By Crispina Lois Cummings
The Sierra Leone Roads Authority and Freetown City Council have blamed each other when parliament summoned them to explain why the city gets filthier by the day, posing serious health hazards for its inhabitants.
The two institutions and Masada had been summoned to face the Committee on Local Government to answer to specific allegations made by FCC in a previous query for the “alarming proportion of garbage” littering the streets of Freetown.
The council had claimed that SLRA was to have cleared the streets and made them clean because they had been contracted for that.
But the Director General of the roads authority, Munda Rogers admitted that they were supposed to clean drainages, but argued that because those gutters were most times clogged with and cluttered by heavy household utensils, they had cleaned them but the garbage had not been cleared up by FCC.
“That is entirely the fault of the city council” he said, adding “They should do a mass sensitization so that people will not dump garbage on the streets and block drainages. When people are caught flouting the law they should be punished and the law be maintained instead of blaming SLRA,” Rogers said.
Meanwhile, the committee raised concerns over a certain clause that didn’t sound favourable to them in the Masada contract.
They said that in the company’s 50-year lease agreement their proposed site costs one US dollar per annum, but that if Masada did not get the agreed quantity of garbage they needed in a year, they could go to another country and ship garbage into Sierra Leone.
The committee also questioned the fact that it was the local government that signed the contract with Masada and not the city council which was now in charge of cleaning as per the devolution of responsibilities.
But the national project officer for Masada, Aminata Dumbuya said the contract had been reviewed and the clauses being referred to by the committee had also been removed.
She said the issue of local government signing contract with Masada was because they won the bid, went through procurement procedures and were now working closely with FCC in building a new relationship.
“When the new contract is signed this week, Masada will absorb all of [Freetown] waste management’s liabilities and all its 490 staff,” she promised.
Chief administrator of city council, Amadu Conteh, confirmed that they had established a relationship with Masada and were looking forward to working with them.
“We hope the new contract will be signed so that we can start working together. We have had an agreement for a two-week operation, starting this week to clean up the pile of dirt” he said, adding that they would not only pay Masada but would also provide fuel for their equipment.
(C) Politico 10/09/13
