By Ezekiel Nabieu
With the extraordinary powers conferred on the Head of State to establish all sorts of institutions and organizations it should not come as any surprise if yet another secretariat is established with funding from the Consolidated Revenue Fund to change attitudes and behavior. This is simply because after eight years the Attitude and Behavioral Change Secretariat has proved to be a disappointment with no tangible achievements. Their so-called achievements have been encapsulated in lectures to institutions that have their own internal mechanisms for behavior and annual reports on those lectures. If every truth is regarded as a witch hunt by neer-do-wells, let this observation not be regarded as such. It is in fact a REALITY HUNT.
The removal of the erstwhile deputy ABC officer and her non-replacement clearly testifies to the fact that she was doubly redundant in an already redundant secretariat. The head of the secretariat is a very able and a very idle man not of his own making but by the device of his employer. Having been a very senior officer of the SLBC he is now being idolized by the press regardless. But conscientious evaluators have seen through the artifice. If attitude change be effective it should start from the top by scrapping the ABC Secretariat which cannot outlive its usefulness because it has not been useful from the word GO. Such static attitudes from role models will filter down in no other way.
And talking about exemplary behavior senior officials of the ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Food Security were unable to account for Le 1.2 billion recently when they appeared before the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) in Parliament. The Permanent Secretary, Mr Edward Kargbo said the money was used to buy air tickets for ministers during the period under review and for administrative purposes. When asked to produce supporting documents, Mr Kargbo was unable to do so but he was asked to do so against a deadline. We are not told of the frequency of travel of these ministers and the class in which they were travelling as well as expensive hotel bills. Is this a patriotic attitude? Any attempt to curb this wasteful tendency Dr Thomas? Ever lectured on willful waste that brings woeful want?
By establishing the ABC to rein in the people’s attitudes towards governmental standards one is apt to have the false impression that before then all attitudes went haywire and needed rebranding. From the beginning of the world there has need for attitude and behavior change domestically and publicly. That is why there are changeable laws, rules and regulations unlike natural laws that are unchangeable. In Sierra Leone uniquely we have a whole secretariat for that with no sense of direction but with phenomenal theoretical successes. In spite of this many professionals bind themselves with ethical codes that are usually strictly observed without need for external stimuli. These institutions including the public service have internal mechanisms to control behaviors and were not waiting for the De Pa to come to power. De Pa knows without admitting it that if anything, lawlessness and violence have become worse since his pet project of an useless ABC Secretariat. Should we not now change our attitudes of being false to ourselves? What’s this stubbornness in maintaining that useless outfit about?
Evidence of ABC Secretariat failures
The most recent evidence that the ABC Secretariat is unfit for purpose is the fact that a gang of students has been going around terrorizing other students out of examination halls after the idlers told the nation that they had been lecturing students against violence. The officials of the Secretariat should take time off their inane lectures and read the Auditor-Generals Reports for the past couple of years to see the extent of graft in the public service. The tale of the two educational institutions across Circular Road in Freetown is too recurrent to be reiterated here. The ABC Secretariat cannot feign ignorance of it. The fact is that they are clueless over the very matters they were set up to address. A university institution I.P.A.M has even been sucked into the fray. Where are the extraordinary lecturers? Stabbing with knives and scissors as well as pick-pocketing is on the increase. The ABC Secretariat has been so “successful” that the African Youth Partnership Against Violence has been formed. How the paper achievements of the ABC Secretariat mock them! A new Secretariat for DNA Change may be the answer.
(C) Politico 16/06/16
