By Mabinty M. Kamara
Sierra Leone is about to witness a major boost in the transport sector with the World Bank funded 50 million-dollar Integrated Urban Mobility and Resilience Project.
Discussions around the project according to the Deputy Minister of Transport and Aviation, Sadiq Silla was initiated by the past government for a 20 million-dollar loan from the World Bank since 2013, noting that the project was renegotiated and the proposal reviewed when President Julius Maada Bio came to office. The World Bank was impressed and decided to allocate a 50 million-dollar grant to the government of Sierra Leone.
“We tried to re-engage the World Bank. Concurrently, the government had issued executive orders targeting prudent financial management and improvement in accountability and strengthening the Anti-Corruption Commission which were the bench marks set up by the World Bank.” Silla said: “The Sierra Leone government is committed to a 2 million-dollar counterpart funding of the project”.
Batu Shamel, Communication Specialist at the Ministry of Transport and Aviation told Politico that the goal of the five-year project was to decongest specific corridors in the East and Western parts of Freetown to ensure safe travel for vehicles and pedestrians.
Part of the project, according to officials, includes the modernization and professionalization of the transport system which comprise the procurement of 200 buses with modern facilities like electronic transport fare payment system. The buses will be allocated to private companies to manage them on the project dedicated roads and also to upgrade the roads so that they are worthy for vehicles to ply the corridors with traffic lights, pedestrian footpaths with iron bars on the edge of the road, interception points to allow free movement of the buses and other vehicles and passengers Passover to prevent accidents and delay at crossing points.
“We want to ensure that the roads in our corridors have the characters that are weather- worthy. You and I know that during this period when we have rain, most roads are flooded, it often empties itself into people’s houses and the footpaths are not properly done and so people think they are death traps so they do not normally use them. And so they walk through the roads. People do not also cross at zebra points. So we want the roads to be weather-worthy that can support easy transportation,” she said.
Minister Silla added that part of the project was to transform the Sierra Leone Road Transport Corporation to make it a regulator instead of an operator which it currently is.
“We will not give the vehicles to the Roads Transport Cooperation to run. We don’t want the SLRTC to be the regulators and the operators at the same. It will be like the relationship between Airport Authority at Lungi and the Civil Aviation Authority. The airport authority physically manages the lungi airport but for the plane to register in Sierra Leone and all other paper work is being regulated by CAA so this is how we want the SLRTC to be. We don’t want it to be the regulator and the operator.”
The minister said over the years the main role of SLRTC has been focused on operation and that most of the regulatory work has been done by the Sierra Leone Road Safety Corps which ought to have been shifted to SLRTC.
Silla said that part of the project implementation is the construction of a mega bus terminal at Lumley and Jui and the capacity building for both institutions and the individual player in the project implementation such as the Freetown City Council, SLRSA, Ministry of Land, Ministry of Works and SLRTC.
According to Mrs. Shamel, implementation of the project has started with some aspects of procurement, negotiations and engagement with the various stakeholders are in progress while the physical infrastructural work will commence by September this year.
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