ThinkTank

By Umaru Fofana

From the Sacred Forest they emerged. The King’s Council of Elders and some young men. Some of them had their faces painted. Some dressed as women. One of them stood out the most – he looked like a pregnant woman, thanks to a calabash he had wrapped under a flowing gown. Tiny little gourds hung over the necks of many of the young men.

About four men carried bigger gourds tied to a stick lying on their shoulders. They walked to the nearby forest as they were joined by hundreds of mostly young men and women and children.

By Umaru Fofana

Mbalu, not her real name, applied to enter university to study Mass Communication. Like hundreds of others do year-on-year, she had treated it as a gamble, in the hope she would be able to raise her fees somehow – through friends and other good Samaritans.

By Umaru Fofana

It is an incontrovertible fact that Sierra Leone’s political parties lack adequate internal democracy, something they badly need if good governance is to take a foothold in a country where every political party that has come to power has by and large behaved in as much the same way as the other.

By Umaru Fofana

Except in a parliamentary democracy where the Prime Minister appoints their cabinet from among colleague MPs, often leaders tend to appoint into positions of trust mostly people they had long known before their ascension and are comfortable working with.

By Umaru Fofana

Before now if you’d mentioned Constituency 110, I couldn’t tell you where it was situated. Such is the natural predilection for infamy that it sticks easily, and brings to retention that which would otherwise be ephemeral. So now I know where Constituency 110 is, in as much the same way as I knew where Constituency 104 was during those infamous elections there all those years ago. How sad! 

By Umaru Fofana

The rain is back. For most of the last two weeks, it has been torrential – almost nonstop. It reached its crescendo on Friday 2 August. On that day alone, the downpour was 187mm, eclipsing the whole of July 2016 which witnessed 106.6 mm, according to the Freetown Meteorological department.

By Umaru Fofana

Yesterday 29 July was five years to the day Sierra Leone lost arguably its biggest hero this generation. Dr Sheik Umar Khan was the arrowhead in the fight against Ebola when the outbreak officially happened in May 2014. This is a story about him and how he has been forgotten by a nation he died defending.