2023 is the year earmarked by many schools if thought to either make or break Sierra Leone as a nation.

In that year to come on 24th June, presidential, parliamentary, and local council elections will hold in the tiny West African country when the electorate will decide on who is next to wheel their affairs.

In the campaign leading to the 2018 general elections that catapulted the Bio-led government to power, the nation of Sierra Leone was promised heaven amid the delivery of goods and services. Since the starting through to the final year of the SLPP Government, very little or nothing good has been actualized except hell being unleashed upon the people. In real sense, the country faces retrogression than progression. Whatever may have caused the anomalous state of affairs is a long analysis for another day’s work.

As it stands, the majority of the people are disgruntled with the excruciating conditions of living they have been confronted with since President Maada Bio and his government assumed the mantle of state governance in 2018, and are desperately yearning for a change of authority.

Now, although other political parties are yet to elect their standard-bearers, the incumbent president Julius Maada Bio will wrestle with other contenders as his Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) has since hastily selected him as the continuity standard-bearer in the last delegates’ conference held in Bo city, South of the country. And depending on whom the other political groups will field in to face Bio head-on; it is apparent that the 2023 national polls will not be clinched on a silver platter.

The schools of thought, therefore, believe the voters will make Sierra Leone if they disavow the incumbent Maada Bio in the 2023 elections to come, or break their country if they choose to renew their mandate by giving him the leeway to continue being the president of the country amid the abysmal failures his government has recorded in its first 5-year democratic term.

Feigning to be doing something while nothing is being done, President Bio bragged in his 61st Independence Anniversary Message that no government has ever performed excellently in four years as he has done.

But in a coincidence, the leading flagbearer hopeful of the main opposition All Peoples Congress (APC), Dr. Samura Mathew Wilson Kamara, who visited Kono District in the east of the country on the same Independence Day, 27th April 2022, handed to the people a message that is in wider disparity with that of President Bio.

For Dr. Samura Kamara, Sierra Leone is into its 61 years of Independence state, but even though it is a country that used to par with Singapore and South Korea in everything 61 years ago, today Sierra Leone has degenerated that it has to go to ask for assistance, and not those nations coming to seek aid from Sierra Leone.
“Why are we not putting ourselves in order so that they too can now come to beg us for help,” APC flagbearer aspirant queried and lamented how the country is going down the drain, but people sit comfortably watching without speaking up.

“Why the silence? Should we remain dumb, not questioning even as our country is plummeting to the lowest ebbs?”

According to Dr. Kamara, it’s an inalienable right for Sierra Leoneans to speak up and prevent the ills meted on them, and challenged that if his party elects him as presidential candidate for the 2023 elections and emerges as the winning horse, those who voted him have the right to remove him from office without even questioning him if he failed to perform well in their interest.

He bemoaned the politics of jokes where those entrusted with the affairs of the state would visit the people to crackle with them and further urged Sierra Leoneans to stop accepting pittance from such people, forgetting the betterment of their communities and the future of their children and the yet unborn.

He urged the people to reflect on their minds and re-echoed the belief of the school of thought by saying that 2023 is a deciding factor – a year to make or break Sierra Leone.

“Do we want to continue with the predicament we now face because we fall in love with those people for offering us mites?” he queried.

The progress of humans should be a continuous spin, and the people should not be driven backward after being moved forward, Dr. Samura Kamara maintained, adding that considering the development gains actualized before the 2018 elections, if the APC had continued in governance, Sierra Leone would have been far better by now.

According to Salone Compass Newspaper, he mentioned the positive development achieved under the APC government led by Dr. Ernest Bai Koroma, such as the restoration and expansion of electricity supply, water and road infrastructure, among others.

Dr. Samura Mathew Wilson Kamara was the APC presidential candidate that locked horns with Julius Maada Wonnie Bio in the 2018 general elections. Samura Kamara was controversially defeated by less than one percent of votes.