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When President Bio took office in 2018, he promised a “New Direction” for Sierra Leone. Eight years on, after securing a controversial second term in 2023, the gap between his bold words and lived reality demands a hard look.
To start with, his flagship Free Quality Education policy is certainly audacious. Launching universal access without enough classrooms, trained teachers, or learning materials was either visionary or irresponsible , depending on your tolerance for chaos. Today, classrooms remain overcrowded. While exam pass rates have improved slightly, functional literacy, the ability to read and understand information, remains alarmingly low. The crucial question is, whether the policy has succeeded in getting children into schools but has so far failed to produce real learning.
Bio’s adoption of the World Bank’s Human Capital Index may resonate well in donor meetings, but it has limited immediate impact on the daily struggles of ordinary citizens. In reality, focusing on long-term workforce development does little to ease the hardships faced by people trying to survive today. While he actively seeks foreign investors often through frequent overseas trips or “Travel for Natin” inflation remains persistently high at around 40 percent. Rice, our staple food, has doubled in price since 2021. Telling hungry people to wait for long term development is a political gamble that tests the limits of public patience.
The most uncomfortable question is his record on democratic space. The 2023 elections, which international observers said lacked transparency in results collation, sparked outrage from us, the APC and general public. How did the government respond? With an internet shutdown, live ammunition fired at protesters, and the arrest of civil society figures. This reveals an administration growing increasingly hostile to accountability.
Perhaps the most damning critique is his failure on corruption. He campaigned as a crusader against the looting of state funds. Yet senior officials in his administration have been implicated in stealing COVID-19 funds, education grants, and mining revenues. The removal of the Auditor-General Lara Taylor-Pearce has shaken the public’s moral conscience. The Anti-Corruption Commission, once feared, now struggles against a perception of compromise. Citizens watch as the “New Direction” circles back to an old destination: a small elite enriching itself while the majority sinks deeper into poverty.
In the end, we the ordinary citizens, assess Bio’s presidency as audacious in its ambitions but timid in its willingness to be held accountable. Free education, human capital investment, and agricultural reform are worthy goals. But goals are not achievements. The people of Sierra Leone, taxed heavily, priced out of basic goods, and increasingly silenced, experience this audacity not as courage but as arrogance.
A leader who truly believed in the people would trust them with transparent elections, protect their right to protest, and prioritize their present survival over PowerPoint metrics. Until then, the audacity of the presidency remains what it has always been: the audacity of power, exercised at the people’s expense.
