SIERRA LEONE OLYMPIC GAMES SO FAR – VERY POOR INDEED
This Land that we Love is completely out of the Olympic Games taking place in Tokyo right now. Our few athletes have been eliminated in the preliminary rounds. Our only hopes now rest with our Paralympic athletes who are due in Tokyo in the coming weeks. Frankly, there was zero hope in this country that even a bronze medal would come home. Far from that. We all wanted to simply see our people putting in a decent performance in their individual events and register the name of this country in the minds of the world. In reality, that’s what we were looking for.
As it turned out, we invested heavily in the games – given our limited resources but all we got was poor organization, athletes who spent more time causing noise on social media instead of working hard to deliver the goods for us. Apart from the swimmers, the others blamed everybody for their poor showing but themselves. The strange thing in all of this is the media back home have been more receptive to their rants than hearing from the side of officials. Well, maybe that’s the name of the game but when a man who knew he was overweight for the division in which he was registered in a judo contest actually boards a plane for Tokyo believing he will shed FIVE POUNDS in a week, we are left to wonder whether officials were to blame or the athlete who ought to have asked to be substituted. The guy simply wanted to fly to Japan and collect thousands of dollars in per diem. We think he should refund the money to our Consolidated Revenue Fund.
The NOC is another story. That organization has remained the same both in terms of personnel and output for many years. We need fresh people and ideas in that place. We want people who can stand up to all those mushroom local sport bodies created only for travel opportunities and tell them we should only concentrate on where we think we can do well. We have never seen Jamaicans doing steeple chase.
MARIJUANA EXPORT FROM SALONE MUST STOP
This is not the first time we are calling attention to what looks like a booming trade in marijuana from Sierra Leone into Guinea and Liberia. It emerged towards the end of last week that a large quantity of marijuana bound for one of our neighboring countries, possibly Liberia was confiscated at a checkpoint in Bo district.
We have always called on the authorities to stop this cross-border trade in marijuana because it’s doing enormous damage to our economy and food production and indeed the reputation of this country. We really can’t afford that at this time.
There is certainly no national outcry over this and it’s almost as if the nation and its institutions are powerless against a few criminals who prefer to make big money at the expense of the economy and reputation of Sierra Leone. We should NEVER be surprised or outraged when a serious western country slams a ban on Sierra Leoneans traveling to their place because we are slowly but surely moving towards becoming a supplier of narcotics.
The immediate danger we face is that people are turning away from growing food crops to the production of marijuana on a large scale because the market exists in Liberia and Guinea. Why can’t they grow what they smoke?
The other danger is that many Sierra Leoneans are being jailed in those countries and our innocent people are facing intimidation and harassment on a daily basis on the streets because the security agencies there think they are all part of the marijuana trade.
The National Drug Law Enforcement Agency knows that periodic news items about the agency or persistent calls for more money will not solve the problem. There’s a lot of money in marijuana business and the big guys running the show are influential and dangerous but we have to fight them because we have no choice.
MY COIN SAGA – WHY CAN’T WE LEARN LESSONS?
We can bet our lives that if another well-dressed so-called businessman turns up in another part of Sierra Leone tomorrow or even in Bo town proclaiming the coming of a new company to do the same thing that the MY COIN thing was doing before the Bank of Sierra Leone pulled the plug, many people will join up again. We say so because we can’t explain how after the so-called WEALTH BUILDERS and POWER RANGERS episodes it was EVER envisaged that another extremely risky enterprise would ever thrive in this country. They say never say never, a company known locally in Bo as MY COIN has just caused significant damage to many homes in the southern city.
These days we feel sorry for BSL and the authorities in general for dealing with a mess created by some greedy Sierra Leoneans who decided to invest big money in a scheme that was just too good to be true, sold to them by what look like our local equivalent of Bernard Madoff. And it’s strange that those who made the risky investment are now attacking the government because they believe business was good and BSL had no business poking their noses in that enterprise. It’s so sad.
We have been given a list of some of the people now suffering grief and pain as a result of the collapse of MY COIN. We are scandalized by the caliber of people on that list. Those who ought to smell risky financial behavior from ONE HUNDRED miles away are the same people now caught in the MY COIN saga.
They are the same people now putting pressure on the authorities to give them the money they invested from our taxes. We are totally against that. When people invest money in a business they take risks. They enjoy dividends when things are fine and when things go bad, they should also take the consequences. No amount of demonstrations should sway the government from the right path. Why the man behind MY COIN is still running around is what we don’t understand. We should probably start criminal prosecution against him with the aim of recovering the deposits now.
PPRC PLEASE TELL US HOW MANY POLITICAL PARTIES WE HAVE IN SALONE
Elections are just two years away and we expect the Political Parties Registration Commission (PPRC) to begin the process of working with our so-called parties registered with the Commission. We cannot tell now whether new ones would emerge or those that participated in the 2018 elections would still be around. And we cannot hide the fact that in the polls two years ago, some political parties were not up to scratch when it came to meeting all the requirements laid out in the laws of this country.
The Commission was quite generous to a good number of them, as they had no properly run offices or credible executive representation beyond Freetown. Some never gave allowances to those that offered their services. We would advise that they look at the structure of some of these parties including some big and old ones. Today, they only exist in Freetown and on social media. Those who want to run political parties should go by the law. As things stand we know that structures are non- existent and we remain skeptical about the seriousness of these parties in the democratic space.
The PPRC boss Abdulai Bangura must get his team to thoroughly scrutinize some of our parties to save the electorate from being confused and cheated by parties that exist only in name. We will not accept any brief case party being certified to put their names on the ballot. In fact we want them to know that no GOODLUCK JONATHAN money is coming here for the foreseeable future.
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