By Adelain Morenekeh Halford
It began with a wedding in the provinces. Fatmata, a schoolteacher, watched her cousin collapse in the midday heat. The nearest clinic had no doctor, no saline drip, no working generator. She called the head of her District Health Management Team, who promised to “escalate to Freetown.” Freetown was silent. In the meantime, the President was abroad again — photographed in capitals of the world at a summit or some nondescript event, where fancy stories about Sierra Leone were peddled for its “wonderful leadership”
Her cousin died before nightfall
For Fatmata, the question was not abstract: where was the President when her family needed a functioning state?
The painful answer to that question is that Sierra Leone has an Absentee at State House. President Julius Maada Bio has travelled abroad more frequently than any Sierra Leonean head of state. His absence hollows out governance. Cabinet Ministers drift without direction, senior civil servants become lords of their fiefdoms, and programmes stall in confusion.
In politics, as in business, even the most hands-on leader struggles to meet targets. An absentee leader transforms the machinery of state into a disjointed chorus, everyone singing their own tune. The result is a government too fragmented to deliver electricity, water, medicines, or credible economic relief.
And yet paradoxically, while he has shown no willingness to serve, President Bio is a man determined to stay. Bio’s commitment to govern may be weak, but his instinct to hold power is iron.
He has tightened his grip on the security sector. He has discouraged his party from debating a post-Bio future. He has cultivated loyalty in the judiciary, Parliament, and media, ensuring dissent is muted. Civil society leaders, who once spoke truth to power, now issue cautious press releases.
You don’t have to look to far to know this. Bio admires the strongmen of Africa: Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni, Rwanda’s Paul Kagame, Mali’s colonels. The pattern is unmistakable: surround yourself with loyalists, redraw the rules, and dismantle bridges that challengers might use to cross.
Sierra Leoneans must learn from lessons of history and political theory. Political theorists warn us that dictatorships rarely arrive with fanfare. They creep. Hannah Arendt described in the “Banality of Authoritarianism” — how ordinary compromises slowly normalize extraordinary abuses. Montesquieu warned that unchecked power corrodes institutions faster than corruption itself.
History provides darker mirrors. Leaders like Mabutu Sese Sekou, Blaise Compaoré, and Yahya Jammeh, each began with the aura of reformers. Each turned “security necessity” into justification for entrenchment. Each hollowed institutions until personal rule became indistinguishable from the state.
Bio’s trajectory shows the same shadow, and the cost to the ordinary citizen is staggering. What does this mean for the everyday Sierra Leonean? It means hospitals without oxygen. Schools without teachers. Roads cratered into death traps. A generation of young people starved of work, but fed a diet of slogans and drugs.
It means Fatmata’s cousin dying in a heatwave because the President chose to spend the nation’s meagre resources on another international trip over strengthening clinics at home.
Sierra Leoneans must recognize the signs of a gradual tightening grip: When security forces become instruments of political loyalty rather than public safety; When the judiciary whispers judgments aligned with power rather than justice; When media grows cautious, civil society hesitant, and Parliament silent; When the President is absent from governance but omnipresent in power.
The creeping danger is not only that services collapse, it is that democracy itself becomes a hollow ritual — ballots without meaning, institutions without independence, hope without substance.
The Imperative of Resistance
If unchecked, Bio’s absenteeism at home and consolidation abroad will not end in better governance. It will end in a state where power is permanent and accountability extinct.
The lesson of history is clear: authoritarianism thrives on the silence of citizens. Sierra Leoneans must not confuse travel with leadership, nor mistake strong rhetoric for strong governance. They must resist the mirage of reform while the state corrodes beneath.
The question is simple: how many more Fatmatas must bury their loved ones before we admit that the President’s travels are costing Sierra Leone its future?