OLD LEONE NOTES ARE GONE AT LAST
Finally the so-called OLD LEONE notes are gone –forever, we hope. We wouldn’t mind seeing them stuck on the walls of our museum or in the home of some collector but not on our streets. Somebody visited our office the other day and wondered what the delay was all about?
The Professor from Greeley, Colorado was this stop start man who was busy flip flopping all over the place. His dates for phasing out the old notes kept shifting to the extent that many in Sierra Leone didn’t believe the deadline set by his successor would hold. People were openly telling others on the streets that like the Greeley Professor, Stevo was only blowing hot air. In fact, because Stevo was part of the team, it was easy for conspiracy theorists to describe them as birds of the same feather.
Now, we want Stevo to tell us why phasing out the old notes had to be postponed at least THREE times. BSL is a very conservative institution and we are not likely to hear from them on this issue so let’s make an attempt to explain what really happened.
1. The Greeley Professor was totally unprepared for what the job of running the central bank in Sierra Leone really was. He thought it was like running the Federal Reserve in the US. Sorry sir!
2. It took the man several years on the job before he summoned some local business people to the BSL office for serious conversation on the depreciation of the Leone. By that time the guy had lost control of the Leone against the dollar. One guy told him he wasn’t in charge of the economy because things were controlled from the streets, not from his powerless office in central Freetown.
3. Maybe the Professor tried to do it all by himself – why not? He is an American Professor with several years of teaching experience in good Universities. Do you now understand why he didn’t easily know the Sierra Leone economy is controlled from Sackville, Goderich and Lumley streets?
4. Anyway, was he being sabotaged by those running the place now? The man ran an expensive advertising campaign to raise awareness about the coming of the new Leone and kept pumping money into it because the date was shifting all the time. How did the board of BSL allow that to happen?
5. The Professor is gone now and the OLD NOTES are also gone but we want to inform our readers that when you decide to do withdrawals from the banks please take a wheelbarrow along because they can only now give small value notes. Brother Stevo where are the big notes? We don’t want criminals attacking our homes because of Five thousand Leone notes in a plastic bag.
6. We call on our readers to also go to the banks expecting their withdrawals to be disgracefully short by several Leones. Including those nicely wrapped up in plastic. That’s the new reality.
YOUYI BUILDING NEEDS ATTENTION NOW
We know we are not the only people complaining about the situation at Youyi Building. This is one of the most powerful buildings in the country, housing several government ministries, departments and agencies but the way things are going in that place right now, leaves much to be desired.
The last time we visited the lifts were down. We struggled our way to the ninth floor for a meeting that lasted less than half an hour. We asked a few questions about the lifts but the grudging answers we got convinced us that fixing the lifts remains a pipe dream for now.
How can we allow a building of that importance to go without lifts for months? And it’s not as if those who should fix it up don’t know that workers struggle to access their offices and work is severely disrupted. The last we heard was their ministers were still arguing about the budget to deliver that job. For how much longer are we going to endure this?
Maybe the only reason we have not had to station an ambulance out there is that we have young ministers this time but if we check the rate of absenteeism among civil servants the result will be shocking.
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In the far corner of that compound a glorified car wash enterprise is in operation. The young guys doing the business aggressively chase every vehicle going by. Not far from their base is a cookery shop. Now church services are becoming a bit of a normal feature inside Youyi Building compound. What’s really going on? |
GHANA TO PROTEST AGAINST POOR FOOTBALL PERFORMANCE
So while the rest of the world would probably be consumed with Valentine’s Day celebrations, a large section of the Ghanaian population would be in a different mood. We have seen a flyer on social media announcing a protest against the quality of football in their country. Ghanaians love their football and they have every reason to. Ghana has produced some of the best footballers in Africa and the world so they cannot understand why the performance of the Black Stars has become so mediocre.
The coach has been sacked and we expect some of the players to also fall on their swords and not wait for the Football Association to sack them.
MEANWHILE IN SIERRA LEONE…
Here, we accept everything from those running our game including the fact that Liberia next door defeated our national teams at all levels recently and all we were told – not in a proper news conference but on social media is that we should use the lessons the Liberia taught us for subsequent matches, classic attempt to SPIN. We say attempt because the effort was badly handled.
We are not asking people to jump on the streets to protest in the kind of atmosphere we find ourselves in. We want more accountable leadership. We DEMAND proper explanation that makes sense for the performance of our national team in particular. We expect those in charge of our game to call the media so we hear from managers and technical staff. When somebody at the NSA once published a technical report after a disastrous outing he was slapped with serious administrative sanctions that threatened his job. Are we really serious?
We are staying away from the local game for now despite the fact that the foundation stone of our national team is planted in the local game.
The government should consider this: we should totally withdraw from all international competition for THREE years, hire proper trainers, not a man who is guessing around and possibly taking instructions from administrators from inside the SLFA.
For now we are busy doing the same thing while expecting a different result. We will not get it.
CAF SHOULD SEVERELY PUNISH MALI
Maybe they will withdraw from CAF and FIFA because with every disciplinary action that Mali is confronted with, they put on their paranoid frame and describe it as the work of their former colonial masters. When their players attacked the referee at the end of the match hundreds of millions of people saw them in real time. That attitude is totally unacceptable.
Many people in Africa and the world were really impressed with the performance of the Malian team up to that point and were holding them up as potential winners this year. They conceded in the dying minutes of the match from a mix up in their box and were hoping to steal a few more minutes to press for an equalizer and force the match into a post-game penalty situation so when the referee sounded his whistle to end the match, a handful of them rushed over to the referee and pushed the man from side to side. These are professionals who would not dare think about attacking match officials while playing for their European clubs. They think everything goes in Africa. Let Mali be severely punished for their sins.
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