I am quite convinced that at the time President Koroma nominated him to be Minister of State in the Office of the Vice President, His Excellency was not fully informed about the disgraceful manner in which his nominee, Dr. Komba Kono had let this country down in 1993. Infact, I am sure many might not have recalled the exact details of Komba Kono’s unpatriotism if they were not in the Medical field or in Government circles back then.

This writer was a Medical Student and also a leading Student Activist in my Final Year of a Four Year B.Sc (Hons) degree in 1993 (I got my second University Medical degree in 1996 before I left for America). As a member of the medical community back then, I was just as shocked and dismayed, as were just about every other medical person, at the immoral, unpatriotic actions of our then Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Komba Kono who had been sent to represent our interests at the World Health Organisation (WHO).

Komba Kono, knowing full well the financial and human resource that Nigeria had been sacrificing to help Sierra Leone prosecute the RUF civil war, gambled with the welfare of his war-torn Nation for his selfish benefit.

In my last article on this matter, I simply highlighted the obvious lapse in his moral make-up that would make him a possible liability at the Office of the Vice President, Hon. Chief Samuel Sam-Sumana. I just stated facts and went on to reproduce articles from credible international news outlets like the New York Times to back up my assertion that the nominee was unfit for a position of trust. It was not a Pull-Him-Down article.

If anyone pulled Komba Kono down, it was himself.

In January 1993, Komba Kono pocketed whatever he pocketed to vote the way he did against his own country’s interests and our largest benefactor back then: the Nigerians.(See Page 8). Komba Kono then went on to get the discredited Japanese Nakajima to ‘place’ him at a plump WHO Bangladesh job in return for selling his war-torn country down the river. He spent ten years at the WHO and retired in 2006. He never apologised to Sierra Leoneans during or after his tenure at WHO and I stand to be corrected as to whether he ever used his WHO links to help his people in Kono let alone the country.

As for his betrayal of our country’s relationship with the Nigerians who were at the time, in 1993 under General Babangida, spending millions of dollars of their people’s Oil Money to help us prosecute our civil war, the least said about that, especially the timing of his appointment in the wake of the fiasco over the UN Security seat for Nigeria, the better for our President, whom as I stated earlier, was probably not in the know about the acts of Dr. Komba Kono when he nominated him as Minister at his VP’s Office.

If Komba Kono was a man of morals and integrity, following my Tuesday publication, he would have first issued a public apology to this Nation for his 1993 unpatriotism. Following this, he would have gone to President Koroma and confessed how, like a little boy caught in the cookie jar, he was caught out as he nominated in public but went on to vote against his country’s interests in secret. He would try to explain to Mr. President, as best as he can, that he knew how much the war was affecting the country and how important the Nigerian support to war-ravaged Sierra Leoneans was back then but he would explain to Mr. President how he had slyly assumed, that some other country would have voted for Nigeria’s Ransome-Kuti during the secret ballot and any such secret vote would have left Sierra Leoneans and Nigerians thinking that vote was from Komba Kono. He would explain to Mr. President how he kept on reassuring the naive Valentine Strasser NPRC, until the dying minute, that he had voted for Ransome-Kuti only for the votes to be counted and shamefully, no-one voted for Ransome-Kuti.

If Komba Kono has morals, he will express deep remorse for the shameful deed and ask for God’s forgiveness as well as the Nations’ forgiveness. At this point of deep remorse, he will ask the President to withdraw his nomination from Parliament for this one and any other future position of trust until such time as the people of this country accepted his apology for selling them out and state that they believed he had turned over a new leaf and would not be a greedy, immoral functionary ever again.

Finally, if Komba Kono is smart, he would call up those brown envelope journalists and tell them to cease the flow of ink from their pens in his defence as they are just making matters worse for him. Dr. Komba Kono knows that it was not only his job as Chief Medical Officer that he lost as a result of his unpatriotism. He lost so much more but we do not need to go into all of those messy details as the point behind this issue is not to pull him down but to make sure he does not get a chance to sell our country’s interests down the river again. Thus, the brown envelopers should cease writing about Pull Him Down and concentrate on writing to build up our country’s shattered moral fibre that makes someone like Komba Kono believe he should be allowed to come back into a position of trust unchallenged.

Dr. Komba Kono should advise his pen-pushing brown envelopers.

Dr. Komba Kono should apologise to this country and maybe even to Nigeria.

Dr. Komba Kono should tell the President to withdraw his nomination (afterall, even Barack Obama had to withdraw some of his Cabinet nominations this year!)