RASTA SENGS’ LEAGUE TABLE OF ABSENTEE WORKERS OUT
When Rasta Sengs turned up at Youyi Building the other day to basically see how early people go to work or whether they make an appearance at all, we knew where the whole thing was headed. Obviously not impressed with what he saw he asked that defaulters be queried.
Now the results are out and for the sake of what we do in this column we will only deal with the two ministries leading the table – the Ministry of Agriculture and the Ministry of Lands. In other words, they issued the most queries.
1. Ministry of Agriculture: They issued ONE HUNDRED AND ELEVEN queries. Those who received the queries were either absent or late for work on the day Rasta Sengs paid that unannounced visit. Let’s try and see where these workers were.
a. Actually, the 111 workers were all in the countryside distributing fertilizers, training farmers to produce a bumper harvest this Christmas. It could also be that they were driving tractors. Who knows?
b. Maybe they were in the canteen area having breakfast. Rasta Sengs didn’t visit the canteen at Youyi Building.
3. Could it be that they were having their usual morning devotion in the conference hall and nobody bothered to tell them the big man was around?
4. Actually, the workers were on their way to Youyi Building after the rush hour struggle to catch a vehicle. These days it’s not just about the cost, it’s about being able to fight to get a place on public transport. It’s that serious. In the interest of completeness, let’s get a summary of what they said in their reply to the queries issued.
MINISTRY OF LANDS:
Frankly, some of what we said about their colleagues in the Agriculture ministry holds true for them over at Lands. But here’s what is unique to these ones.
1. The fourteen workers were probably from the Survey Division and were busy that morning marking out government property in the Freetown Peninsula where chaos reigns when it comes to land acquisition and use.
2. Maybe they were in court serving as witnesses for the dozens of land cases going through our courts. That’s a big part of their job.
3. They just didn’t bother to turn up for work because Minister Turad Senessi is making life difficult for them. They prayed and fasted for Principal to either transfer or sack their minister. Now they have to do it all over again. Sorry guys!
4. By the way, we understand that some offices that were supposed to issue queries simply ignored the directive of Rasta Sengs. What is he going to do about that? We have an idea: send the head of the institution home for two weeks without pay.
THE LITTLE GIRL FINALLY MET PRINCIPAL, WHAT NEXT?
We join the family of that little girl standing beside principal in saying thanks to the big man for opening his doors to them for what we think is an existential threat to our education system on which we are spending so much money from the little we have as a country.
The little girl called the attention of the country to the fraudulent activities of examination supervisors hired by the West African Examination Council, WAEC. The video quickly went viral and absolutely shamed the nation – an exams supervisor openly destroying the future of our children, collecting money and going to bed feeling good about his service to Sierra Leone. We acknowledge the courage of the family for allowing the child to speak out so publicly about an issue she feels so strongly about, considering all the risk. And there are risks.
So we’ve seen pictures of the meeting with Principal but like all Sierra Leoneans we have to ask the inevitable question, WHAT NEXT?
1. By now the Force for Good ought to have turned up at the residence of that supervisor to invite him to visit the CID headquarters. Surely, it’s easy to get the person because WAEC knows the person they deployed to that center where the brave girl wrote her exam.
2. We don’t want to be told that the matter was under investigation because that’s usually a good way for the police to kick criminal investigations into the long grass where nobody gets to see them again. We need this thing to be done in the open for all to see.
3. We have always called attention to the threat posed to credible examinations by hundreds of parents who would these days set up camp outside examination NPSE centers. These are the people who are so desperate for their children to get the grades to the extent that they would provide food and money for supervisors to get them to do the kind of criminal act the young girl described in that video. Why has WAEC not decisively dealt with that all this while?
4. We didn’t quite like what ACC did the last time when they decided to parade those teachers they caught corrupting the WASSCE in their so-called strong room but we weren’t as outraged as some of those who actually attacked the ACC shouting Human Rights. Some of these teachers have betrayed the trust placed in them by the nation to train the next generation. We have no choice but to STOP them now.
ROGUES ALREADY AT WORK OVER SEWA GROUNDS MARKET
We hear that rogues are already collecting money from traders and promising to give them priority in the allocation of stalls at Sewa Grounds market while still under construction. Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised at all because criminals are becoming increasingly bold these days. We have also, in the not too distant past experienced bogus get rich quick schemes that ended up impoverishing many Sierra Leoneans. The authorities realized the murky business only after people started demonstrating for their deposits. So we are not strangers to this kind of cheap trick.
We are still at a loss as to how people who should know better are giving opportunities to shady characters to steal from them. The traders know that NASSIT is handling the project and they also know where NASSIT offices are located in Freetown yet they allow people who have no business with that organization to collect cash from them for stall that would otherwise be genuinely allocated to them for far less than what we hear was being proposed by the shady characters.
Anyway, NASSIT has taken steps to warn people against falling into the wrong hands over Sewa Grounds. Let’s see how things play out. We suspect some people would end up in court because it’s possible that even before NASSIT issued that press release, something very foul had already taken place.
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