A good man, the proverb says, is hardly ever honored in his homeland. So is it with one of Sierra Leone’s finest patriots who has worked assiduously to bring back sanity to the country’s once disheveled timber trade that was costing the government to lose tens of millions of dollars annually that otherwise would have gone into the consolidated revenue fund.

Even though the CEO of Leadway Limited, Babadi Kamara, has called a press conference and presented the entire nation with the facts and figures of his upright, transparent, accountable management of the country’s timber export trade, there are certain detractors enemies of progress and detractors from the New Direction government’s ongoing project to sanitize governance at all levels in society – including the management of the country’s natural resources.

The matter is simple. Babadi Kamara challenged anybody to come up with concrete evidence of his having stolen one penny that belongs to the government and people of Sierra Leone derived from timber export during his two year’s management to come out with the evidence.

Since then, what has come out are outrageous claims of Babadi Kamara and Leadway having stolen over USD150 million from sale of timber.

One can only encourage the detractors of Banadi Kamara that have made this outlandish allegation to take the evidence quickly to the ACC and if they are genuinely true, publish it in the media for the people to see.

To put the matter straight, 150 million dollars in a relatively small economy like ours is not money that one can easily hide. That is because the ACC and FIU work directly with all the registered banks in the country to help them trace such huge deposits and where they come from.

Secondly, if Babadi Kamara has that amount of money in his account hidden somewhere outside Sierra Leone, the Financial Intelligence Unit which works overtly and covertly with money laundering agencies across the world would have been informed.

Lastly, let it be known that His Excellency President Bio who the nation knows has an absolute zero tolerance policy towards corruption would not keep Babadi Kamara for one minute long as the government’s sole timber export agent if there is any hard concrete evidence of Babadi Kamara having swindled millions of dollars from the timber account.

Fact of the matter is that it was the government itself which seeing how much the country was losing from the timber trade set up an independent investigative committee on whose findings the government acted to place the trade under the control of Babadi Kamara who has performed credibly and exemplarily to in the space of two years give government over 50 million dollars from timber export to the government through the NRA.