LAND BORDERS ARE FINALLY CLOSED SO WHAT NEXT?
Our land borders with Guinea and Liberia are not open to human traffic for the next THIRTY DAYS at least. Principal closed the borders just as Kotor Juldeh was completing a whirlwind tour of the borders to inspire personnel of the agencies deployed there in the struggle to keep the coronavirus out of Sierra Leone. Principal was himself out there in the early days to test our bulwark against the dreaded virus.
Principal acted after Guinea did the same thing. Crucially both countries exempted the movement of good in and out of our territories. Trade between particularly Guinea and Sierra Leone has continued to grow in volume and importance. So that was a good idea.
Apart from trying to get the border agencies ready to stop the coronavirus from entering Sierra Leone, Kotor Juldeh must have noticed other things about those institutions on our border with Liberia in particular. We think the whole border administration should be moved from where it is right now further inland because they are flooded out every year with the loss of important documents and electronic equipment. Let’s just clear the place and have something as decent as the facilities in Kambia. Why not?
So what will Jendema look like for the next THIRTY DAYS?
1. How will our people process the goods coming into Sierra Leone from across those borders? Over the next few days somebody should explain to the people what the new approach would be. We don’t want to make any mistake processing goods for our market and end up processing coronavirus across our borders.
2. How can Kotor Juldeh be sure some rogue officials will not risk our safety for a few dollars? We ask because we saw some idiots doing it with people who were quarantined recently.
3. The other point is that while the official points may have been closed down, smuggling of goods and people will still be going on in unofficial places. What are we doing about those?
4. We hope Kotor Juldeh dropped pennies for those very hungry border staff. The have a well-coordinated system of getting money out of passengers on a daily basis.
Now that there are no passengers, they are going to be very broke. They definitely hate this closure thing.
5. All those police checkpoints leading to the border areas must now look for something else to do to get money. Please we don’t want to hear that they are taking so-called samples from goods passing through. These are not normal times. Leh we all bear.
WILL PRINCIPAL PUT SOME CASH IN THE ACCOUNTS OF PUBLIC SECTOR WORKERS?
So far Principal has done extremely well leading the fight to keep coronavirus out of Sierra Leone. No doubt about that. All borders are closed now, national awareness on the issue of personal hygiene as the main line of defence against the virus is really high, a state of emergency is now firmly in place and the nation is ready.
Principal says it’s a question of WHEN and not IF coronavirus will hit the soil of Sierra Leone. We believe he is trying to manage our hopes of going through this struggle without shedding any Sierra Leonean blood. That’s not a bad strategy because if we woke up one morning to the announcement of even one case, it will be easy to say Principal had said it.
Now our concern is that other countries are doing a lot to keep their economies running properly and helping their people stock up on food and toiletries in the event of a lockdown that will surely come the moment a single case is declared. Therefore we call on Principal to help the good people of Sierra Leone prepare their homes by giving ALL public sector workers ONE MILLION LEONES EACH and then encourage the private sector to match that. It makes no sense giving the private sector tax breaks, freeing them up to be able to give big cash to their shareholders and bonuses to CEO’s. Let them give some of their profit to their ordinary staff.
We are waiting for that press release to come out of State House this week. Come on Principal, you can do this!
HOW FAR ARE WE NOW WITH THE LIMKOKWIN ISSUE?
We’ve been trying over the last week or so to find what we journalists call ANOTHER ANGLE to report the story of those unfortunate students at that school owned by Malaysians that goes by the name Limkokwin. Before Biobele spoke recently all angles were exhausted and that’s a bad position to have what looks like a running story. The last we heard of this issue was the brief comments from the Commissions of Inquiry regarding how Bra Minks who ran the MOST CORRUPT MINISTRY until two years ago handled the affair. The issues in those COI documents are still being processed so we will keep Bra Minks in view for now.
There was also this ill-advised demonstration by some affected students from that college and the arrest of a man who claimed to be defending the students against their own government but vehemently refuses to talk about how we got here and whether those who acted on behalf of the state at that time did so in good faith. All we hear is “GOVERNMENT IS CONTINUITY”. That’s fine but Trump is out of the Iran nuclear deal and has forced major reforms in what used to be NAFTA. Britain is out of the European Union and Mauritania is out of ECOWAS while Ivory Coast has joined the Mano River Union. No departed government should tie the hands of their successors. The deal with Limkokwin was bad. Our young brothers and sister were huge pawns in a game set up by Bra Minks. We will soon get the details.
For now let’s find a way out of this mess. We call it a mess because imagine how Malaysians will react to Sierra Leoneans flying to their country, setting up a private college to teach anything in buildings provided by their government and then getting the Malaysian government to pay thousands of dollars for all their students while absolutely failing to do even FIVE PERCENT of their side of a so-called Memorandum of Understanding.
1. We simply do Special Admission for the current students into other institutions offering their courses in this country. All of them will get grants –in –aid just like those in government colleges. Academic credits will be transferred and the various universities will offer the degrees.
2. We say Special Admission because of what we know about the entry requirements that landed many of the students in that college. We will close our eyes to this batch and bring this situation to an end.
3. There are students who have completed their courses without paying fees and they cannot now graduate. We call on Principal to pay the fees of this class and free them up.
4. Let’s calculate the monetary value of all the services the college ought to have provided to the government under the Memorandum and ask them to pay that into our treasury. Let them also pay their rent for our property starting January 2020.
5. Never again should do such deal. Imagine two young Sierra Leoneans living in the same compound from average families taking the same WASSCE. One of them gets a distinction and proceeds to a state college with her parents paying from their petty trading cash. The other girl gets say three credits but goes to Limkokwin and the government pays THREE THOUSAND DOLLARS a year to educate her. What kind of country was Bra Mink really creating? What should anybody defend this with a so-called MOU?
WHERE ARE THOSE PEOPLE WHO VIOLATED OUR AMBULANCES?
Can anybody tell us what happened to those ambulance workers who tried to smuggle people quarantined recently as part of the fight against coronavirus? We saw pictures of social media as they tried to smuggle people home against a government directive to keep them away from the rest of society for two weeks.
We never thought such a thing would happen at a time when people are desperately trying to keep this dangerous virus out of Sierra Leone. People are ready to die and in the process kill many others just to make money. Are they now in JAIL or what?
They have seriously undermined confidence in the innocence of an ambulance. And that’s DANGEROUS.
Copyright © 2020 Politico Online
