Posted by Teacher Gboyo on October 16, 2007 at 06:51:08:
Flash back to 2006: The Betrayal of Sierra Leone by its Pseudo-Intellectuals
Tuesday, October 02, 2007 - SLL News
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First publish on wednesday, August 23, 2006
By Mohamed A. Jalloh
Like most S/Leoneans, John Mannah, who tells us that he is writing a Ph.D. dissertation in macroeconomics and finance at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan, New York, would be expected to mean well for his own country and its long suffering people. However, as is true of a relatively small number of misguided S/Leoneans, Mr. Mannah, unfortunately, has chosen to place his loyalty to his chosen political party above his much more important loyalty to his country.
Nowhere in Mr. Mannah's rather lengthy opinion piece in Awareness Times entitled "Why Sierra Leoneans should be hopeful about the unequivocal vote of confidence The (sic) World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz passed on The (sic) ruling SLPP Government," published on August 14, 2006, did he display such surprising lack of patriotism more than in his shocking claim that anyone who states that the SLPP government of President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah is corrupt is guilty of "bias against" the SLPP. Here is how Mr. Mannah explicitly put it: "The other issue Mr. Jalloh brought up, which showed his bias against not only Alhaji Fofana, but the current SLPP government in Freetown is the accusation that the government is corrupt, his yardstick for this allegation, (sic) millions of dollars have been pumped into Sierra Leone and that the government has been in power for almost ten years now without any progress, as there is no electricity and water supply in the country."
Which begs the following key questions that regrettably expose Mr. Mannah as an unpatriotic apologist for the corrupt SLPP government who cynically places the interest of the SLPP above the much more deserving interest of the people of SL:
1. Since the Secretary General of the United Nations, Kofi Anan, in his report to the UN Security Council in May of this year, categorically stated that rampant and growing corruption combined with an extremely high youth unemployment rate could lead Sierra Leone to renewed political violence, did Mr. Anan thereby "show[] his bias against not only Alhaji Fofana, but the current SLPP government in Freetown?"
2. Given that the G8 member nations, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States, uniformly identified corruption under the SLPP government of President Kabbah as a reason for denying much-needed debt relief to the people of SL in 2005, did each leader of the G8 countries thereby "show[] his bias against not only Alhaji Fofana, but the current SLPP government in Freetown?"
3. When the European Union, which also attended the same G8 summit in 2005 agreed with the leaders of the G8 countries that corruption under President Kabbah's SLPP government was so rampant that SL should be denied much-needed debt relief, did the leader of the country holding the presidency of the European Council and the President of the European Commission, who represented the EU at the meeting, thereby each "show his bias against not only Alhaji Fofana, but the current SLPP government in Freetown?"
Tellingly, a deafening silence is Mr. Mannah's revealing answer to each and every one of the above key questions arising from his brazen claim that anyone who criticizes the SLPP for its internationally notorious corruption is biased. It is that self-serving conspiracy of silence against the people of SL which, regrettably, cements Mr. Mannah's membership in the cabal of unpatriotic S/Leoneans who know the truth about the SLPP's longstanding record of rampant corruption in SL, but who, for their own purely selfish political profit from the SLPP, unpatriotically seek to lie about it to its victims. Those victims are the millions of their own fellow S/Leoneans whose lives have become a nightmare of unending deprivation under SLPP rule.
It is clear, therefore, that Mr. Mannah falsely sees in me what he truly sees secretly in himself, when he writes: "So Mr. Jalloh I cannot characterize you as someone who is ignorant of the facts here, but someone who knows the facts and ignores them for ulterior motive and political or social convenience." That is only one of the so many surprising errors of fact and logic committed by Mr. Mannah as to raise very serious questions about his ability to collect data and to draw the correct conclusions from such data. It is a legitimate question, therefore, whether Mr. Mannah's surprisingly shoddy scholarship indicates a need for remediation of the quality of the instruction he received or, sadly, only of his own personal learning skills? In order to answer that question, it is necessary to helpfully identify and analyze John Mannah's myriad unfortunate errors of omission and commission.
First, Mr. Mannah unwittingly signaled his unfamiliarity with the elementary rules of logic, as well as his inability to recognize objective, fair and balanced writing, when he failed to recognize the important question of fact that had been tellingly omitted in the "fair, balanced and objective" opinion piece by his self-admitted hero, Alhaji Morikeh Fofana. That question is whether Wolfowitz has any credibility to warrant anyone taking seriously his statement that the long suffering people of SL have suddenly been magically transformed by President Kabbah's SLPP government, into satisfied, peaceful and tranquil citizens. Significantly, not only did John Mannah not ask that crucial question but he also demonstrated, unfortunately, that he had no clue as to how to answer it, even if someone had asked it, as I properly did. What is the evidence of Mannah's regrettable multiple cluelessness, one might ask? The answer is that it is of the very best kind -- Mannah's own voluntarily written words. Let us duly proceed to that evidence:
According to Mr. Mannah: "The ongoing war in Iraq and Mr. Paul Wolfowitz's role in it have no relevance to his visit to Sierra Leone as President of the World Bank and the statements he made in Sierra Leone." Mannah's opinion, which, unfortunately, he omitted to support with any evidence, raises a series of questions that prove that, sadly, he has absolutely no clue about how to make logical inferences from data, namely:
If the institution that employs Wolfowitz, the World Bank, had concluded that the SL government was so corrupt that it denied our long suffering people sorely needed debt relief in 2005, and yet, barely a year later Mr. Wolfowitz came to SL and made statements contradicting his employer's statements, is it not legitimate to ask whether Wolfowitz should be believed or not? Moreover, if millions of S/Leoneans daily suffer under an SLPP government that condemns them to a turbulent life without reliable electricity, potable water, and affordable access to medical care, and yet Wolfowitz comes to SL and tells them that theirs is a life of "peace and tranquility," as Alhaji Fofana put it, is it not legitimate to ask if Wolfowitz can be trusted to tell the truth to the public?
And if the same Wolfowitz had made statements to the public in America in 2003 about Iraq, which led to the current devastating Iraq war, and those statements were later proven to be totally false, is it not legitimate to ask whether Mr. Wolfowitz's false statements to the American public represent a pattern of telling lies to the public that he has now compulsively repeated to the people of SL?
By what logic, therefore, can those statements, and the particularly harmful war it has led to, be regarded as having no relevance to Wolfowitz's like-minded statements that he recently made in SL, as Mr. Mannah claims in palpable error? The inescapable answer is: Only by the "logic" of someone like Mr. Mannah who, sadly, has demonstrated that he has no clue about logic, in general, and how to make logical inferences from factual data, in particular. Not surprisingly, Mannah blissfully declared that "[b]ringing the Iraq war into the World Bank President's visit to Africa, especially Sierra Leone is not only fool hardy (sic) but irresponsible." Which statement raises a legitimate question that, regrettably, lays bare Mr. Mannah's unfortunate additional intellectual limitations, namely: Does Mr. Mannah actually know the meaning of the words, foolhardy and irresponsible?
Second, belying Mannah's claim to knowledge of "the facts," he alleged that "the World Bank is the main instrument that rich nations have to fight" poverty. Yet, people who actually know the facts about the World Bank's record of abject failure in African countries during the past 50 years, have come to a totally opposite conclusion. As attested to by the widely-available published writings of the world's leading contemporary economists, such as recent Nobel laureates, Larry Summers of Harvard University and Joseph Stiglitz of MIT, it is now widely recognized that it is the World Bank itself that has caused poverty in Africa through its uninformed and inappropriate economic policies in African countries.
Which raises a question that proves that, sadly, Mr. Mannah is either not the expert on "the facts" about the World Bank that he loudly proclaims himself to be, or that he is, regrettably, intellectually dishonest. That question is: Does Mr. Mannah actually want us to believe that he -- the self-styled expert on "the facts" -- is unaware of this widely-known fact? If not, why, then, would be blatantly mislead his audience by conveniently omitting to inform them of the crucial fact that both Prof. Lawrence Summers and Prof. Joseph Stiglitz -- who have both worked at the most senior levels of the World Bank -- have openly accused the World Bank of promoting poverty, malnutrition, and bad governance in African countries over the past 50 years? Or, does the self-acclaimed, vaunted expert on "the facts" regarding the World Bank, Mr. Mannah, want us to believe that he is unaware of the widespread fact that even the World Bank itself has recently been obliged to finally admit what sober economists have been saying for more than two decades – that the World Bank is the cause of much of Africa's poverty through its harmful economic policies in hapless African countries?
Significantly, there are even more relevant facts that Mr. Mannah conveniently concealed from his unsuspecting readers: For example, both internationally respected economists, Dr. Summers and Dr. Stiglitz, are not alone in identifying the World Bank as the major cause of poverty and economic chaos in developing countries: In a widely-praised 2001 book, "The Elusive Quest for Growth" (MIT Press) and an op-ed article in London's Financial Times, World Bank economist William Easterly criticizes development aid unambiguously:
"Contrary to conventional wisdom, aid to the developing world has been a big disappointment. Consider the facts and it soon becomes evident that the $1 trillion spent on aid since the 1960s, with the efforts of advisers, foreign aid givers, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, have all failed to attain the desired results."
Yet, in a shocking display of a surprising lack of diligence, Mr. Mannah idolizes the same, demonstrably failed World Bank thus: "The bank's ten thousand professionals form the brightest concentration of development thinkers anywhere in the world, and they combine brain power with practical experience." Which incredibly uninformed statement would reasonably cause any objective reader who knows the World Bank's globally notorious record of incompetence in economic development to wonder whether Mr. Mannah actually knows the meaning of the words he so carelessly uses -- even simple words such as brightest, professional thinker, and development?
Third, despite the ranking of SL in virtually all indices of human development as the poorest country on earth and the worst place to live, John Mannah, echoing the only slightly more clueless Alhaji Fofana, brazenly declares that "[i]t was a hopeful day for Sierra Leone" merely because World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz saw the SLPP government of SL as "a performing government," as Fofana put it. Which, of course, raises the question that any diligent researcher would have posed, namely: Does Wolfowitz have any credibility?
That question is important because a diligent researcher would have known that the SL government that Wolfowitz praised is the same government which international donors -- including Wolfowitz's employer, the World Bank, the United Nations, the G8 and the European Union -- had recently unanimously condemned for its pervasive and massive corruption.
Given Mr. Mannah's claim to knowing "the facts," one would expect that he would know that particularly shameful fact about the SLPP government of President Kabbah. However, if Mr. Mannah knows the fact that the international community had recently uniformly judged President Kabbah as the leader of a rampantly corrupt government, he failed to let his readers know that. Instead, John Mannah refers to the same President Kabbah -- whom the World Bank, the U.N. and the European Union had all called the leader of a corrupt and incompetent government in SL -- as a "president [who] returned to his home country and rescued it from total destruction and has sown the seeds for its socio-economic progress." Given the universally acknowledged falsity of Mr. Mannah's self-serving claim, it is a reasonable question whether Mr. Mannah is unwittingly or deliberately confusing the meaning of (near) "total destruction" of civilized life for millions of S/Leoneans under Mr. Kabbah's rule, with the meaning of "socio-economic progress" -- an illusion that the people of SL have yet to witness under the ten-year tenure of Mr. Kabbah's corrupt and incompetent government.
It should now be painfully obvious that Mr. Mannah's errors of fact and logic are far too numerous to permit their exhaustive narration in an article of any reasonable length. What remains to be noted is that Mr. Mannah's demonstrated lack of knowledge about my personal background is not limited to his demonstrably false claim that "[l]ike President Kabbah, Mr. Jalloh's parents originated from the Republic of Guinea." Had Mr. Mannah been as diligent as he wants us to believe he is, he would have easily discovered by rather elementary research that I do not share such a background with President Kabbah. Similarly, Mr. Mannah also claims to be an expert in differentiating relevant statements from irrelevant statements. Yet, he failed to tell his readers the relevance of the origin of President Kabbah's parents to the issue of Mr. Wolfowitz's lack of credibility -- the subject of my article to which he purported to reply.
In closing, Mr. Mannah, kindly permit me to help you actually distinguish between relevant and irrelevant issues. Whether President Kabbah attended St. Edward's Secondary School, or Fourah Bay College , or any of the three graduate schools which I have had the privilege of attending here in the U.S., is completely irrelevant to my views about his sorry record of corruption and incompetence in SL. Indeed, Mr. Kabbah could be my brother, and I would still speak the same truth about his record of unconscionable malfeasance that has needlessly destroyed the livelihood, hopes and aspirations of millions of our fellow S/Leoneans, despite tens of millions of dollars of humanitarian foreign aid sent to his government for the people of SL. To you, naturally, performing my patriotic duty by duly pointing out that inconvertible fact means that I have a "bias against" the SLPP government. However, any truly objective, fair and balanced observer would tell you the exact opposite, namely: That to the extent that I am biased, I am biased only in favor of the people of SL. Sadly, it is a measure of the depth of your lack of patriotism that you proudly admit openly that you pray for the continuation of the needless suffering of millions of your fellow S/Leoneans under the corrupt and incompetent SLPP government of President Kabbah in 2007 and beyond under his equally clueless, self-admitted "faithful follower," Vice President Solomon Berewa.
That, Mr. Mannah, is exactly how unpatriotic S/Leoneans "with Ph.D.'s and without" have needlessly and unconscionably destroyed the once bright future of millions of their fellow S/Leoneans. As anyone who actually knows me would readily confirm for you -- St. Edward's Secondary School or not -- I do not share with President Kabbah, yourself, or anyone else, such blatantly unpatriotic and selfish aspirations.