By Isaac Massaquoi
Congratulations on your election to this high office, Your Worship Mayor Of Freetown. It’s a solid achievement. And as your humble subject I hope you will enjoy all the goodies that come with it while keeping your eyes firmly on the enormous challenges ahead. I really mean enormous.
Except for a few travels here and there, I have lived in Freetown for forty years having been brought here like many children with provincial roots to be educated in the ways of the Whiteman and so help improve the lives of the extensive family back home in Pujehun. While I still maintain extremely strong ties to the village, I have made Freetown my home. I love the place despite the challenges of living in a city like this.
Your Worship, I said in the beginning that you have enormous challenges at hand. These have accumulated over the years owing to the war, near criminal neglect by successive leaders of the municipality and corruption. And I don’t believe you can change things overnight. What I believe though is that as a resident of Freetown and having served on the Freetown City Council, you have a good idea what the majority of people who voted you into office really want in their city.
Freetown has changed beyond recognition as far as I can remember. It has expanded as rapidly as the population has increased beyond control putting a lot of strain on social services. So you have your job cut out.
FCC’SIMAGE
Lord Mayor, you are taking over a council with a big image problem and it doesn’t help that you served on the last council that ended its term so disastrously. Even the most sophisticated Public Relations firm in the world will struggle to change the image of the council in the eyes of residents of Freetown without you and your councillors setting the brightest of examples from now on.
The image of the City Father and his most senior managers being whisked to prison after being convicted for corruption involving the city's money will take a long time to go away. Confidence in the council’s ability to collect and manage our taxes in our best interest is very low, even non-existent at this time. It will soon be January and you have the next four weeks to prove to us in concrete terms that our monies will be in good hands otherwise tax evasion will continue and you know the consequences.
The truth is you need every penny due you to make any difference in Freetown and turning a blind eye to sections of the Freetown population for political reasons must stop. Let everybody pay the council tax.
Education
I spent more than 20 years living in and around the difficult community of Brookfields. In the mid to late 1970s, Brookfields was occupied by the poorest people in the city. Crime was the order of the day. Education was never a priority. Residents were mainly petty traders and small scale artisans who made just enough to feed their families. Even with the construction of the narrow winding roads in the NPRC era, Brookfields witnessed only marginal improvement. There are many communities in Freetown worse than Brookfields.
Then as now, the municipal schools which your council run are the only ones that poor families can send their children to. I attended what was then called Fergusson Street Municipal School with Rev. JC Peters as headmaster. The school is now named SM Broderick Municipal. I went back to the place the other day and found it in very poor shape and I make bold to say that the situation is the same with the other municipal schools in Freetown.
Lord Mayor, you have no choice but pay attention to these municipal schools and make them what they used to be. Private schools are springing up all over Freetown and the children of ordinary Sierra Leonean parents have not even a dog’s chance in life against those of the few who send their children to such elite schools. I don’t believe in miracles.
I am sure you are very unhappy about the state of these municipal schools and the fact that there are hundreds of children in the most decrepit parts of Freetown who are not in school is extremely worrying. Those children who are losing out will surely be a burden on society as they grow in Freetown. You must not fail them sir.
Street Trading
During the campaign I heard you on radio talking about street trading. To be honest, many people in this city are just fed up with the uncontrollable manner of street trading in Freetown. It’s happening on all major streets and that’s besides the hundreds of young street hawkers who harass people on the streets daily as they sell things ranging from mobile phone chargers to razor blades.
Every time people have complained about the disruption to traffic in the Central Business District and the propensity for some of the street traders to be rude to people and engage in criminality, I have heard romantic arguments describing those who complain as being completely out of touch with the reality that those people have to survive and the state must build a market space for them all otherwise it will be wrong to take them off the streets.
As it is with almost everything in Freetown, politicians have manipulated the people into believing that only one party can ensure they continue doing business as usual. Lord Mayor, I believe the people on the streets are victims of a system that failed to plan properly for them and I don’t want to hold them directly responsible for their circumstances. But you will agree with me that we cannot afford to have our 18 – 24-year-old citizens on the streets selling razor blades and mentholated balm and whether it’s for survival or not, that kind of trading must be properly regulated and isolated to certain areas of the city. This free-for-all trading is unacceptable. Again, this is not something you do overnight but if you don’t demonstrate to your subjects that you have a handle on the situation within one year, you might as well forget it.
Sanitation
Lord Mayor, this is a major problem. Again, you don’t need to be lectured by me about the extent of the problem in this city. Somehow, we don’t appear to have any clear plan on how to go about keeping Freetown clean. The national cleaning days that are declared sporadically these days only make things worse. You know the details. The national cleaning day project must be scrapped now. Let people be made responsible for the filth they generate with the City Council playing its own part – providing the vehicles and personnel to clear rubbish from the designated areas daily. The council must inspect compounds and deal firmly with those who can’t keep their compounds clean.
Lord Mayor, there are hundreds of houses that have no toilets. House owners collect a fortune in rents but keep the people in sub-human conditions as they are reduced to relieving themselves in plastic bags which they then throw on the streets or in the gutters. I humbly ask you sir to drive around Mends Street junction to Pademba Road, the lower part of Siaka Stevens Street and a few other areas and see what I am talking about. In other houses, more than fifty or more people are made to use one badly maintained pit latrine. I am not talking about slum areas alone. However, the slums are a real challenge that you will have to deal with. They remain a real scar on our claim to being a civilized democracy.
I must draw your attention to the ever-growing number street garages and rotten cars all over Freetown. They disrupt traffic and the young people in those garages are having a negative impact on the beauty of our capital. If you drive past Youyi Building by the FSSG wall, you will notice a huge mound of rubbish taking over the area near one of the most important buildings in Freetown. And as if that’s not enough, a glorified scrap yard has been opened close by.
I think on your first day in office, you must give orders for that disgrace to be removed. We have the same situation near Govt. Rokel Seconday School on the road to Parliament, Lewis Street and Calaba Town. I have mentioned just a handful.
There are many problems I could have raised with you but these, for me are the most pressing ones and you must act fast. There’s generally too much cynicism around what politicians say and do or attempt to do and you should understand why. Many have promised heaven and delivered nothing only to return to the people at the end of their mandate to blame everybody else but themselves for their failure.
I believe, however, that there are people who seek public office to make a contribution to the development of their society. I want to encourage myself to believe that you are in that category.
Lord Mayor, the advantages you have in office are these: Your political party is governing at the national level. That should make it easy to coordinate programs in the areas mentioned above and to get money to implement them; there are no opposition councillors to pose “problems” for you and above all you have experience serving as a councillor.
But there are down sides that you must consider: You former boss Herbert George-Williams embarked on some projects that were a complete waste of public money. Despite complaints from the public, he plodded on, trusting his own instincts.
Here are some examples: Why was it really necessary to change the face of the Eastern Police Clock Tower in the way he did it? That old stone design could well have been improved upon and also without all that fanfare that ended up in violence on the streets; why did your former boss buy a premier league football club with all that fortune that he could have spent doing something worthwhile? I can’t remember the last time the team won a match.
Look at Victoria Park and tell me why your boss decided to build that concrete jungle in the heart of the only park we have in our city. He fenced the park with corrugated iron sheets and work has stalled for about three years. What is going on?
The Morgan Heritage debacle was part of the evidence at his corruption trial so I won’t mention that anymore. But as an ardent fan of Morgan Heritage, I was scandalised by the whole affair.
You will find it easy dismissing people like us who will try to keep you on your toes as hopeless hacks looking for recognition and bribes like others have done. You will not find it easy telling the people you failed, because the media kept writing day after day.
I will be at your swearing-in ceremony.
Good Morning
© Politico 05/12/2012
