For his second term government President Julius Maada Bio has made several changes to his cabinet that has left many people in and out of the party wondering what is going on in the SLPP.
According to the SLPP rumour mill, the days of the Paopa sect of the SLPP are over as the President has taken his own future legacy project by the bootstrap.
It is no secret that President Bio has dropped or set aside certain individuals from his past government that we can say belonged to the Paopa element of the party.
With the likes of former Chief Ministers Professor David Francis and Jusu Saffa of bread and butter economics fame, Sahr Jusu, Alphas Timbo and Wurie not being recalled by President Bio to be part of his second term cabinet, the SLPP is now experiencing the rise of the Green Renaissance Movement of the SLPP that was the brainchild of Ben Kaifala and his friends. The staunch and young SLPP loyalists started the movement to bring SLPP back to state power.
‘What we are seeing in President Bio’s second term cabinet appointments is a clear indication that he has set aside the Paopa members of the regime for members of the Green Revolution. Think about it; from David Sengeh to Ben Kaifala and Chernor Bah, we see a rise in the Green which gives us the hope that the president has dropped the very forceful Paopa ideologues for men and women of peace. Green is a symbol for peace after all and the SLPP is known as “The Party of God” hence of peace,’ we were reliably informed.
It must be remembered that when President Bio started his third attempt at the presidency after his days as a junta head of state, he came with the forceful Paopa rhetoric that many people have blamed for the very forceful and violent way they say even the police officers behaved at scenes of public protests during the past regime.
‘We believe that the days of Paopa are over. The SLPP is back with the young guns of the Green Renaissance Movement who are all young technocrats. The old image of Paopa was wrong for the party. We understand that President Bio needed these people in the past term because we can say he owed them something for winning in 2018. But he has more than compensated them for which such people are blamed for repaying the president by fleecing the state coffers as reported in the Auditor General’s reports on the Bio led government. Such people should consider themselves lucky at present because when we have another government such people will be expected to show how they amassed their newly acquired wealth on the pay of a civil servant in such a short period of time,’ they said.
Should he fail to convince the Opposition…
