By Mabinty M. Kamara
The Civil Society Coalition on Mining and Extractive (CSCME), an advocacy group, has in a position paper called on the government of Sierra Leone to honour the payment of the Diamond Area Community Development Fund (DACDF), which it acceded to.
Like other community based natural resources management initiatives in Africa, the DACDF embraces community led decision making as a means of ensuring that mineral benefits go back to impoverished and vulnerable mining communities to help address key social challenges such as water, feeder roads, schools, markets, scholarship opportunities and many other projects like youths and women empowerment in the form of support towards agriculture, skills and small scale businesses in the form of micro credits.
According to a statement from CSCME, these structures and benefits have over the years been felt in the case of Kono District until three years ago when such financial commitment had stopped going to mining communities across the country.
“It is now nearly three years ago when we last saw the payment of this fund to the mining districts and chiefdoms in the country, we are gravely concerned about this as there is a likelihood of a return to over centralization as this may undermine the sustainable development, the aspirations of the most deprived communities of their endowments as based on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report,” the statement reads.
The advocacy group therefore called on the government to quickly pay all outstanding arrears for the past years and to review the process and increase the amount from 0.75% of the total 3% of the export tax to 40% and for the Parliament of Sierra Leone to speedily enact the DACDF into law.
In an interview with Alex K. Fomba, National Coordinator for the Youth Empowerment for Advocacy Human Rights and Development Sierra Leone, one of the consortium members, he noted that the last DACDF was paid in 2018 nationwide. He added that the non-disbursement of the Fund over the years has affected developmental activities in mining communities.
“In the Kono context, through the DACDF funds, schools have been built, roads have been constructed, people were given scholarship opportunities to universities and have come back to give to their communities, and women have been empowered through micro credit facilities and some for agricultural purposes,” he said.
According to Fomba, the non-payment of the fund is alleged by the National Minerals Agency to be a result of lack of proper accountability and monitoring of the projects undertaken through those funds, but this, he said, wasn’t convincing to them.
“So the people benefitted immensely from those funds but now it has forestalled development in these communities. Of late it was decided that this money should be sent to the chiefdom committees instead of the paramount chiefs. We are not against that and let it be monitored so they cannot tell us it is because of monitoring. Some chiefdoms have not performed very well, that is why we are stopping the DACDF. That is not correct,” he said.
Politico contacted the National Minerals Agency for a reaction on the position of the coalition but they didn’t get back to us as promised.
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