By Mustapha Sesay
Director in the office of national security, Rtd. Brig. Mustapha Kawuta Dumbuya, has expressed delight in a partnership between the mass media and the security sector formed to foster national development.
He told a one-day symposium organized by the Africa Centre for Strategic Studies Chapter 29 (ACSS) at IMATT in Freetown that the effort was meant to understand the “goodwill and effective support of the mass media in Sierra Leone”.
He pointed out that the symposium came at a better time “as we are grappling with the sceptre of a terrorist threat posed to our national security by the Al-Shabab terrorist group in Somalia”.
Chairperson of the symposium, Brig. Gen. Kestoria Kabia, said the relationship between the media and security institutions was “one of tension, due to differing institutional cultures and goals”.She, nevertheless,added that the media and the security sector were mutually dependent on each other and must cooperate to educate the public and hold the government accountable on security policies.
The brigadier confessed that the intelligence sector posed a number of challenges to the media, noting that that had created “a risk for over reliance on official information and manipulation of information provided to the journalists”.
She Kabia observed that the media landscape in the country needed a repositioning in order to enhance its contribution towards national development.
President of ACSS Charter 29, Ambassador Joe Blell, said to the wider public the security sector, remained a very complex idea to understand when it came to expectations and functionalities. This, he said, had deprived the sector of “real appreciation of its contribution to growth and national development”.
He said “the traditional approach of keeping the security sector close needs to be opened up with an assured means of breaking the previous means of working”.
(C) Politico 13/03/14
