomatic sources, a document which he alleges was informed by another “leaked” content of the president’s own speech. What a plethora of “leakages” that seem to run only in one direction- towards the “exclusive” desk of one Cherinoh M. Bah. Lucky him!
From his writings, the best way to describe Chernoh is “a clever rogue” who is so obsessed with his own political goals that he forgets that there are many people capable of reading between the lines instead of merely swallowing his cooked up conjectures.
The fellow blandly insists on “the increased nature of police brutality” as one reason for his in-his-dream diplomatic snub. Very interesting!
Even more interesting is the wide attempt to rope in the US ambassador to Sierra Leone on the side of Chernoh’s spurious script. In fact, that same ambassador has come out of her way to openly praise president Bio many times before. Do we need to quote or reference these praises to validate our point? Of course, not because this president continues to do what is good and right by and for the people of Sierra Leone despite the antics of negative political critics like Chernoh Alpha Bah.
The seething bias in Alpha’s script is signalled by his description of the Tombo riots as “spontaneous”. And his revealing hypocrisy is seen in his attempt to sanitise a well-coordinated attack that led to the burning of a police station and a community clinic by a malevolent horde. If that is not “domestic terrorism” what else is?
Can Chernoh Bah tell us where on earth (even in the West) a group of people (for whatever reason) would be allowed to march to a hospital and a police station and burn them to the ground and not be considered and treated as terrorists? Is such an act not an act of TERROR?
May be “Comrade” Chernoh Bah would know best. Or he could whisper to his Bombali townsman “World Best” to “leak” the answer to him.
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