WHY ARE MANY SIERRA LEONEANS FLYING OUT OF CONAKRY?
Many Sierra Leoneans are complaining that traveling abroad from our airport in Lungi is expensive and they save good money by driving across our northern border into Conakry to use their airport. What are we really doing here? Is it that we are operating here without looking over our shoulders to see what our MRU neighbours are doing? We are losing airport tax money to Guinea and they will soon notice the trend by making available shuttle buses from our common border to make life easy for people traveling from Sierra Leone.
Our transport minister was on social media the other day reporting a meeting with the operators of the new airport and suggesting that they have heard the concerns of the people and that action was being taken. We are monitoring to see if that was some lazy attempt at spin or the beginning of action to reverse the trend. This is something that started over a year or so ago but Sierra Leone is holding meetings only now to begin to address it.
We will soon check the following out to know how many own-goals we’ve scored, at least since the new airport was opened for business.
1. We want to know how many Sierra Leoneans have traveled to Guinea to fly abroad because they want to beat high taxes in this country.
2. How much money have we lost since the trend of traveling abroad through Guinea started? We are looking for honest answers.
3. Has Guinea started taking deliberate actions, like cutting certain taxes to draw in our people while we are being penny wise and pound foolish?
4. Our transport minister has met with the Summa Group that runs our airport, so what?
ANOTHER ROUND OF PRISON COURT SYSTEM ENDS
CJ Babatunde Edwards is doing well in the UK at the moment but when he returns he should look at the reports from the latest round of his Judicial Week system to learn some lessons. We understand 802 cases were up for consideration by 23 judges.
We joined many other Sierra Leoneans who congratulated our judiciary for this because the last time the programme took place we read about some ridiculous cases that landed people in jail – cases that could have been easily dispatched by magistrates. The result was overcrowded correctional centers with all the challenges that go with that including diseases, deaths and huge financial burden on the state to feed people in such large numbers behind prison walls. This year we read about similar cases – people detained for years without trial, missing court files and tough sentences for what we can describe as relatively minor offences.
We urge CJ Babatunde to shake up the court system to prevent people from being thrown into prison for stealing FOUR plastic chairs even after they are sacked from their job and made to pay for the chairs. We are not lawyers but we believe that too many people are being sent on remand when they could easily be granted bail while going through preliminary investigation or the actual trial in the High Court.
We know that police prosecutors also have a hand in causing such delays in the delivery of justice by taking countless adjournments to either prepare their cases or go in search of witnesses. We want the judiciary to spend its money on other things, not on endless rounds of annual judicial week programmes.
The budget preparation for 2023 is on and we call on the Minister of Finance to be fair with the judiciary in their allocations.
LET’S JUST SAY GOODBYE TO THE GREELEY PROFESSOR
We heard Greeley Professor on radio the other day blaming everybody other than himself for the state of our economy. The Professor is a highly educated man and we enjoyed his writings in the days when the Green Camp was in opposition. We were among many Sierra Leoneans who applauded his appointment as Governor of our central bank because we thought he now had the opportunity to put his ideas into practice. To be fair with him up to this point he’s been churning out policy after policy including the redenomination of the Leone but our economy is not doing well at all.
It will be wrong to blame the Professor for all the economic ills of our country just as it is very wrong for him to go on radio and accuse the nation of being corrupt, covering all of us with the same blanket. Is the professor not strong enough to name and shame those whose corrupt activities are causing inflation and driving up food and fuel prices?
We understand the Professor’s tenure ends this month. We urge him to retire and return home to Colorado. We will then ask Principal to select somebody that was not part of his time in our central bank to take over and drive policies based on the situation on the ground in Sierra Leone, not those contained in books found on the shelves in Colorado.
SACKEY SHOULD FIGHT DEBT-RIDDEN PRIVATE SCHOOLS
Conrad Sackey has to quickly deal with this unbelievable mess that private schools have caused. On Monday he reported that results for TWENTY EIGHT private schools were not released by WAEC because those schools owe the examination body some cash. Those schools have now seriously embarrassed parents and our children. While their colleagues in government schools and well-run private institutions have received their results and are applying to universities at home and abroad, they have to anxiously wait for their schools to pay WAEC.
Thousands of students are attending these schools where parents are made to believe that a decent pass at all examinations is guaranteed. So we are now at a point where Sackey has to stand up and convince us that he means business in that ministry which means so much for the legacy of Principal. We are spending a good part of our small budget on education so we are not prepared to accept any jokes with the system.
1. We want WAEC to explain how the children from the 28 schools named and shamed became candidates with genuine INDEX NUMBERS without paying full examination fees. This really sounds strange to us.
2. Why is WAEC now trying to collect their debts using our children’s results into the bargain? Their business is to release the results of candidates who took the exam and were not involved in any malpractice.
3. What if the schools fail to pay and those results remain in the drawers until University admission windows close, what would those schools and WAEC say to the children and their parents?
4. Is this not a big opportunity for Conrad Sackey to take these schools off the books until he is convinced about their ability to operate in a fit and proper way. The institutions that fail should be struck off. This is not the time for jokes.
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