HELLO RASTA SENGS: HOW FAR WITH THE QUERIES AT YOUYI BUILDING
We woke up one morning to pictures of Rasta Sengs paying unannounced visits to the different ministries and departments at Youyi Building splashed all over social media. There were commentaries about this new guy checking those offices to see whether civil servants are normally at their desk as required to serve for the people.
According to his media handlers, Rasta Sengs was disappointed to discover that lateness was common and absenteeism was not considered serious enough to get the attention of a man in the position Rasta Sengs holds. The big man returned to his office that day and decided to act. He issues queries and somehow, well in his style, those official queries ended up on social media.
Now, several weeks after, we are still not clear as to what has happened since those affected were required by official regulations to reply to those queries. In fact, that’s the reason we have decided to bring this up and to remind Rasta Sengs that we are committed to seeing this to the end. For now, we are content with speculating about what has happened.
1. The civil servants received the queries and decided to ignore Rasta Sengs. They may well have concluded that his love for social media may have driven him to attempt that stunt.
2. Maybe they replied telling him that on that day of his visit to Youyi Building, the new fuel price has just begun biting very deep into their pockets and some of them were even beginning to think about resigning their jobs because the little money they make is spent on transportation alone.
3. They also ignored the man because upon assuming office they were hoping to have a meeting with them to hear what it is like working for the government of Sierra Leone in these days of rising inflation and high cost of living.
4. Rasta Sengs looked at the pictures of his visit on social media and was happy that his mission had been achieved. Trying to fix lateness or absenteeism was never his objective. In fact the man has not gone back to see how clean Youyi Building really is, weeks after his highly publicized so-called cleaning exercise at that main government facility.
WE MUST AVOID ANOTHER ROUND OF INTERNATIONAL COURT BATTLES
Are we walking into another court battle against another of the few significant foreign investors we have in this country? These days nobody wants to remember the long drawn out and costly legal battle we had with what is now Marampa Mining and the reputational damage that caused us. We are slowly gaining the reputation of a country where the leaders sign one agreement with a company only to revoke it a few years down the line and pass the same assets to other business concerns.
Just yesterday we watched a film of the launch of the ARISE IIP program in Sierra Leone. The ceremony took place on the eve of the last elections and Principal told the world that ARISE IIP would establish factories in that industrial zone; create tens of thousands of jobs and take control of the rails to transport their products and raw materials and transport passengers. The applause was deafening applause and Principal liked it as TV cameras took those pictures right into the homes of many around the world.
Now, we are hearing that the same government has decided they made a mistake and are now going to pass the port and rail facility over to the Chinese miner – Kingho or Leone Rock. We have not received any official explanation and that is because the government thinks we don’t deserve one. They are dead wrong.
We want all actions taken in our name to be clean and ethical. Our government should not be saying this today and doing something completely opposite the next day. We deserve to know why ARISE IIP is being treated this way. We are citizens of Sierra Leone so we call on our government to RESPECT their own pronouncements and tell us why the sky would fall if they didn’t ditch ARISE IIP.
SUPPORTING THE PEACE PROCESS - WELL DONE SLAJ
The main opposition party and the government have signed a document agreeing to do a number of things to ease political tension in the country and ensure full participation in our democracy. As with all such agreement, people would dispute aspects because in negotiations people don’t always get what they set out to achieve. We have heard a few fiery responses on social media and those ones are now threatening to drown out voices of moderation that have decided to give this process a chance in the interest of the country. It is against this background that we commend a recent press statement by SLAJ calling on us to help the process succeed by engaging the idea of conflict-sensitive reporting.
We know that some of us would not resist the tendency to proclaim winners and losers and shame people by giving prominence to extremist hawks on both sides of the political divide but we are glad that SLAJ put that statement out anyway.
In the coming days some of the points on that paper would certainly be subject to a lot of argument and misinterpretation threatening the whole process once again. As media people, we have a big role to play to help all sides approach implementation in good faith. It pays nobody to encourage division and throw Sierra Leone into conflict for political reasons.
A FAKE LETTER USED TO THROW MPs OUT OF ZIMBABWE’S PARLIAMENT
We’ve been having some fun listening to media reports of a political drama in Zimbabwe. The Speaker of Parliament received a letter from a man claiming to be the Secretary General of the main opposition party in that country. The man listed the names of more than a dozen MPs from the opposition and asked the Speaker to throw them out because the MPs were no longer part of the party. The Speaker swiftly expelled them and opened the possibility of ZANU PF gaining the upper hand in parliament following the recent election.
The leader of the opposition then wrote to the Speaker saying the letter was an absolute FAKE and in any case they had the Secretary General position in their party. The Speaker is standing firm and a court battle is set to begin. So what’s really going on?
1. Obviously, ZANU PF is at work. They must have hired that impostor to write the letter as they attempt to assert control over the parliament which they lost in the last election. The man has collected his cash and is probably having fun in the French Riviera.
2. It could well be that the man felt bad about his party’s loss of parliament and is merely trying to address that imbalance. He went to sleep one evening and dreamed up the idea of writing that letter. He then selected MPs from constituencies that may be vulnerable in a by-election and sent their names to the Speaker. We congratulate him for his bravery.
3. Should this expulsion stand, the ZANU PF should be ready for the day a similar trick is played on them in opposition. They say what goes around, comes around.
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