By Joseph Lamin Kamara
“BE IT ENACTED by the Queen’s Most Excellent Majesty, by and with the advice and consent of the House of Representatives in this present Parliament assembled . . ,” the 1965 Public Archives Office (PAO) Act of Sierra Leone, enacted when Sir Henry Josiah Lightfoot Boston was Governor-General of Sierra Leone, reads.
By that decrepit Act, which has never been amended, all archives in the custody of any government office must be transferred periodically to the PAO. And the office must make available to the government any piece of information the archives contain. The office has done its job.
When, between 2002 and 2003, the local government ministry wanted to address contemptuous issues that ensued after the deaths of 63 paramount chiefs during the rebel war, it was the PAO officials that ferreted around – shuffling old smelly and dusty books and papers here and there – for documents that clarified the issues. When dispute broke out over Yenga between our government and that of Guinea, it was the PAO that the former turned to which offered sacrosanct documents with which we all boastfully protested our claim to the disputed area.
Recently the local government ministry enjoyed the service of a PAO official who helped prepare documents involving land and chieftaincy disputes.
That’s the usefulness of the PAO – a place of reference and conflict resolution for the public.
But with all that the office, which operates under the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology, has suffered extreme hardships against arrogant heartlessness. Most important of all the afflictions the office is incurring is when its staff goes for almost a year without salary.
“In all of 2014 we did not receive salaries until December, when all that year’s salaries were lumped together. It’s because we started agitating for salary increments that our salaries were held up to that time,” Joanes Allan Caulker, Assistant Archivist, tells me.
Shameful! Men and women with families, leaving their homes early in the morning and returning late in the day, with nothing at the end of the month!
The number of the staff members is just seven and all of them have been given ten million Leones to run the office, including salaries. That’s what’s too much to pay! That amount of money is obviously diminutive.
If the Public Archives Office were an institution like the Ministry of Mines and Mineral Resources that would bring physical cash to government or an office that held political relevance, its Act would have long been amended and, perhaps, its staff changed.
One thing President Ernest Bai Koroma’s government will be remembered and praised for will be salary increment. It started raising salaries of civil servants since 2008 when it made 20% increment. In 2011 there was 100% increment. In 2013 the government pronounced that the minimum wage for a public servant was Le480, 000 and in December 2014 it said no public employee must be paid less than Le500, 000. In all of those the Public Archives Office has realised only an abysmal development. The first increment did not reflect on the salaries of the staff of the archives office until the last quarter of 2009 and without drawback. The 2013 increment did not reflect until June, this year, for first quarter, that is in late second quarter. Several letters regarding the issue have been sent to the Ministry of Education without a single reply.
“I am the Senior Government Archivist and Records Manager with over twenty-seven years of dedicated service to the government Ministries and Departments. My take home pay for the end of last year was Le888, 794.25 per month. As I write it is now very difficult for me to be continually telling my staff to continue to exercise patience because the situation is affecting our families and households,” said Albert Moore, in a letter dated 14th August, 2014, addressed to Dr Minkailu Bah, Minister of Education.
That letter came after several others were addressed to the ministry’s permanent secretary and at least another to the minister himself.
“In concluding sir, we are once again pleading that you approve the new increment with effect from January 2014. In October, 2011 we suffered the same fate,” the August-14 letter continued.
Later I will comment on Mr Moore’s attitude of begging in that letter, which is the same in all the letters I have seen addressed to the minister.
Even after that letter when the PAO met the Ministry of Finance which approached the education ministry, there has been no new story to tell. While Dr Bah’s office complained it had received no increment allocation, but the old one, Dr Kaifala Marah’s office promised to make the increments reflective. But that has not happened. While the PAO has grappled to receive its normal salary and has not seen any increments for 2011 and 2013, it is worried it will not also see the latest increment.
The Archives Office has continued to suffer though not failing to continue to perform its duties; the government has continued to ignore though not failing to exploit the services of the office. The office has not rested because it operates in a worrying situation. Its latest letter is the one sent to the chairpersons of the oversight committees on Education and Labour in Parliament. The letter is dated 25th February, 2015 and titled “Letter of Complaint for our Draw-backs.”
“Sir, now that there is a government approved salary scale of five hundred thousand Leones (Le500, 000) to workers in the private sector and another increment to be effected in July for government workers, our greatest fear is that, the same treatment of us will continue if we keep tight lips on this. We have families sir, with numerous dependants on our salaries . . ,” part of the letter reads.
“We have been deprived for so long and we are sure with your intervention, this inhuman and unpatriotic handling of a group of Sierra Leonean workers in the hands of another could be stopped.”
There has been no reply to this also.
The education ministry approved increment for the first and second quarters of 2015, but up till now – the second quarter just finished – the pay rise has not been felt by the PAO.
Now, the inhumane treatments the Archives Office has suffered in the hands of particularly the Ministry of Education are immense, but that is no reason for the Senior Government Archivist Mr Albert Moore to beg for his salary to be increased when government has already said so. You don’t beg for your salary, as Mr Moore does in the first letter I quoted above. It’s something you work for and you deserve which MUST be given to you without requesting it. It’s a government policy that all public servants must have their salaries raised. Why should it be otherwise?
The easiest excuse public offices give today is that it is Ebola that has prevented them from performing their duties. But if Ebola can stop the payment of the Archives Office, let it also stop the payments of the ministers and the Members of Parliament.
Perhaps after this publication some officials of the PAO will be sacked, because that’s one of the commonest things in our country today: You stand to be victimized for standing up for your rights. But we will wait and see.
What’s been made manifest to me in the course of investigating this issue is government’s complete disregard to record keeping in this country. The Ministry of Education at the moment can give no clear explanation about the situation.
“Originally they (the Archives Office) are under the University of Sierra Leone and so government gave them subvention. But at some point it stopped. Whatever happened, I will have to find out,” said the ministry’s public relations officer, Brima Michael Turay.
He spoke to me after the permanent secretary refused to talk to me.
Public Relations Officer at the Ministry of Finance, Sayoh Kamara, told me the specific people who should comment on the issue, whom he refused to identify, were “in US and I can’t comment on that.”
Record keeping in this country has suffered in another regard. Our historic documents are scattered in three separate buildings in Freetown, two on Fourah Bay College Campus and one at the Civil Service Training College at Tower Hill.
That is the same with the Records Office at the Human Resource Office. Files and documents on the floor, not even a fan; and the sight of the office does nothing more than exuding colonialism. The Records Office which keeps documents of present relevance wants to transfer some of its old documents to the Archives Office, but there is no space for that.
If ever government had respect for record keeping it would, in the first place, not allow that small number of staff to go for even a month without pay. It would secure a piece of land where it would erect a structure just for archives and record keeping. Two or three acres of land around Freetown are not up to the immeasurable acreages of land our politicians are grabbing and are not up to those that government is offering to foreigners. This country has to respect its history. The history of a nation is as relevant as its future because it defines the future. But our own history is relevant only in our classrooms and to foreigners.
The Act of the Archives Office clearly needs amendments, if for nothing but to suit contemporary society. It needs to create provision for current files and information and communications technology mode of keeping records. And it needs to address the appalling staff welfare.
The government has ordered the increase of the salaries of both private and public workers, but while some realize the pay rise some others like the staff of the Archives Office have not and they go for almost a complete year without pay. Let the president explain this.
(C) Politico 29/07/15
