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Political scientists and foreign policy analysts believe that authoritarian states actively use diplomatic engagement to normalize their rule and expand their influence abroad. Dictators and human rights abusers often engage in “values-based diplomacy” that frames liberal democratic values as culturally relative rather than universal.
This is the dangerous strategy now being used by Sierra Leone’s President Maada Bio , whose hands smell horridly of the blood of his innocent countrymen he has killed in 7 years of brutal dictatorship in Sierra Leone.
While the opposition enjoys its shameful slumber while Rome is burning and civil society , media, Judiciary, the intelligentsia and the military are now in the voluminous pockets of President Bio , with the UN and the diplomatic community distracted by Gaza, Russia , South Sudan and other crises around the world, the venal Bio is using heinous diplomatic engagements to give a semblance of normalcy in an unfortunate country he rules with a bloody hand and nebulous politics.
Bio knows that he is loathed at home . Sierra Leoneans are not only crying with his satanic name because of the pains he has inflicted on them but even wishing his demise . Bio cannot stand the heat of the kitchen at home so he spends his troubled waking moments trotting around the globe to seek international goodwill for his illegal rule. As if that is not enough, the dictator uses the country’s abundant resources to bribe international organizations to feed his ego with meaningless awards that do not put supper on the empty plates of his starving citizens.
Bio, largely, is succeeding. While international diplomacy can be an important tool to check the excesses of tyrannical rulers, it is limited by its own frailties, fickle- mindedness, lack of resources and the crafty and deceptive intentions of dictatorial regimes like the SLPP, which actively use diplomacy to project power and legitimize their rule internationally.
The sad thing is that the opposition is too busy enmeshed in its internal squabbles, some of them being secretly orchestrated by President Bio , and churning out prospective presidential flagbearers for 2028, to notice. A serious opposition would have set up a crack, vibrant and biting international diplomatic and lobbying team to counter President Bio’s diplomatic postures abroad. But not the present moribund All People’s Congress ( APC ).
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