By Umaru Fofana
Our citizenship law is shamefully racist!
By Umaru Fofana
Whenever the issue of citizenship comes up in my beloved Sierra Leone I cringe in utter bemusement and shock and even shame. How do we use the colour of a person’s skin – in this day and age – to determine their citizenship of a country especially so in which they were born. Or do we always see racism as being all about white people discriminating against black people? The usual self-pitying, navel-gazing, isn’t it.
Lungi airport, defacing a beautiful project
By Umaru Fofana
Some of the infrastructural initiatives happening in the country these days are flummoxing – in a very positive way. I cannot help but ask myself sometimes why we had to leave it until now to do some basic fixings to our basic needs. I am not talking about the impressive roads being and already built. I have probably said a lot too much about that already. I am talking about the Freetown International Airport at Lungi.
Where Bio blew blue
By Umaru Fofana
“Game Change” is the title of a 2012 HBO political movie directed by Jay Roach. I watched it two weeks ago on an Emirates flight to the Middle East. I would usually sleep on a plane but I managed to stay up to watch the movie twice on the 8-hour flight from Accra to Dubai because of the political poignancy before catching a short sleep.
An encounter with death
By Umaru Fofana
October 9 1997. It was just an everyday morning for a journalist in a war zone. I was pre-occupied with what to report, and wondering how to stay alive. I had no idea that day of just how horrifically events would unfold. I was in Juba Hills, Freetown. The Nigeria-led West African intervention force, ECOMOG, was surrounding rebel positions some 30 kilometres away.
Will Charles Taylor “be back”?
By Umaru Fofana
Under a spectacle that made many an African leader sit up navel-gazing, Charles Taylor stepped down as president of Liberia in 2003, promising “God willing, I will be back”.
It followed mounting pressure both from within and without. A rebel war in his country led by the Liberian’s United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD) had intensified and was snaking its tail into the capital, Monrovia leaving the man who had first come to power through rebellion on the verge of being ousted by a rebellion.
Securing our Security Forces
By Umaru Fofana
Sierra Leone’s security forces – especially its military and the police – have come a very long way since the bloody civil war days. Considering where we were just a few years ago, it is a huge transformation even if there still exist some teething issues to be addressed.
