Resolutions 2012
I have no idea where this business of making resolutions at the end of every year came from but it’s now widespread. At the start of 2010 we asked some college students what their New Year resolutions were. More than half of the forty students said they wanted to go “closer to God this year” and to “spend more time on their studies”. Well, I don’t need a sorcerer to tell me that none of them stood by those resolutions strictly. Don’t ask me why and don’t convict them before hearing them out.
In biblical days, Kings of Israel made covenants with Yahweh (God) only to misbehave badly and incur His wrath. Our political leaders of today make mountains of promises on their way to high office only to “scorn the base degrees by which they did ascend...” So the college students we spoke to are not alone.
As a people we ought to make resolutions and keep them otherwise we will be swinging aimlessly like pendulums all the time. So, on my honour, I suggest that these should be our national resolutions for 2012.
State House
This is the seat of the presidency, the most important office in the land. Somehow Ahmad Tejan Kabbah spent only a few months there before he withdrew to fortress Hill Station (actually, can you really blame the old man? Didn’t rebels, sobels and those adventurist soldiers try to overthrow him?) Or was he just too paranoid?
Let us resolve as a nation to organise ourselves into self-help groups to clean the back of this important building and keep it so forever. I mean the whole stretch from Rokel Street junction down to the area opposite the Sam Bangura building. The place is filthy. It’s a small rubbish dump near the most important building in the country. You know in 1996, James Jonah looked at the old rotten wooden structure we called National Electoral Commission and concluded that the condition of that building represented the country’s lack of respect for democracy. (We have now replied to Dr. Jonah in a fantastic way). Please let no one tell us so many years later that we lack respect for the presidency. By the way, if we can’t renovate that military quarter close by, why not demolish that eyesore? Let’s not come to this issue again anytime soon.
Minister in the air
Overseas travel by public officials paid for from government coffers should be scaled down drastically in 2012. Minister IB Kargbo for one is more in the air than at Youyi Building. Meeting after meeting from Nepal to Benin, Uganda to Trinidad and Tobago, IB is in attendance. We are checking the air miles and the cost to the treasury since 2007. Even as we write, we understand IB is in the air, on his way to North Korea to meet the new leader of that country. On the way home, we are told he will go to Myanmar to meet Aung San Suu Kyi to urge the military government in Burma to accommodate her and organise free and fair elections. Anyway I meant all that tongue-in-cheek. But didn’t IB Kargbo ask Laurent Gbagbo to leave office? Where is Gbagbo today? IB travels more than the foreign minister. Fly away Mr. Minister! What’s the date for the next fibre optic meeting in Montenegro?
SLBC
The ‘national’ broadcaster is facing its biggest test in 2012. Elections in November will provide that test. Is SLBC willing and ready to be even-handed? There are some professionals in that department who are looking forward to the challenge. But as it is now, SLBC is incapable of being fair. The so-called Board of Trustees is sleep-walking into all sorts of problems and the euphoria that greeted the station when Ban Ki Moon commissioned it in person has died down. The station is in debt, the unnecessarily expensive perimeter wall project cannot now be completed; morale is low and program quality has sunk without trace. The news from the SLBC in the last few days is scary. We shall return to this in the next edition. This experiment should not fail. Resolution 2012 - equal access to all people and views; stop this partisanship approach to every little decision; end the harassment of perceived SLPP journalists at SLBC and wake up the hugely expensive board from their long sleep or else. You can’t hide friends.
SLFA
As far as football is concerned, the first resolution for 2012 is that the ‘football family’ will accelerate the removal from office of the absentee president, Nahim Kadi. This is long overdue and no SLFA official should insult our intelligence by saying that the SLFA constitution is silent on such protracted absence of the ‘president’ from the country. We really can’t wait another year. We can only wait till March. After that football-loving Sierra Leoneans will assemble at the National Stadium (our own Tahrir Square) and demonstrate day and night until what is left of Nahim’s administration falls.
Second resolution - The minister of sports should not join us. This is a people’s movement. He has other responsibilities like job creation for young people to concentrate on. Fighting media battles with SLFA officials should end in 2012.
Mr. Minister, please fight youth unemployment and hopelessness. Forget about the Youth Commission, the Minster has not created any significant job opening since he was appointed. How else can we explain this mad rush among our brothers and sisters to go to the God-forsaken country of Iraq?
The Police
The Sierra Leone Police didn’t change at all in 2011. Same soup Munu was doing the same thing; spokesman Samura was busy churning out the same lies about the so-called force for good. Here’s PR advice for free from POLITICO. Munu should move Samura from the limelight for the next one year and introduce new voices – a nice female one will spice things up a bit. That will make the police look a little fresh. Many people are just fed up with Samura’s same lines day-in day-out. Also try and face the truth when there really is no escape like the brutal attack on Farjah Barrie and other journalists. Change the philosophy of your PR operation because for now, it’s all about defending the police at all cost. Just scrap the Complaint Disciplinary Internal Investigations Department (CDIID), Keith Biddle’s idea was good but the structure has lost credibility. I won’t charge a penny for this PR advice. Next time I will.
By the way, who are these Okada police officers we see on the streets of Freetown? Are the police and their traffic warden cohorts telling us they can’t do their jobs anymore so they need help from untrained bullies? One of these days we will move a motion at the SLAJ meeting to recruit our own wardens. Nurses will do the same, the teachers, JC footballers on Leone Stars duty, Kao Denero, LAJ and others will all recruit wardens. What’s the matter with this country?
Wardens
The Traffic Warden project is slowly making a case for its own dissolution, in fact the pace picked up dramatically in 2011 – the wardens are now more corrupt than the traffic police officers they were recruited to teach lessons in how to be good citizens serving their nation. Prove me wrong by spending some time at Model School junction, Mountain Cut junction by Kissy road and St. John. When the wardens started work, they were so effective that Freetown’s lawless commercial transport operators were complaining all over the place. Even Emerson Bockarie had his say on the issue. But alas! Evening came and morning came, our dear wardens became too greedy and forgot the national pledge. Nobody will bat an eyelid if they were all sacked tomorrow morning.
Bra you borbor dae yar
There are young people standing around small corners in many parts of Sierra Leone doing absolutely nothing but perfecting the art of transferring money from people’s pockets to their cookery shops. Bra you borbor dea yar, (big one, you boy is here) they will shout as you go past them. The late Reggae musician Joe Hills has a song called YOUTH MAN MOVE in which he urges young people ‘move from off the streets and find something to do’ and to ‘stop leaning in the park listening to everybody’s talk’ and to ‘find whip to beat down illiteracy.’ This is why we like Rastafarians, they speak to the issues. We have to make this hopeless call for Bra you borbor dae yar to end this year. We say hopeless because 2012 is election year in Sierra Leone and those politicians who changed their phone numbers after the 2007 elections and put layers and layers of secretaries, personal assistants and police officers between them and the people have suddenly started visiting Ataya Bases in Freetown acting like normal people. When will young people catch this trick and throw politicians out of their ghettos at election time? Tough call eh?
Freetown City Football Club
As tax-paying residents of the city, we must resolve to disband the Freetown City Football Club in 2012. The reason is simple: the people, in the shape of their representatives were never consulted before the City Council bought over the Freetown United Football Club. The City Council could
prove us wrong by publishing the minutes of the meeting at which the decision to carry out the hostile takeover was made. The other point is we fail to see the reasoning behind the Council’s action; it’s completely a waste of our tax money to satisfy the indicted Mayor’s wish to appear like Roman Abramovich. Look at the way he went about paying huge amounts of money for untested players. In fact when all is said and done, the team is always languishing at the bottom of the football league. Our resolution is to divert all that money to more productive sectors like buying chairs for council’s primary schools. The indicted Mayor can go ahead and become a member of Ports Authority or F.C Kallon and hear the sound of victory.
Blackman vs. Whiteman
We must make the point from the outset that we see nothing wrong in people coming together in groups and calling themselves Tigers or Hyenas, absolutely no problem. But every decent Sierra Leonean is fed up with all the bickering, intemperate language and violence that have come to define student politics particularly on FBC campus.
Imagine students now complaining about being thrown out of their hostels by the college authorities as they intend to undertake repairs. You know, the hostels are just uninhabitable. The place was destroyed largely by the students themselves. After every election they attack their colleagues, break down the doors and do all sorts of things. Every time they have a problem with some college policy, they smear the warden office with faeces. We really can’t bring ourselves to believe that students at FBC can behave like political thugs in Kono who once sprayed buckets of faeces at the SLPP office. The New Year resolution by the students should be that politics at FBC should be like politics in any serious Western democracy. This is the great FBC...come on!
