Broken Promises, Broken Nation…
WORLD BANK EXPOSES SLPP’S FAILURES
By Mohamed Pope Kamara
Deputy National Publicity Secretary (APC)
The newly released 2025 World Bank Country Report on Sierra Leone isn’t just a routine assessment; it is a damning indictment of President Julius Maada Bio’s Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) government. Ranking a catastrophic 181st out of 195 nations on the Human Development Index (HDI), Sierra Leone now languishes among the world’s most failed states. This metric, measuring life expectancy, education, and income exposes the grim reality Bio’s administration has desperately tried to conceal: a nation betrayed, impoverished, and stripped of its future .
Economic Collapse Under the Guise of Recovery:
While the SLPP trumpets “resilient growth,” the World Bank data reveals an economy in shambles. Growth plummeted to 4.0% in 2024 (from 5.7% in 2023), crippled by collapsing iron ore prices and Bio’s failure to diversify beyond extractive sectors. The mining industry, contributing a mere 7% to GDP, remains the sole growth driver, while agriculture, the lifeline for 60% of citizens buckled under flash floods and policy neglect. Inflation, despite a superficial dip to 13.8% in late 2024, had earlier skyrocketed to a staggering 52.2% in 2023, eviscerating household incomes. Meanwhile, the fiscal deficit ballooned to 4.8% of GDP, fueled by reckless spending and institutionalized graft. Domestic debt now carries a predatory 40% interest rate, enslaving future generations to service Bio’s deficits .
Human Capital: A Generation Sacrificed
The HDI disgrace is no anomaly, it is the culmination of systemic abandonment. Sierra Leone’s Human Capital Index score is a harrowing 0.35, meaning a child born today will be only 35% as productive as they could be with full health and education. One in four children suffers stunting from chronic malnutrition. A mere two-thirds of 15-year-olds will live to see 60. These are not statistics; they are Bio’s legacy .
The SLPP’s much-hyped “Free Quality Education” initiative stands exposed as a cruel façade. Despite $85 million in World Bank funding, learning poverty remains endemic. Schools lack materials, teachers flee unpaid, and 56,000 educators struggle to serve 1.8 million students in dilapidated classrooms. The result? A generation functionally illiterate, unemployable, and destined for the informal scrapheap .
Corruption as State Policy The World Bank spares no blame: “Weaknesses in commitment control and oversight institutions” enabled unchecked looting of public coffers. Fiscal overruns are institutionalized, with parliament and audit bodies neutered by SLPP patronage. Revenues, though improved to 8.8% of GDP, remain among the world’s lowest, as Bio’s cronies enjoy tax breaks while mothers die in underfunded clinics .
The SLPP’s “Feed Salone” flagship program? A hollow slogan. Food insecurity ravages rural communities, with subsistence farmers, 43% of them women, abandoned without climate-resilient seeds or irrigation. The World Bank’s Country Climate and Development Report warns that climate shocks could plunge 600,000 more citizens into poverty by 2050 a death sentence Bio’s government ignores .
A Democracy in Name Only
Amid this unraveling, Bio consolidates power. The 2023 elections, marred by violence and opposition suppression delivered a tainted SLPP majority. The “Agreement for National Unity” brokered by ECOWAS is a fig leaf covering festering wounds. Political gangs, allied with SLPP elites, terrorize urban centers, while rural Sierra Leoneans are left to vigilantes and secret societies .
The Path Forward? Not Under Bio
The World Bank prescribes reforms: fiscal discipline, private sector investment, climate-smart agriculture. Yet these require competence and integrity, traits absent in Freetown. As reserves cover just two months of imports and youth unemployment fuels unrest, Bio offers only empty rhetoric. NA DIS MESS PRESIDENT BIO WANT MAKE APC EN YOUNG PEOPLE DEM INHERITS? cried one young man.
Sierra Leone and its younger generations deserves more than survival. They deserves leaders who see them not as pawns, but as promise. The World Bank report is more than data, it is an obituary for the hopes of a nation betrayed. Until Bio’s regime is held accountable, Sierra Leone’s descent into human development hell will continue, unabated and unforgiven.