Dear Mrs. Fatima Jabbie Bio,
Seven years ago, when your husband first ascended to the presidency, I wrote you an open letter with genuine hope for Sierra Leone’s future. In that letter, I presented you with a choice that would define your legacy: the path of a Famous First Lady who seeks personal glory, or a Compassionate First Lady who serves her people with humility. I outlined the implications of each path with the earnest wish that you would choose wisely.
Today, after seven years of your tenure, that choice has been definitively made. You have become, without question, the most famous person in Sierra Leone, but for all the wrong reasons, exactly as I had warned.
In 2023, witnessing our beloved country suffer under the most corrupt and uncouth behavior ever displayed by a First Lady in our nation’s history, I felt compelled to document this tragic transformation in my book, The Unbecoming Mrs. Maada Bio of Sierra Leone: A Case of First Lady Syndrome. Since its publication, your actions have served as an unending validation of every word I wrote, demonstrating just how deeply you are afflicted by the very syndrome I diagnosed.
Your recent Facebook post, titled My Loyalty, My Mission, My Truth, stands as perhaps the most damning piece of evidence yet, a public confession that reveals the full extent of your constitutional overreach and democratic sabotage.
The Fiction of Humility
You open with the audacious claim that your “journey in Sierra Leone politics has never been about titles or applause.” This statement would be laughable if it weren’t so insulting to the intelligence of the Sierra Leonean people.
We have witnessed your relentless pursuit of recognition. Your highly paid lobbyists have orchestrated a global campaign to place you on platforms for accolades and applause. Award after award has been collected in your name, many of which were purchased rather than earned.
Most egregiously, you made an undisclosed donation to a university in The Gambia to secure an honorary doctorate, which you now unethically brandish as “Dr” in your name, despite not having earned either a medical degree or a PhD through legitimate academic achievement.
Your recent rotational selection as president of the African First Ladies’ organization has become yet another permanent fixture in your inflated titles. Every signature, every introduction, every public appearance trumpets these manufactured credentials.
If this is not about titles and applause, Mrs. Bio, then what would shameless self-promotion look like?
Twisting SLPP History of Struggle
You claim:
From the day I stood by my husband in the struggle for State House, I made two solemn commitments: 1) To enhance his presidential ambition. 2) To ensure SLPP produces the next Head of State after 2028.
Mrs. Bio, let us be clear: the SLPP’s struggle long predates your involvement with Maada Bio. When you met him in 2013, he had already lost a presidential bid in 2012. By then, his eventual 2018 victory had been painstakingly built on the shoulders of SLPP stalwarts like Dr. Prince Harding and many others who fought for nearly a decade, long before you appeared on the scene.
Yes, you added fanfare to his 2018 campaign, but the victory was not designed by you.
The Constitutional Crisis of Your “Commitments”
Your statement reveals two “solemn commitments” that should send chills down the spine of every Sierra Leonean:
First, you pledge to enhance his presidential ambition and protect his presidency. This language exposes the fundamental corruption at the heart of your operation. How does one “enhance” an ambition that has already been fulfilled? Your answer lies in your documented pattern of constitutional violations: forcing your way into cabinet meetings, interfering in ministerial appointments and dismissals, and treating state resources as your personal treasure.
Mrs. Bio, nowhere in any democratic dispensation, is a First Lady assigned the role to protect her husband’s presidency. This commitment is the textbook definition of First Lady Syndrome, the delusional belief that marrying a president grants you governmental powers. Your statement essentially confesses to creating an unconstitutional power-sharing arrangement between you and your husband that renders your husband’s presidency a façade. At the same time, you operate as the de facto decision-maker.
This explains the socioeconomic devastation Sierra Leone has endured under your husband’s administration. When an unelected, unqualified spouse interferes with governance, the people suffer the consequences.
Second, your commitment “to ensure that our beloved SLPP produces the next Head of State after the 2028 elections” is not a mission; it is a confession of electoral manipulation and party dictatorship. This statement acknowledges your systematic rigging of SLPP elections over the past seven years, your oppression of party members, especially women, and your authoritarian control over an institution that should serve its membership, not your dynastic ambitions.
When party delegates finally found the courage to resist your latest attempt to impose your chosen candidate as party chairman, your reaction was nothing short of a juvenile tantrum. The tantrums, threats, and retaliations that followed revealed the true nature of your commitments to sabotage our democracy.
Dangerous Confessions & Juju Politics
Your boast about having crossed rivers, climbed mountains, and braved jungles, both the political kind and the human kind, reads like the memoir of a criminal. You are confessing to using every means necessary, including what many Sierra Leoneans recognize as juju practices, to bend institutions and individuals to your will.
You are correct about one thing: you are “far from being an angel.” In fact, you embody the very essence of Lady Macbeth, manipulative, power-hungry, and willing to destroy opponents and democratic institutions for personal and political gain.
Thin-Skinned and Vindictive
Yet your claim of being thick-skinned is perhaps your most laughable assertion. When Members of Parliament dared to sing a song upon your entrance, a mild expression of their frustration with your overreach, you responded with the petulance of a spoiled brat. You disrespected your husband and violated parliamentary protocol by refusing to stand when the President entered. You wore earbuds because, in your own words, I did not want to hear their nonsense. You then spent three consecutive days releasing video messages insulting SLPP members, MPs, and the Speaker of Parliament.
This is not thick skin, Mrs. Bio. This is the behavior of a vindictive, vengeful, and deeply insecure individual who cannot tolerate even the slightest criticism.
Reducing the Presidency to Bedroom Politics
Perhaps most disturbing is your declaration that your “intimate time with the president at night is far more important than the time his staff spends with him in the daytime on governance issues.” This statement is another public humiliation of your husband and a confession of governmental dysfunction.
You are essentially telling the people of Sierra Leone that your pillow talks at night with their president, trumps policy discussions in the daytime with his cabinet. That sexual influence overrides professional advice, and that their elected president is so weak that he is ruled by his libido, takes orders from his wife in the bedroom rather than from his constitutional advisors in the boardroom of the State House.
This statement makes your husband appear less like a president and more like a junior secondary school boy whose hormones rule his decision-making. It suggests that Sierra Leone’s governance is determined not by competent analysis and democratic deliberation, but by whatever commands you whisper into Julius Maada Bio’s ears in the darkness of your bedroom. This beats your public humiliation of your husband a couple of years ago, when you told little children at your political rally that the president washes your period-soiled bedsheets.
Promise of Continued Tyranny
Your closing statements represent a direct threat to Sierra Leone’s democracy and the SLPP’s institutional integrity. You promise to continue your pattern of corruption and institutional destruction. This is not a commitment to service; it is a declaration of war against democratic norms, constitutional governance, and party democracy.
Your statement challenges SLPP members to resist your continued takeover of their party. It promises the people of Sierra Leone that you will continue to disrespect our laws, rules, regulations, and institutions in pursuit of your personal agenda.
We are committed to challenging you
Mrs. Bio, your statement to continue your tyranny has indeed inspired this response, not because we fear your threats, but because history demands that your abuses be documented. You have chosen to continue down the path of the Famous First Lady, accumulating notoriety through corruption rather than respect through service.
Therefore, we, the people of Sierra Leone, accept your challenge. We will continue to expose and document every abuse, every violation, every corrupt act. We will address you in our speeches, our writings, and through every democratic means available until your husband either assumes the full responsibility of his office or resigns. One way or the other, he needs to remove or restrain you from further damaging our democracy, as you are his liability, not ours.
You have made your choice, Mrs. Bio. You have chosen power over service, fame over compassion, and corruption over integrity. History will remember this choice, and it will judge you accordingly.
The people of Sierra Leone deserve better than a First Lady possessed by the very syndrome that has destroyed democratic institutions across our continent. We will not stop fighting for that better future we imagine for our country, no matter how many mountains you continue to climb or rivers you continue to cross. And most of all, no matter how many juju-implanted silver rings and bracelets you wear, the people will overcome your tyranny.
Your truth, Mrs. Bio, is our evidence. Your mission is our warning. Your loyalty is our greatest challenge!
Bring it on!
Yours Truly,
Fatima Babih, EdD
Citizen & Justice Activist
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This letter serves as both a response and a historical record documentation of how power corrupts and how democracy dies when institutions bow to the whims of power-hungry unelected spouses of elected officials.
MAMA SALONE ~ Lioness of the West Coast 