By Isaac Massaquoi
May be we should invite Nollywood producers to come to Sierra Leone and shoot a movie on this country's latest experience with some scam masters roaming the world looking for easy preys. It will be an instant blockbuster. We could even use some of the proceeds from that project to compensate the thousands of people who have lost good money to those who came here offering gifts that were simply too good to be real.
As far as I am concerned, all it took for the operators of Power Rangers Solutions to take away so much money from struggling young people under the guise of giving them a job in Canada is this: A little cash invested in paying for an office space, occupied by a bold master tactician, a reasonably sophisticated but cheap public relations and marketing strategy, weak and corrupt public institutions and a disillusioned and vulnerable youth population eager to flee to foreign countries to seek better lives that they don't want to work or fight for back home. That's all.
We can do all the analysis we feel like, cry all over the place but the fact remains that once again, our governance system has failed and as a consequence, hundreds of Sierra Leoneans have lost their life's savings, their hopes for a better life for themselves and their children and must now rebuild from the start on a non-existent foundation. It's a very serious situation to find oneself in anywhere in the world. It's worse in Sierra Leone.
I may not get an answer to all the questions I want to raise here about how it was possible that a group calling itself the unlikely name, Power Rangers Solutions could pull off a scam as basic as the one now being discussed in 21st century Sierra Leone, because, as always, I will be dismissed as a mad man complaining about everything. But I am happy to put my views about this Power Rangers scandal on record anyway.
Inevitably, I have to start by asking those young people who opened up to these scammers, how they allowed themselves to swallow a bait as cheap as that jobs-in-Canada decoy dangled by Power Rangers? Again, I am prepared to be told that I am writing with the benefit of hindsight. I absolutely reject that because some of my friends and relatives brought documents to me asking me to help them meet the requirements to get jobs in Canada. I turned many away telling them the whole thing was a scam. Some believed me and dropped the idea while others, in typical Sierra Leonean style, went away accusing me of refusing to help them grow. I am waiting for the latter group to come back to me and apologise for being rude.
Let me attempt to demonstrate why I say the system has failed. When Power Rangers Solutions landed in Sierra Leone from DR Congo (of all places), Nigeria or Cameroon, they certainly needed authorisation to start operations. And they might well have passed through the Administrator and Registrar General's office and the National Revenue Authority. Should one of these institutions have raised a red flag for the eyes of the appropriate authorities to keep watching over Power Rangers Solutions?
What about the Ministry of Labour? Surely, as the ministry in charge of the country's workforce I will never accept that their role was limited to facilitating the paperwork around this company. When a company offers to send a huge number of Sierra Leoneans to a foreign country for work, it is this ministry that must have a say in that. But did the minister and his staff raise the red flag at any point in their dealings with Rangers Power Solutions? Could it be that the labour ministry did not read the papers submitted to them? Were any papers submitted, in fact?
I understand that staff of Power Rangers Solutions actually facilitated the issuance of a large number of passports by the immigration department. Did Chief Immigration Officer, Kholifa Koroma or his staff relax procedures like doing proper checks and or actually conducting interviews? The information available to the public now is that the passports were prepared in huge batches.
Let's even say there was nothing wrong with engaging a fast track procedure ostensibly to help get the many jobless Sierra Leoneans into jobs in Canada, wasn't the way this process was being carried out enough reason for any immigration service to have been concerned to the extent of launching an investigation into what was really happening with our travel documents?
In some countries, even an unusually large purchase of bread from a particular store on a normal day will alarm the shopkeeper to the extent of informing the police. So while it was good business for Kholifa as he tried to meet sometimes unrealistic targets, in the interest of the country the police ought to have been informed of this sudden urge to travel abroad by mostly young men and women.
When all is said and done, the question must be asked whether the representatives of the shadow state within those institutions that are established and paid for by the formal state from our taxes did not subvert the correct procedures to keep the shadow state happy. In simple language was the system corrupted by those we employed to serve the state?
I have to mention the police at this point. I believe they came too late to the scene of crime - effectively closing the staple after the horse has bolted. Or was that lateness part of the grand plan of the shadow state? I beg the police to forgive me, but knowing how sensitive they are to groups of people gathering in places, almost like their counterparts in those former communist states in Eastern Europe, how was it that they failed to ask the right questions when hundreds of young people gathered outside the offices of Power Rangers Solutions daily? They should have kept an eye on the place. Now they are talking about a safe, and deploying their men to guard an office that has been virtually looted, as far as I am concerned.
I told a friend when this scheme fell apart that it is possible for any criminal to come to Sierra Leone, set up some kind of office within a few days with very little or no background check and proceed to openly recruit tens of thousands of young Sierra Leoneans for combat with the Janjaweed militia in Sudan, SELECA rebels in Central African Republic or even Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army. I bet we will only notice their departure after casualties or atrocities involving our people would have reached disgusting proportions.
If you think I am being unnecessarily alarmist, tell me how, with all the outcry about people smuggling, 50 Sierra Leoneans were recently made to pay huge amounts of money to be taken to Europe using the dreadful route across the Mediterranean sea only for them to be dumped in the desert of Libya at the mercy of criminal gangs who now control the place post-Col. Ghadaffi?
The only option open to the government now is to set up a judge-led inquiry into how the young people of this country and indeed their parents came to be ripped off by means of such a mediocre scam probably facilitated by the institutions that should have protected the interest of the people. Those found culpable should be severely punished.
Just when those who suffered at the hands of the so-called Wealth Builders theft were reeling over that fleece, comes news of another monumental scam. It cannot be right that such naked thefts are taking place almost always without consequence, and the victims are told to fall on their knees and pray for better luck next time. The state must act. And fast.
(C) Politico 05/06/14
