By Yusuf Keketoma Sandi Esq., Freetown, Sierra Leone
There are many great things President Julius Maada Bio has done for which he has been credited as the first sitting President to achieve whether it is the implementation of the Free Quality School Education Programme, the repeal of Part V of the Public Order Act, 1965 or the selection of Sierra Leone as eligible to develop a compact by the MCC Board of Directors.
Marking three years in office has been a great milestone for President Julius Maada Bio and to put that into context you only have to remember that President Paul Kagame of Rwanda has been in office for over twenty years and Rwanda has still not been selected as eligible to develop a compact. Better still, you only also have to remember that under the leadership of President Julius Maada Bio, Sierra Leone is spending over 200% more than Rwanda on primary education.
Mayor/SLPP Versus Ignorance/Enlightenment
I was bemused and amused after reading the March 31, 2021 “Press Statement” by the governing Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP), with the pedantic word in its title “Incendiarism”, accusing the Mayor of Freetown, Her Worship Yvonne Aki-Sawyer, of “Hate Speech”.
What triggered my mirth the most were these words in paragraph 3: “After keenly listening to the five different audios, transcribing the words into English, having our own team of Linguists, Psychologists, Anthropologists, Sociologists, Political Scientists and Security Experts analyze the contents….” The style of the Release, its unusual length, reads like that of students at university flaunting their jingoistic intellectual prowess; and worse, it reeks with that individual and collective egoistic-ism of too many of the Mende-speaking educated elite who dominate in the SLPP – that which non-Mendes do find so irksome. If it is a political document, it sure is u
Kingsley Ighobor: Sierra Leone Telegraph: 13 February 2021:
In December 2020 the United Nations Capital Development Fund (UNCDF), the Freetown City Council (FCC) and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) jointly launched the Freetown-Blue Peace project, an initiative that will leverage innovative finance to implement a sustainable water project in Sierra Leone’s capital city.
First of its kind in terms of partnership and financing, Mayor Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr, the first-ever elected female Mayor of Freetown, spoke to Africa Renewal’s Kingsley Ighobor about the project’s potential impact on the city’s residents, and the lessons for other cities, among other issues.