By Aminata Phidelia Allie
The Sierra Leone National Social Security and Insurance Trust (NASSIT) is set to transform Sewa Grounds into a modern business center. The NASSIT plan to construct a multi-purpose market that officials say would accommodate about 4,000 traders will, hopefully, bring an end to years of search for solution to the proliferation of street trading in the Freetown municipality.
There has been a lot of controversy over not just the running of but also how to make appropriate use of Sewa Ground, which is currently home to several small scale businesses. It is also home to the Cathedral Primary School, and part of it has been used as home to some homeless youths.
One legacy of the 1991-2002 civil war is the overcrowding of the country`s capital, which has seen street trading engulfed it as the dominant mode of trade. Almost on a daily basis young people, in an apparent move to escape poverty in provincial Sierra Leone, relocate to the city where they tend to find out that the only legitimate means of survival is to sell in the streets. It`s therefore common to see young men and women hawking items as little as a pair of shoes, padlocks, necklace, and even dog chains. The result has for a long time been constant chaos, especially demonstrated at the Abacha Street market.
NASSIT, according to official sources, has budgeted over US$20million for the project. They also say the plan is for the facility to provide room for all street traders in the city, including the over 1,700 Abacha Street traders.
“It would not eradicate street trading. But I am positive that it would significantly reduce street trading,” says Osman Foday Koroma, head of public affairs at NASSIT.
The planned investment will be a joint venture by the Freetown City Council (FCC) and NASSIT and the lease agreement is for 50 years, renewable after every 25 years, he says.
He added that the facility, which was formally handed over to the national pension fund on February 13 by officials of FCC, would be transformed into one that will be the first of its kind in the country. “They have the land, we have the money,” Koroma boasts.
The project details revealed to Politico involves a multi-purpose market that will include a car park which will be constructed on the current location of the Cathedral Primary School. The school will be moved to A. J. Momoh Street on a piece of land opposite IPAM College which was initially owned by Njala University.
According to official sources, the Trust had been after Sewa Grounds for the last over six years. Yet all this while the city council has attempted a number of botched projects that has not only cost the country a fortune but also poor traders eagerly seeking a lasting solution to their troubles have had to endure repeated disappointments.
Abdul Karim Sillah, aka ‘Mr. Kay’, is among several traders who were the first to move out of Sewa Grounds on the promise of the FCC to build a new market. That was about a year ago when the council embarked on its last incomplete project. Sillah and co who feel stranded on Rawdon Street, where they were moved to, say they have now been asked to relocate to Free Street and Upper East Street. He says they have been told that this is to make way for easy transport of construction materials for the Sewa Ground project.
Sillah, who describes himself as an executive member of Vcitoria Park sellers association, claimed that the Council had promised to complete the construction within two months. “But all plans about us returning to Sewa Grounds changed after the president, on several occasions, condemned the FCC structures. That is why council brought NASSIT into the picture,” he says.
When early 2013 the government launched ‘Operation WID’, the FCC, in a bid to provide accommodation for street traders who were targeted by that exercise, built makeshift structures. President Ernest Bai Koroma condemned the quality of those structures on a subsequent visit there. They were demolished and replaced with permanent structures, which were yet condemned by the President.
It was following this that the President appointed journalist tuned politician, Winston Ojukutu Macauley, to oversee the construction of an ultra modern market facility.
In his search for an investor, Macauley approached NASSIT.
There has been no direct official statement from the President`s office on the Sewa Grounds project as yet. However, Mayor Franklyn Bode Gibson, at the FCC’s Regular Council Meeting in January, told his councilors that they were handing over the place to NASSIT on “presidential instructions”.
Macauley`s version of the planned project at Sewa Grounds, on completion, indicates that it will also have storage facilities, cold-rooms, a ware house as well as stores. Even business people who wanted to trade but lacked the finance would be aided, he tells Politico.
Macauley also says that anyone found hawking in the city after the completion of the project will be liable to face legal action.
The new Cathedral School will be a modern nursery and infant primary school that would accommodate about 1000 pupils, as per an agreement between NASSIT and the school authority, he says, disclosing further that it will also feature spacious modern facilities to make the atmosphere a conducive learning environment.
The car park, he adds, would accommodate about 400 cars and small office facilities.
But shop owners presently occupying the Sewa Grounds have concerns. Their chairman, Sheka Turay, says 50 of them had already received Le 13 million each as compensation even though they were gunning for more than that.
Turay, who sells cosmetics, says they were hoping for at least Le 25 million each.
Turay and his colleagues entered into an agreement with the FCC which saw them build their own shops on a leased land. They were supposed to start paying rent after 10 years. But he says they were only a year into their contract when this latest Presidential initiative was hatched.
In a much earlier interview with Politico, the chairman had sworn that they would shed blood should the government or any institution attempted to remove them from Sewa Grounds without a concrete contractual agreement. At the time they were still in talks with the council which was reluctant to compensate them for “breach of contract,” refund their monies and compensate them for whatever they might loss before giving up the facility, he says.
It is unclear whether the new owners of Sewa Grounds intend to demolish all existing structures, but the traders observed that their stores were not among those condemned by the President.
“The President admired our structures and condemned the FCC’s makeshift structures. So they demolished those makeshifts [structures] and constructed the present ones with concrete. But even these ones have been condemned by the president,” Turay says.
Although the NASSIT initiative has been received with praises, concerns remain over many issues.
Effort to get idea about how much has been spent on Sewa Grounds all this time proved futile. Cyril Mattia, the Public Relations Officer at FCC, after several promises, later tells Politico that all the monies that have been spent on all these failed projects came from the central government. Even Presidential coordinator Ojukutu Macauley could not provide figures. But observers believe that around the region of billions of Leones of hard-earned tax payers money may have been wasted.
For the traders, the concern right now is affordability of the new stores.
NASSIT`s Koroma says they have taken into consideration cost of the stores and that they are fully aware that most of the traders in the country were petty traders.
But Sillah, the trader at Rawdon Street, said promises that preceded this project were too many and have already gravely affected their businesses.
“We have lost all our customers and we are still moving.”
© Politico 24/02/15
