By Joseph Lamin Kamara
I mean all 49 of them, from Orogoo Bridge/Allen Town, running by the coast of Freetown and parts of Mount Aureol to Portor Levuma at Goderich, in the Freetown municipality.
They should be convening regular committee meetings in which we interact, dialogue, telling them the problems our communities have. They should take those concerns to the Freetown City Council (FCC) which should provide us the necessary social services.
President Ernest Bai Koroma or the ministers of Health, Water Resources, Transport and Aviation cannot fix our water pipes, repair or construct our bridges, public toilets, and cannot clean our drainages for us. It is the duty of our councilors to ensure those problems are discussed regularly at community levels, not office or household levels, and sustainable solutions are proposed and submitted to the council for funding. Where they have difficulty in securing money from FCC, they should get back to us, to examine better channels for solution. Yes, we must know what they do and do not.
But hardly do our councilors do those, if ever they do. Yet they often design projects unknown to us and pester the council for funding. The council also hardly verifies those fake presentations, and when the money comes they delude us with street water taps – ‘pump.’ We wake up in the morning and astonishingly find the flimsy façade of water facilities on the sides of our streets, as they stop functioning in a few months or they hardly run water regularly. Well, they have just succeeded in just that.
Our councilors never meet us after elections
Our councilors seldom consult with us, but with just a few people who are close to them and so the facilities they provide hardly are sustainable.
When government doled out Le63, 000, 000 to our Members of Parliament (MPs) last year, to help in social mobilization and sensitization against Ebola, we all blamed President Koroma’s administration because of those reasons the money was given to the MPs. Many councilors bemoaned and complained that government was unwise, leaving them out, who are closer to the people.
After that, according to a councilor in the Western Rural district, they also were given some money for sensitization. And that’s what an official at FCC tells me about the councilors. But a councilor in Freetown denies receiving any money relating to Ebola.
My councilor would not say whether or not she has been empowered for any Ebola sensitization. She was busy, she said, when I called her.
The youth in my ward say they have never seen our councilor in our ward all through this Ebola period on a social mobilization or sensitization drive since May last year.
And today again, each of our 49 councilors has been given Le15, 000, 000 to improve our wards with mini-development projects. Like I indicated above, I do not know the projects my councilor proposed to FCC for implementation because she never spoke to us. People say there are no committee meetings in our ward, but my councilor submitted to council not less than 20 minutes of meetings claiming she normally convenes committee meetings in the ward. The submission of the minutes is a criterion for the councilor to attract the funding, I understand.
I live at Naimbana Street, around Sanders Street and St John in Ward 379 and my councilor is Manteneh Conteh.
People who spoke to me at Percival Street last Tuesday said they just saw a water tap being erected close to the TOTAL fuel station, near Pademba Road.
“That was after senior members at the street harassed her,” a young lady said on condition of anonymity.
Percival, Bathurst, Wellington, Waterloo streets off Siaka Stevens Street; Naimbana Street off Upper Brook Street; and Jones Street off Sanders Street, and many others have problems with water and refuse disposal facilities. Because of the very limited amount of facilities, we have to sit three, four hours at night waiting for street taps to run water or we rise from bed at 2 or 3 in the morning to fetch water.
Schoolgoing girls have often faced sexual advances, and in many cases they have succumbed. Apart from that, pupils’ studies have been spoiled, and when they go to school they sleep in classes while teaching is going on.
Several times I have met boys and girls, men and women fetching water from cut pipes running into and along the filthy drainage along Sanders Street.
It was around 4pm on a Tuesday last month, and people had already started queuing up around the pipes.
“The next time our tap opens is 3 am and it stops before 6 in the morning. After that it opens only the next day. When school is in session it keeps me sleeping in class,” said 16-year-old Edward Kanu.
Safe refuse disposal facility is an essential, but it’s either we dump our garbage in Samba Gutter, which many households sit very close to, or we drag our bags or buckets of refuse and empty them at Lewis Street off Dundas Street.
It’s very essential that all communities in Freetown have general cleaning exercises at least throughout the rainy season, to minimize the risk of any further spread of Ebola in the city and avert any other outbreak of cholera. This can also help us in the fight against the malaria disease.
If our councilor were meeting with us, we would have told her this.
We need our councilors at election times, but we need them even more after elections. For instance, where public service providers like the Guma Valley Water Company default, as they regularly do, we need our councilors to intervene and rescue us. But when my councilor says she cannot provide a water facility at Naimbana Street because Guma says it’s impossible for it to supply water to that environment, to me, that’s incredible!
We don’t know about the Le15, 000, 000
Even after receiving the money, over a month ago, Councilor Manteneh never spoke to us about it.
She says she will inform us about it after she finishes utilizing it.
“If you tell them now about it, everybody will want to eat part of it,” she told me last Tuesday.
Hogwash! Worse luck! None of us wants to eat that money. It’s development we want to see.
My councilor says she plans to provide only three street water taps in our ward with the Le15, 000, 000 and she has done one at Chakra D’ Corner and is doing one at Percival Street. When I approached her last Tuesday, she did not tell me where she would erect the other one. But we will know if she does or not.
The councilor said the money would be finished after providing the three facilities. Let’s first see the three taps, before we can examine their worth.
I’m told by a very reliable person that a few months back the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints gave our councilors huge sums of money for provision of facilities like water. Some of them only started implementing water projects – Councilor Manteneh Conteh says she was late for the Church money. And just when council asked them to present project proposals for the Le15, 000, 000, they ran back home and swiftly forged minutes for meetings many of them never held and presented feigned water project proposals again. They are now completing the projects they started with the Church fund. Holy Ghost!
If that’s not the case, why didn’t we have new water facilities before the Le15, 000, 000? Or is it that they did not use the Holy money for its purpose? Hell fire!
It’s not all of the eggs that are rotten, however. A few of them, I mean just a few of them, are doing something substantial with the council fund.
FCC not helping us
We are concerned about the council fund because it’s our money, the tax payers’ money. And that’s why the Freetown City Council cannot go unreproached for giving our money to our nontransparent councilors without letting us know. My councilor confirms there was no media presence at the allocation. And we are yet to receive a press statement from the council.
Doing a short press release and sending copies of it to media houses that are so newsthirsty would have been a stroll in the park if FCC ever wanted to help us.
My councilor argues the Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC) and the civil society were present at the allocation. Let’s even agree that was the case. Now does she want us to believe honesty has been achieved because of the presence of the antigraft body and a mostly government-favoured civil society? Let’s even agree the ACC and the civil society do their jobs with a national character, will honesty be achieved without the media? How will the people know, when their councilors don’t meet them?
FCC, what you did was a travesty of transparency! However, you did a good job giving our councilors the money, but you gave them a carte blanche to do as they willed with it.
At community levels it’s true we have a lot of problems, but there is a fundamental approach to solving them. Let’s chase our councilors!
© Politico 09/06/15
