By Abass Jalloh
The Minister of Local Government and Rural Development (MLGRD), Tamba Lamina, has stated that the Mayor’s Delivery Unit (MDU) at the Freetown City Council (FCC) should be dissolved following a damning report by the ministry concerning the nature of management of the council.
Lamina highlighted the line of action at the ministry’s conference hall on Thursday 17th February 2022 as he made a public presentation of the report on FCC.
He spoke of an acidic working environment, dysfunctional relationships, and financial mismanagement at the Council and said as a ministry they have resolved that the MDU at FCC should be dissolved. The minister said the move is in accordance with Part 14, subsections 97 to 99, which outlines the responsibilities of the ministry with regards to monitoring, supervision, and oversight.
“As a ministry, we are very concerned about the performance of its councils; therefore, we have developed benchmarks that we will engage the Freetown City Council on the 22nd [Tuesday] to discuss timeline” he added.
The minister ordered that the committee in charge of hiring FCC facilities including the auditorium and lobby at the new building be dissolved.
Presenting and reading the summary of the said report, Dr. Carol Labor, an Independent Consultant and Administration Inquiry Member of the MLGRD said the focus of the ministry was to examine the general administration of the FCC including assessing its financial management and to recommend ways of remedying the challenges undermining effective service delivery.
She said the report drew attention to the fact that the FFC is largely dysfunctional because “it deeply sees the mistrust and division between the council staff and the mayor.
She said the establishment of the MDU continues to further exacerbate the rift at the FCC. “As a result, this has affected the ability to provide effective service delivery to the residents of the Freetown Municipality and has occasioned financial loss to council in some businesses,” Dr. Labor stated.
Presenting and reading parts of the financial management of the report, with focus on the Property Tax, Francis Fofanah-Komeh said: “The inquiry team discovered that the recruitment personnel who had been carrying out the exercise were put aside and new members were brought in and so it brought a lot of chaos in the mapping system for which the statistics they came up with were the problem. That is, properties were understated.”
He said the team also discovered that the procurement system in outsourcing the function was improper and not competitive,” he said.
He stated that the team found out that “35 billion Leones was written off in the process of the transition from the old system of revenue collection to the new MOP tax system. “The Local Government Act specified how revenue can be written off, and this was not followed. It was a unilateral decision by the Mayor and the MDU to write off the 35 billion Leones.”
Komeh further stated that all donor funds to the FCC went through an account contrary to the Local Government Act and the Financial Management Regulation.
He added that there was an “illegal account” operated in the council wherein “funds collected like a cooperative system from the tricycle riders for which they pay Le 100,000 every month in a bid to secure funds for the repair of the tricycles were put into this account for which the Chief Administrator allegedly has no knowledge of and is not a signatory to that account.”
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