By Aminata Phidelia Allie
The mayor of Freetown has expressed concerns over the opening of roads leading to and from districts in Sierra Leone, noting that it was slightly too early.
Speaking at the council’s 97th Regular Council Meeting last week, Franklyn Bode Gibson stated that the lifting of bans on district travels was a problem to most of the districts in the country as people now moved freely from one district to another.
“And we don’t know who is safe and who is not,” he said, urging health workers to keep working hard and not to relent in the fight against Ebola.
“A second outbreak of the disease might be disastrous,” he warned.
The mayor also urged women councilors to be advocates to their fellow women, stating that any woman that had sexual intercourse with a male Ebola survivor was likely to die as the virus would not show quick enough.
“It eats deep into her system and by the time she begins to exhibit signs of the disease she might already be dead,” he observed.
Mayor Gibson disclosed that he would be convening a meeting with the National Ebola Response Centre sometime this week for his council to register its disappointment about the opening of the district roads.
Speaking to Politico, Secretary General of the Sierra Leone’s Peoples’ Party (SLPP), honorable Tamba Sam, described the mayor’s fears and concerns as “legitimate”. But he said that it was important that the roads be opened as the closure was already affecting the country’s crippling economy.
That, he said, was so because most Sierra Leoneans were involved in cross border businesses. Noting that it was necessary for the roads to be blocked at first, Sam said that the importance of the opening of the roads could not be over-emphasized, especially now that the country had almost overcome the epidemic.
Efforts to get a comment from the official government spokesman, Abdulai Bayraytay, proved futile.
© Politico 03/02/15
