ORANGE OR LIME
Have you NOT been having issues with the Orange mobile phone network especially of recent? We ask the question in the negative because having problems seems to be the norm these days with ORANGE. Their mobile money transfer, the best in the country, seems to be a letdown. So much so that if other telcos had launched a stiff competition and provided a real alternative Orange would be been in trouble. You OrangeMoney these days you’d be lucky if you got an SMS alert. This is causing so much mistrust and agony for people. And the company, so notorious for sending all sorts of irrelevant messages, has never sent one message explaining or even apologizing for hits, as far as we know. Perhaps they don’t want to send a message of apology because that will mean always having to do so, because the problem doesn’t seem to end. Whatever they prefer to do, we urge NATCOM to step in and save the poor customers.
SLFA ON THE MEND AS THE QUEEN ABDICATES
Finally, like the former Ivorian president Laurent Gbagbo, who spent as much of his tenure on borrowed time than the one mandated under the constitution, the QUEEN of Salone football has finally effectively abdicated. This, after leading the FA for twice as much as the four years he was elected to do. Well, not that she is no longer in office. She issued a statement this week withdrawing from the forthcoming election probably after smelling the rat. She was going to be defeated anyway, never mind her FIFA council membership rhetoric. In fact even her first and only mandate was questionable after arguably the worst ever SLFA election as far as our research goes. The real delegates boycotted the election because their preferred candidates had all been disqualified in one of the most cooked up vetting process. Phony delegates were eventually drafted murkily to vote in a phony election. So you see! And the QUEEN made little effort to atone for her sins against those disqualified candidates. Rather, under her watch, football took a turn for the worst in the country. Her policy of divide-and-rule backfired as it failed to secure her another mandate. With just a few days to the elective congress the delegate numbers did not add up in her favour. So she backed off from the race. We wish her well in her future endeavours. Whoever becomes the next FA President, should definitely try to resurrect football and unite the football family. We are very hopeful that a post-QUEEN FA will be on the mend and we will bring laurels.
OLD VEHICLES PAYING LESS AND NEW ONES PAYING MORE. WHAT LOGIC!
We don’t understand the logic behind it but clearly the Sierra Leone Road Safety Authority needs to explain why they charge old vehicles coming into the country less, while charging newer ones more taxes. Conventional reasoning would want to make us believe that newer cars are less harmful to the environment. So a way to discourage the influx of old rickety vehicles which are more harmful to the environment would be to charge them more. For example, Guinea does not allow the importation of any vehicles that are more than five years old. Here, people would be quick to jump on social media crying if such a policy was introduced. We behave as if we are the poorest people God has ever created, so much so that we lower our standards below our feet. Remember when the Right Hand Drive vehicle ban was introduced by LOGUS, it was like the sky had come tumbling down. All of a sudden our brothers and sisters in the UK diaspora started screaming that it was exclusion. We backed the LOGUS Policy. But ambivalence by the Government at the time, emanating from political convenience, turned that into something close to a nightmare. So we urge the authorities to charge newer cars less because we want to safeguard our environment in more ways than one.
THE SHAME AND SHAM THAT THE FBC ELECTION WAS!
We are appalled by many things that have happened in the protracted FBC students’ union election. From the continued untoward involvement of the national politicians, nothing new, to the violence by students that led to the beating-up of one journalist, the snatching away of at least one ballot box albeit later retrieved, and the college administration not taking a neutral position in the whole contest. A contest which should pass off almost unnoticed has in the last decade or so become a do-or-die affair. Just when we were all hopeful that one of two women would AT LONNNNNG LAST become president, came the shock that was Election Day. Voting started very late, the voters’ roll was shambolic, and hundreds of qualified voters could not exercise their franchise. The college administration should bow its head in shame. Agreed some students have no business being in university due to their despicable conduct of violence and disbelief in democratic process, but the administration’s inability to provide an even hand, conduct a fair process begs so many questions. The only way out of that situation now is to cancel the election, engage the parties involved, reorganize it by regularizing the voters’ roll and allowing the National Electoral Commission to go and conduct the election. Such was how poorly organized the whole sham was, that NEC even had to withdraw their staff because the college administration who had invited them, gave them no role to play. Now you understand why our national politics is the way it is.
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