By Septimus A.M. Saffa
Practitioners of horoscope would tell you that number 3 is ill-luck.
Moreover, the Spider as a hungry insect is depicted in mythology as having advised three cooks to tie a cord around it and once they finish preparing food, they should draw the cord for it to feast on their respective meals.
But ill-luck befell spider as the three cooks finished preparing food at the same time.
Spider was caught between the devil and the deep blue sea as the three cooks drew their cords simultaneously.
Bang! Spider was so tightened that until doom’s day, spider is one of the insects with a thin, if not very thin body.
Coming to the situation in Sierra Leone, Eagle’s eye would like to first and foremost quote few lines from free verse Poet, Gwendolyn Brooks’ Poem: “Horses Graze”
It reads: “Cows graze
Horses graze.
They
Eat
Eat
Eat”
As can be deduced from the above, eat is stressed thrice to show the level of gluttony and brute satisfaction of these animals.
The animal instincts in man should be suppressed or else it may lead to disastrous consequences in one’s political agenda.
As Eagle’s eye highlighted in the introductory paragraph of this article, 3 is an ill-luck number.
Readers would now recall that President Bio in the last forth night has made three errors in the art of governance which continue to box him into a tight political corner in which his spinners will not be able to extricate him from.
Error number one: President Bio unconstitutionally suspended the reputable Auditor-General of Audit Service Sierra Leone, Mrs. Lara Taylor-Pearce from office and one of her deputies, Tamba Momoh.
The unconstitutionality of this deliberate act of President Bio has been succinctly put by Lawyer Charles Francis Margai in a Legal opinion titled: “My thought on the Mrs. Lara Taylor-Pearce saga.”
A paragraph in the piece reads: “The President’s suspension of the Auditor-General and her deputy should have sufficed and not prefixed a referral of their removal from office to a tribunal.
(see section 137 (6) of Act No. 6 of 1991).”
Eagle’s eye views this unconstitutionality been shamefacedly managed now by the Bio regime as reports in “Awareness Times Newspaper” dated Thursday November, 18th 2021 read, “Initial reports that the President had sent Mrs. Taylor-Pearce on suspension order his hand later proved to be untrue.
However, now that the tribunal has been set up, the President is expected to have a letter written directly to Mrs. Lara Taylor-Pearce ordering her to go face the tribunal and suspending her from office pending the outcome of the tribunal.”
Indeed it is like Bio putting the cat before the horse!
Coming to error number two: Bio’s attraction of boos during a public function in Kono.
Eagle’s eye considers this scenario as clear indication of premonitions of failure and defeat of Bio in 2023 presidential election.
Error number three: SLPP/Bio’s stolen victory in Ward 091 Bye-election in Kono as well as presentation of a very uninspiring 2022 budget in the wells of parliament.
This nasty behavior by a SLPP Party Agent who has the audacity and arrant arrogance to destroy ballot papers in a bid to give undue victory to SLPP and indirectly give false sense of popularity to Bio’s failed policies and activities is an anathema to Sierra Leone’s democracy.
Eagle’s eye is even annoyed that this complicit behavior by NEC just weeks after EU took swipes at NEC’s credibility leaves any sane Sierra Leonean with raised eyebrows and trepidation of what will happen in 2023 watershed elections if NEC, SLP and the Judiciary are not called to order.
And for the budget speech, the least said about it the better.
The point is, the diatribes and platitudes in the budget disqualify if as very uninspiring and a major dis-connect to Sierra Leone’s developmental trajectory.
In this light, President Bio’s ‘spider web of reversals’ is alarmingly, blatantly nauseating and forebodes ill-will for citizens as the unlucky number 3!
We Yone View
Laborious Budget!
We Yone joins Hon. Sallieu Osman Sesay to affirm the budget presented by the Minister of Finance, Denis Sandy is ‘Suffer Posh’.
‘Suffer Posh’’ could be attributed in a literary sense as an unachievable, a loud, and an extravagant financial plans of the fiscal year of the government in 2022.
The House of Parliament, overtime has been playing significant role in reviewing budgets from the central Government.
We Yone observes the SLPP Bio-led Government has not been going by financial plan.
The financial managers of the state and for the past couple of years has been spending funds loosely to a point that the government’s expenditure goes beyond the funds approved by the House.
We Yone can safely say, all this is happening because of the expansion of the wage bill.
We Yone notes one of the main functions of Parliament is to discuss and pass the Budget.
Year in, year out, the Minister of Finance introduces the Budget in Parliament after its been discussed in committees
We Yone notes the Budget is an annual plan for what government wants to achieve and how it will spend money to achieve those goals.
The Budget, We Yone, believes, is one of the most important economic instrument of the government.
It is used to: make sure that the state has the resources it needs to do its work; create conditions which stimulate economic growth; clearly indicate the priorities of government.
The sad reality is, the mangers of the economy has missed out and there is no clear correlation between the two sides of the budget: revenue (income) and expenditure (what will be spent).
The inability of the financial managers to manage the available resources (money) with meeting the basic social needs of the people is a major crisis which had befallen the state.
We Yone notes that all the wishful allocations the government had made to finance activities of MDAs may not be achievable given the fact that the current government is spending more than the revenue they generate.
The State is unable to attract foreign direct investment because of the unfavorable business climate.
The Bank Governor has revealed how the Central Bank has insensitively auctioned millions of dollars but the issue of inflation remains the same with no potential for growth.
The political economy of Sierra Leone (Bread and Butter) is because private business is not thriving. This could either be because of the high taxation levied on business people or for the fact that the country is struggling with serious constructional controversies.
We Yone concludes the 2022 budget is laborious.
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