WHY CAN’T THE MAYOR OF FREETOWN SAVE FSSG?
We have found it very difficult to explain why the Freetown Mayor has allowed conditions around the Freetown Secondary School for Girls to deteriorate so badly. We have also NOT heard much of an outcry from the teachers and pupils and indeed the board of that school.
Along the school fence on the Hannah Benka Coker street end is a complete disgrace. As a newspaper we should normally attach a picture to this write up to properly illustrate why we are so disgusted about the mess out there but the last time we tried to take a picture of the place one of our reporters was attacked. All journalists are told to get but don’t become the story. We may now have to hire a drone to get the job done from a distance if the mayor tries to ignore us again and take our case to the people of Freetown.
We should let the mayor know that this is a campaign we are prepared to sustain until that mess is cleared. So if she is holding back because of votes, she must be prepared to be thrown out of office. This is her city and she can’t hide behind the central government to avoid doing something about FSSG. She said a lot on VOA in the last few days about running this city (We are analyzing her statements now against the reality in this city. We will return to that issue later. Here is an opportunity for the Mayor to do something concrete.
The entire fence area running up to Tolongbo office is occupied by a chaotic and intoxicating mix of people selling food to our children, a so-called youth parliament, Okada and Kekeh boys, an amateur vulcanizing place and at least FOUR cesspit vehicles. Is the mayor telling us she has never seen that mess? Her party office is just next door so we will not accept any such escape route. The school authorities should also tell us why they allowed what essentially was a mini-market of a few women selling food to the pupils to become what we have just described above. Are they telling us that the situation has no effect on the learning atmosphere and outcome at FSSG?
We will be back in subsequent editions.
GOOD MORNING LEONES STARS: NO COMPLACENCY PLEASE
Let’s not take anything away from you guys; you played a very good game against Algeria. It was highly technical, requiring a lot of energy and concentration and you did your best. At the end of the match the Algerian coach was so disappointed that he decided he needed to bury his head in the grass. He came into that match expecting to give this small West African country a good lashing. It turned out that we had pushed him into a very difficult spot. We will shed no tears for him if he is sacked before the end of this competition. The lesson for him is that Sierra Leone is bigger than those few guys who try to use Algeria on Temple Run to reach Europe.
That was a good day at the office guys. Congratulations. Our next opponents know us a bit better in terms of football. They are a good side but even when they had the most powerful footballers in Africa playing in top European leagues they always failed in Africa. We mean no disrespect but we can hold our own comfortably against The Ivory Coast. We warn however that we should never be complacent.
We are in this competition to prove to the world that we play very good football in this country and we are not afraid of any country. The performance of our next two opponents when they met on Wednesday evening gives us a lot of hope that we can beat them.
The rest of us –citizens of Sierra Leone have provided all the money and we fully support the team on and off the field. Our team has no choice now but to beat the next two teams in front of us and win our group. We are deploying the prayer warriors again. By the time we meet here on Monday you guys should have taught the Ivorians a bitter MRU lesson. Good luck.
KABINEH KALLON PLEASE PROTECT OUR VEHICLES
Next time you enter the Youyi Building by the Zonta Bye-Pass gate please cast your eyes to the right and what immediately comes into view is something that looks like a scrapyard for government vehicles. What is Moba Kabineh really telling us about what we can all see in that corner of shame inside one of the most important government compounds in this land that we love?
Very expensive vehicles either bought with our taxes or donated to us by friendly governments with different types of defects have been abandoned in the corner of Youyi Building and God alone knows what’s happening to them every night. We appreciate what has been done over the years to bring some respectability to Youyi Building but surely there are very good grounds for suspicion that wicked people hanging around that place might be removing vital parts of those vehicles for sale along Goderich Street. That’s the area of Freetown where some people who have no Tax Identification Number or even a bank account are running big time spare part businesses.
In the name of the good people of Sierra Leone we call on Moba Kabineh to immediately move those vehicles to the Road Transport Corporation for maintenance or if they are not fit for purpose let’s just sell them off to private people.
When taxpayers like us enter the Youyi Building and see our vehicles apparently abandoned there we feel really bad. Those who donated some of those vehicles to us know this reality and we probably should never read the report they are sending back home about the gift they gave to this land that we love.
STATISTICS SIERRA LEONE AND THOSE ROGUE ENUMERATORS
Some trained enumerators collected our tablet and money and SSL sent them to the field to simply count the good people of Sierra Leone within a given location but all they did was to chop our money and go to sleep. They have effectively stolen the tablet and some are even brazen enough to turn up at SSL headquarters to collect more money alongside those decent Sierra Leoneans who did the job even in such very difficult conditions. We understand some are now at the CID answering questions for taking and money and pad without doing the job and perhaps for even attempting to get more money from the national purse. How can anybody explain this?
We’ve been trying to understand why any good Sierra Leonean would behave this way and we could only do the following reasons. We absolutely think there is no reason for such a behavior but let’s just put a few lines down to get the conversation underway.
1. It could well be that the vast majority of those who refused to go to the field even after collecting our money and pad are supporters of Tolongbo and they were simply giving practical effect to Yansaneh’s call for a total boycott of the process by his members. Maybe we should just add for good measure that Yansaneh actually asked all Tolongbo members not to even serve as enumerators.
2. We also suspect that among those people are outright criminals who went into the training simply to carry out the criminal enterprise that SSL just exposed.
3. We know that many of those trained as enumerators are University students. Let’s now ask very serious questions about what it means to be a University student. Honestly, society expects so much from people in our institutions of higher learning but see how disgraceful this behavior is.
4. We call on SSL to publish the full details of those rogue enumerators in at least FIVE national newspapers over a whole week. We don’t want such people to even approach public service anymore. They’ve lost their chance through laziness and partisan politics.
Let the census continue with the new hotline for targeted enumeration areas.
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