There was no Joe Wilson of the US Congress in our parliament on last Friday to shout “You Lie” when President Ernest Bai Koroma was delivering his address to mark the occasion of the state opening of the third session of the third parliament of the second republic. But the heckling aimed at distracting the president was ceaseless and sometimes appeared like freckles on a Caucasian’s skin. Too visible, too distasteful. And such was the puerility that ignominy and democracy must have been given a new meaning.
I know there are parliaments the world over that can be rowdy and chaotic to the extent MPs can throw blows, literally speaking, at each other. But not paying attention to substance and concentrating on the politics punches can deride the essence of people representation in the House. Such was it that even when the president said something, take for example the reconstruction of roads in the southeast, some opposition MPs frowned as if to say we wish you didn’t do that lest you should lose more votes in the next elections. So also was it that when the president said things that were clearly unrealistic, such as the next phase of the Bumbuna Hydro project to be completed in six years, they clapped with some ministers jumping in the lawn of parliament as if it was a discotheque. This, clearly, is politics of retrograde.
But to the substance of the president’s address to parliament. In my view, it was a blend of intent, reality, and blatant unachievable. First, the president was spot on when he spoke about the cause of climate change and the global economic recession which are due to the activity, or the lack of it, of some western countries. But while he lamented the current bad state of affairs of the climate, he fell short of proffering any solutions.
I was surprised though that the president did not mention the battering our currency, the Leone, has taken and continues to take against the US dollar probably the worst ever since records began. Despite this, he said that the country had managed to weather the economic and financial storm. How about the spiralling costs of food stuffs in the country something that has forced many families to live under reduced circumstances? What measures, we would have been interested to hear in the president’s address, are being taken to ward that off. I didn’t get that.
On agriculture, a lot has undoubtedly been achieved. The acreage that has been ploughed and recorded leading to a 35% increase in the last one year, is a marvel. With funding now “secured…for the construction of rice mills, stores and drying floors” across the country, farmers should be feeling fed even before harvesting. The upgrading of the Rokupr Agriculture laboratory was a thing that had waited for too long to be done. This rice research station had given rise to such people as the head of the UN Food and Agriculture Programme, Jacque Diouf. It was later allowed to lay waste owing to decades of political decadence in our country.
The president also plans to set up Chiefdom Farms across the country. Brilliant initiative if what it takes can be provided for farmers in these chiefdoms. But it has to be monitored before the predictable happens namely that the Paramount Chiefs personalise them.
That said however, to mark today being World Food Day, some would say World Hunger Day in view of the more than 1 billion hungry mouths around the world, ActionAid says we are becoming hungrier.
Talking about what is obviously his biggest success so far Parliament erupted when the president got to the point of energy. Why not? One may ask. In 100 days he lit up Freetown. I understand that the previous Tejan Kabbah administration asked many questions about the cost of the project which runs into tens of thousands of US dollars a day. I don’t know the veracity of the cost of the project because there has been no genuine explanation to it without the usual spin to the left or to the right. However, it is clear that electricity bills have shot up in the last one year or so. And the National Power Authority does so with such arrant impunity that we the consumers are not in the loop. This, despite or may be because of the fact that there is so much hardship made worse by new tax regimes.
Additionally, despite a damning report on the “fraudulent” (courtesy the Anti Corruption Commission) awarding of the infamous contract to Income Electrix, there was no mention of that. One other thing that was indeed mentioned was that Bumbuna will be commissioned “this month”. So far so good, but one can only hope that the president is right on this. Information from the African Development Bank, a key donor to the project, indicates that it will happen only in November at the earliest. It may be negligible, the time difference, but
By Umaru Fofana