‘John Benjamin wants Maada Bio to lose elections’ -Mohamed Bangura

By Abdul Hassan Fackie

The Leader and Presidential candidate for the United Democratic Movement (UDM), has said that the Chairman of the Sierra Leone Peoples Party (SLPP), Mr. John Oponjo Benjamin, does not want the SLPP Presidential candidate, Retired Brigadier General Julius Maada Bio to win the November 17 elections.

In reacting to comments made against him by Mr. Benjamin in this paper yesterday, in which he called him a noise maker, Mr. Bangura said that politics is all about making noise as long as the noise is positive and sensible.

He stated that Mr. Benjamin is quite aware that Mr. Julius Maada Bio messed up in both the speech he made at Chatham House and the interview he gave to the BBC Focus on Africa programme but refuse to tell him so because he is very happy that by such blunders Mr. Bio is slowly destroying his chances of winning the Presidential election on November 17.

Mr. Bangura further stated that Mr. Benjamin has never accepted Mr. Bio as Leader of the SLPP and he is always happy to see him making one blunder after the other so that the people will be become fed up with him and massively reject him at the polls.

He also explained that Mr. Benjamin always gets very jittery whenever he sees a new political party with strong potentials emerge.

“In his pathological fear of competition he tried to destroy the Peoples Movement for Democratic Change (PMDC) but woefully failed and now he has turned his warped attention to us, and as usual, he is going to fail,” he asserted.

Mr. Bangura said Mr. Benjamin hates his guts because his party has made very significant inroads into the South East which the SLPP erroneously regards as their stronghold.

“With the emergence of the UDM Mr. Benjamin and his members have realised that the myth that the South East belongs to them has been broken and we have shown that we are going to defeat them there and emerge as the main opposition party after the All Peoples Congress (APC) gets reelected for a second term on November 17 and position us to take over the reins of power in 2017,” he maintained.

Mr. Bangura concluded that all what Mr. Benjamin is doing now is preparing the ground for Mr. Bio to lose the elections on November 17 so that he, Benjamin, will be seen as the only fit choice to be given the SLPP Presidential candidacy in 2017.