How happy can it be for us in Sierra Leone? Work on Wilkinson Rd will hopefully be completed; so will that on Spur Rd. and the hillside bypass, with many main and feeder roads in other parts of the country, not forgetting the Lungi Airport terminal building. Talking of Lungi, one hopes new staff will replace the current beggars who shamelessly molest passengers, asking for alms instead of getting on with their customs and immigration duties. Many Freetown streets still yearn for attention which we have been assured will be given in phases.
What will happen in Agriculture? We have waited and waited for the promised bumper harvests of rice that will feed us all at reasonable cost; but they have yet to materialize. It is a mystery how much has obviously been spent on machines, tools, seeds and fertilizers and yet the results so far are apparently nil. Another more baffling mystery is our huge oil consumption now sustained by ‘Refined Oil’, cartons and cartons of it, from the USA! We love fried things and used to produce quantities of groundnut oil for all our needs. We still plant heaps of groundnuts, but no oil is forthcoming. ‘Fish meets Land’ advertises palm oil, coconut oil, but no groundnut oil. Very strange! A healthy return to locally produced groundnut oil would surely save us money and make the New Year happier. We still import enormous quantities of onions and tomato paste still with no trace of an industry in both those popular commodities.
When, for instance, a Welshman goes to Kailahun to buy cocoa beans which he takes away to make choice chocolate flavoured with ginger and mint for sale in Europe, the Ministry of Trade and Industry, should be in a position to insist that as part of the deal, some of the processing is done here in factories that provide jobs for thousands of idle and poverty-stricken Sierra Leoneans. We hope too, for a resolution of the many disputes over the use of land for growing raw material to produce biofuel- an alarming development before which there was no national discussion or dialogue. Do we want our land to be used for this? You never see a sugar cane in the local market nowadays and yet our soil is supposed to yield enough to sell abroad for car fuel. Landowners were evidently not sensitized beforehand, hence the dissatisfaction.
Agreements on land for mining are somewhat unfair when examined closely, while, so far, there are no visible signs of economic progress. The impression created by what we hear of land deals for both agriculture and mining, is of a new kind of colonialism practised by our compatriot leaders who appear to go ahead with plans for their own profit, at the expense of a humble, unsuspecting public. We hope that this New Year will bring us more transparency that will lead to real prosperity. At the moment, we can only envisage continued unrealized promises and a stunted economy. A happier New Year should mean a vibrant economy with the value of the Leone taking a sharp upward turn.
There will be no pleasant New Year while Freetown remains dirty-dirtier even this Xmas than last- litter everywhere, piles of unmoved rubbish, witness Signal Hill Rd, etc. We have a population of new-comers to urban life who now outnumber the original residents. They leave tidy villages to join in the squalor of Freetown. Sometimes I feel like taking a broom myself and sweeping along Siaka Stevens St. in the hope that others will join me; but I fear they’ll merely stare at this elderly woman whose wits are clearly waning, laugh, spit, and carry on dropping litter. Beside the muck and spanning the drains are mattresses for sale! Between all that and a totally ineffective municipal system (the oldest municipality in West Africa!) we are caught in a downward spiral which gets more and more difficult to reverse. Poor President Koroma with his ‘attitudinal change’.
Our television and radio broadcasts could do with a complete overhaul and more serious editing. Much of today’s content is cheap, repetitive sensationalism, on TV, second-hand material from abroad, endless adverts and money-seeking birthday and obituary announcements based on the motto ‘the more wordy the better’. One to three year-olds are supposed to enjoy watching their greetings at 10:30pm. Tighter controls are needed with more locally produced feature programmes. Some interviews e.g. Isa Blyden’s and Uman to Uman are good and some adverts, excellent. I love the one with the two girls and their ‘uman condom’; but even that and the irate mother with her precocious, condom-using schoolgirl daughter, get very boring when you see them for the 5th time the same day. Radio programmes in Krio continue to ‘kergo and bringcam’ their stuff- with new verbs that take a direct object. Together, these two words used to be a picturesque noun meaning ‘gossip’.
More electricity has meant, perhaps, a more enjoyable holiday season. A Happy New Year should mean a less erratic and more widespread flow of electricity so that we can all feel more human, intelligent and in tune with 21st century trends. A mild handshake for NPA then, but none at all for the enigmatic Guma Valley Water Company as we continue to dig our wells!
By Lulu Wright
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