SLRA THIS IS CIRCULAR ROAD RIGHT NOW. UNACCEPTABLE
Frankly, the SLRA or the Road Maintenance Fund should never have allowed this to happen. Well if it happened without notice, and we doubt that very much, somebody should quickly rush to that place and deal with what is clearly a death trap waiting to start consuming its unsuspecting victims. Those victims will almost certainly be ordinary Sierra Leoneans going about their normal business. What makes this situation even more worrying is that we are living in a country where people NEVER get compensation when they injure themselves in these road conditions. That must change immediately. It will make the institutions in charge of our roads or public services in general more alive to their responsibility.
Let’s even put the possibility of sustaining injuries on our roads to one side and think about how ugly this looks in the center of our capital. We don’t want any long conversation about this and that, we want the SLRA to move and move very quickly and they should do this all around Freetown not just target this area in the picture. We can assure them that there are many such places being ignored. The rainy season is here and we all know what happens to our roads when we get to July and August.
THE MAYOR MISSES A BIG OPPORTUNITY ON 98.1
Our mayor of the SUN was on Radio Democracy the other day to talk about what the council was doing about sanitation in the city. Actually, we should be talking here about her so-called DELIVERY TEAM and not the different units of the FCC because they are in the periphery. Anyway, we are waiting to see how the sanitary police she is planning to deploy will combat this criminal act of people throwing rubbish on the streets or dumping mounds of domestic waste in the drainage system. We wish her and the sanitary police all the best.
While on this, we want to call her attention to a mound of garbage piled up near the Taylor Cummings garden as you approach the Cotton Tree from the CID end. From what we saw this morning, the rubbish has accumulated there for more than a week. Let’s deal with that now.
So why did the mayor not use that glorious opportunity given to her by the station to deal with her Buwa-Bisieh gaffe? Instead she repeated the false line of not wanting people to take her comments “out of context” suggesting that’s what happened in that “cut and paste” social media leak from her beautiful office.
We will not let the mayor get away with this because we listened to that material many times over and even used a certain software to determine the “cut and paste” allegation she is making. Briefly, we sympathize with the mayor because she was absolutely betrayed by one or more of those who were in that meeting. They all agreed that it was a meeting for “frank talk” and so they decided to lock the door. Now confident that they were totally in charge of the environment, the mayor opened up. There’s no other way to understand what happened in that upper room. In other countries that would have been this mayor’s political last supper because she would have resigned the day that material was leaked. Her own political party members would have asked her to go but this is Sierra Leone. Yes, those who leaked the audio were rogues but why should our mayor allow her judgment to fail so badly that she would hang out with those rascals who had other agenda items.
Those who leaked the material have achieved their objective because that brand is now significantly damaged across the country. This was an internal Tolongbo game. Rejecting the opportunity to put things in context and apologize has just increased the agony because journalists will always spring that ambush when our mayor opens up for any interview. The mayor should stop running away from the people and ANSWER the question directly.
BO RANGERS CLUBHOUSE IS FANTASTIC BUT WHERE ARE THE BIG BOYS?
We congratulate Bo Rangers for what they have achieved. They now have a decent clubhouse and secretariat, the first football club to do that in this land that we love. It’s a real shame that it took one man with a vision to mobilize others to make Bo Rangers the main talking point in club football in this country. So far Babadie Kamara has scored two of his goals he set himself on taking over the club – he has restructured Bo Rangers and raised the bank balance beyond recognition from the time he took over and has completed the clubhouse and secretariat. The third goal is to win the premier league. For now, BO Rangers are leading the log. We’ll see where they end. The signs are good anyway.
Now, this is not about shaming any other club but frankly it’s inexcusable that Mighty Blackpool and East End Lions in particular are not only losing players to the new comers, they are now left to copy the example of Bo Rangers. What have these clubs been doing? They are the oldest football clubs in this country and they still have a reasonably good fan base.
It is in their interest to work together as from now on so that they can change things around their clubs. Bo Rangers announced ONE BILLION leones in their bank account after building this huge facility. Barring any catastrophe, they can only improve. Both East End Lions and Mighty Blackpool should make every effort to give their fans a real stake in the running of the team otherwise they will continue struggling as they depend on the pockets of a few people. Small donations that come out of a clear sense of ownership are very important.
THROWING MISSILES DURING LEAGUE MATCHES
We are repeating our call for something drastic to be done to halt this practice of fans throwing missiles in the direction of match officials every time they disagree with a decision on the field. The scary thing is that the fans have weaponized an everyday item like water in sachet which is normally available for fans to cool down in the hot burning sun. It’s so cheap that all fans can afford several bundles for every match. We have watched fans throw these things from the stands to show how angry they are about any call the referee makes that they believe should have gone their way. Something must be done about this.
This is difficult to do but it starts with the organizing committee of league matches making sure they limit the number of water sachets any fan can take into the field. We know it will be difficult and maybe too patronizing but we have no choice now but to send a clear message to anarchists that the rest of us looking for good football and orderliness will not accept their behavior anymore.
The premier league board will make a lot of money fining the clubs that are not able to control their fans in the face of a defeat like the behavior of fans of Kamboi Eagles at the Bo Stadium last Sunday. At one point they forced the match to be suspended for at least SEVEN minutes breaking the momentum of the game. That’s was very wrong. The anarchists should NEVER be made to feel as if they were above the law.
We have also complained about that serious pitch invasion in Makeni when the local team played against Bo Rangers recently. Even as we speak nothing has been done to teach Wusum Stars and their fans a bitter lesson for such behavior. What really stops those same fans from freely attacking match officials when they lose a match in controversial terms? And that is always a possibility.
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