RESHUFFLE! RESHUFFLE: “OTHER APPOINTMENTS WILL BE ANNOUNCED IN DUE COURSE”
The dust raised by the recent reshuffling of ministers and civil servants is refusing to settle. And that may not happen for the next few weeks because State House says “other appointments will be announced in due course.”
Now those ministers not mentioned in the first announcement are looking very worried. Yes, very worried. So when you see some ministers inside their air-conditioned vehicles smiling, please don’t assume all is well. They have to continue creating the impression and at the same time sweating inside a freezing car. While we wait for things to happen “in due course”, we’ve been thinking about what our ministers should do to avoid The Principal’s cane.
1. The Principal has just celebrated his birthday. Let those ministers concerned take out whole pages in at least 10 newspapers to wish The Principal a happy birthday. Tell the newspapers to do in colour please and make sure those papers land on his desk
2. Please visit State House every morning with a huge pile of papers in hand. Make sure The Principal can see you on his CCTV at least. Say hello to some of his advisers and leave by the back door.
3. During this waiting period please don’t engage in any unproductive and unnecessary arguments with your senior civil servants like that other guy who has just been asked to step aside for now.
4. Remember to fast and pray. This is not about Ramadan. Just pray without ceasing. Your miracle may just arrive.
5. In case all the actions above look like failing, making your sacking inevitable, suddenly start being nice to your workers again. Remember to smile to them, give them gifts and generally make them feel loved. And start calling your old friends again. We are talking about those friends whose calls you’ve been rejecting over the last one year. They will accept if you apologize. Even a stupid one like “I was always very busy” will be accepted.
We hope we’ve been of some help.
ONE YEAR OF MAYOR OF THE SUN AND FREETOWN IS STILL LOOKING LIKE FREETOWN
Congratulations Mayor of the Sun on your first anniversary in that big office. We wish you all the very best. We pray that your Transformation Program will be an unqualified success. When that happens, Freetown will become GREAT AGAIN and we will all be very happy. Amen!
The other day we saw a short video spreading the message about how blessed we are in God Old Freetown to have you as Mayor of the Sun. Well done. But there are some things we need call your attention to as our contribution to the Transform Freetown idea. Here goes.
1. Frankly, how can you allow that horrible mess to continue in the middle of King Jimmy Bridge? Raw sewerage is pouring out on the bridge from God Knows Where and we have observed it for months hoping you will do something about it.
2. Why did you wait for a joint team of soldiers and police to clear the road from Lumley to Juba Barracks? That was a job for your police officers because you have people collecting market dues from those roadside traders who colonized the whole stretch, causing the worse traffic jam anywhere in Sierra Leone.
3. Moving beggars from the Cotton Tree area is a good effort but why are they quietly coming back with all the pile of rubbish near Taylor-Cummings Garden? Those near Bank of Sierra Leone hardly moved. A difficult problem indeed but how do you intend to deal with that?
4. As we enter your second year in office, we ask you kindly to invite as many of the people of Freetown to attend open sessions of your council meeting. We want to be able to engage with our councilors. We will then squeeze in a question or two about pigs roaming freely in some parts of Kroo Bay and Kingtom.
5. Please sell our football team – Freetown City Football Club. They are not winning matches despite the huge fortune we are spending to get them to participate in the Salone Premier League.
And to make matters worse, the other day we even heard that our coach received some money from an opposing team to buy “cold water”. What a shame? You mean we can’t buy the so called cold water for our team? Let’s sell this team NOW. In fact FC Johansen will use that as a route into the SPL once again.
EPL SEASON IS OVER: NOW THE “SILLY SEASON” OPENS
What will weekends now look like for lovers of the English Premier League? The show has ended for this season with Money Bags, Manchester City winning. We have now entered the football equivalent of what political journalists in UK call silly season – that period when parliament is on holiday and the Westminster rendezvous is quiet.
With the EPL off now, sports programs on BBC look empty even with Formula One, Athletics, Tennis and Horse Racing. Look out for speculations about players moving from one club to the other. Eighty percent of those speculations, inspired by player agents as a marketing tool never go through. Newspapers and websites open gossip columns to feed the readers appetite for news about the big players.
The local league is doing well in terms of spectators turning up for matches. That looks set to improve with the ELP out of the way. Some of our local teams are pretty mediocre but we have to pretend they are Barcelona before the debacle at Anfield.
Those who are supporters of the following clubs we want to talk about right now should please bear with us.
1. No team in England should sell their players to Manchester City. They don’t want to train their own players. Their strategy is to buy all the best players from all over the world to win the league. Their substitute players are first team players in the national teams of best football nations in the world like Brazil, Argentina and Germany. Come on!
2. Manchester United should simply sell at least seven players including Pogba, Jones, Fred, Lingard, Sanchez and Shaw. Some are already leaving but please the others must not remain. Even if they take a wage cut to stay.
3. It was a serious mistake for Manchester United to give Ole Ole the job on a permanent basis before the end of the season. See what happened to the club since. The guy was completely out of his depth.
3. Chelsea should prepare for life after Hazard. In their re-building effort Real Madrid are going to buy everybody they can lay hands on.
4. Please, finally introduce the Video Assistant Referee or VAR in the coming season. We are sick to death with incompetent and sometimes arrogant match officials.
BSL AND NASSIT BUILDINGS: REHABILITION INCOMPLETE AFER YEARS
What’s really going on with the Bank of Sierra Leone Building on Siaka Stevens Street and NASSIT headquarters on Walpole Street? We’ve been observing rehabilitation work on those two very important buildings over the last few years and we have reason to conclude that the contractors have abandoned work, creating a real shame in the heart of our city. We want the heads of those two institutions to speak up right now.
Let no one tell us the change of administration is responsible because those projects were halted even before the last elections. Now we have a situation in which all the makeshift scaffolding at NASSIT headquarters would have to be pulled down because it is very dangerous after a period in which nobody paid attention to it. For the Bank of Sierra Leone we are not even sure of the quality of the cladding work being done on that building. All d bank dem wan falamakata ECOIBANK cladding. Hahahah! Not bad! But make sure you do it well. Remember the Grenfell Tower in London and the inferno there! If you can’t find money from anywhere to complete the rehabilitation please tell your contractors to remove those ugly scaffoldings immediately.
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