By Mohamed Jaward Nyallay
The Freetown City Council (FCC) is in disarray, amidst an ongoing strike action by its administrative staff over the running of the institution under Mayor Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr.
For a second day running on Thursday, work was brought to a standstill at the Council after the aggrieved staff first went on strike on Wednesday. The striking workers, who claimed to have come from across all the departments in the council, lined up outside its head office on Lightfoot Boston Street on Wednesday as a demonstration of their discontent against the mayor, who they accused of running the council with a select group of appointed people.
They are particularly unhappy with Aki-Sawyer’s reliance on her Mayors Delivery Unit (MDU), which they say has “usurped” all the responsibilities that council staff were supposed to have and operates like a “parallel body to the city council.
Among a number of other issues, the aggrieved staffers, who included senior officials, complained about salary delay, which they blamed on alleged corruption by top senior officials and people close to the mayor.
Festus Kallay, Chief Administrator at the Council, said the strike action was a culmination of about two years of frustration over how the Mayor was treating council staff.
“Back in 2018 when the mayor came, the first thing we struggled over was our functional relationship - who does what. Her first intervention was the Flood Mitigation, during that time we saw the Mayors Delivery Unit doing assessment of drainages and culverts without involving the environment and social officer,” Kallay explained to journalists on Wednesday.
“So up to now we are still struggling in terms of our roles and responsibilities. If you look at the Bailiff Department for example, the staff morale is very low; because for the very first time they are not involved in the distribution of demand note, and that’s a job they are paid for,” he added.
Another staffer, who spoke to Politico on condition of anonymity, summed up the feelings and experience of the rest of the aggrieved junior staff.
“I come to the office and I don’t have anything to do for the rest of the day. The Mayors Delivery Unit has usurped all our functions. They have even managed to connive with some Heads of Department to secretly syphon funds for their own use. We have gone three months without salary,” the junior staffer said.
The strike action has once again exposed a deep seated leadership problem within the largest and most important council in the country.
Mayor Aki-Swayerr could not be reached for comments, but the Labor and Establishment Committee at the FCC, which is responsible to address welfare issues of staff, said the issues highlighted are strange to them.
In a short statement issued after Wednesday’s protest, the committee said: “As a committee, this is news to us as we have not been previously engaged by the staff about the issues stated in the paper.”
The statement added: “we will work through the proper channels to address their grievances.”
Two time councilor, Sheku Turay, who spoke on behalf of the Mayor to journalists on Wednesday, said the council couldn’t afford to pay its staff because government had not disbursed its subvention.
“The last time we received money from the central government was in the second quarter of 2019,” he said.
Turay who is the co-chair of the Urban Planning Committee said council staff were still heavily involved in the planning of activities and implementation, countering allegations by the protesting staffers that they have been sidelined.
Turay also denied allegations that the MDU had hijacked official council functions.
Chief Administrator Kallay said most of the work the MDU has done so far is flawed.
“Take for example business license. When we came businesses around the city were around 36,000, according to what we had in our database. Guess what! When they did the geo-mapping they only captured 10,000 businesses. That is around 26, 000 businesses that were not captured. So if you say they are here to improve the existing system, then I was expecting them to capture maybe 40 to 45,000 businesses,” Kallay explained.
Despite claims that the council doesn’t have enough money, Kallay said the council is now generating close to Le 14 billion a year on market dues alone, far more than the Le 3 billion hey collected before 2018.
Kallay said much of the increased revenue is down to the system he and some council staffers designed.
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