By Mustapha Sesay
The chairman of parliamentary oversight committee on Works, Housing and Infrastructure, Kombor Kamara, said in parliament on Wednesday that the Sierra Leone Road Authority (SLRA) was not doing its job properly as it wasn’t correctly supervising ongoing road projects.
The APC lawmaker made the statement at a joint committee meeting bringing together MPs from the committees on Agriculture and Works with officials from the Rural Private Sector Agriculture project and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD). The session was convened to give update on feeder road projects across the country.
And MP Kombor Kamara was responding to concerns raised by his colleague MPs after the head of civil works engineers of the Rural Private Sector project, Neilford Rose, gave a status report on all the feeder roads projects across the nine districts they are working in.
In his report, Rose listed 100 lots of feeder road projects on going and said each of those projects was 81percent completed. He noted that the roads that were selected for rehabilitation were chosen based on their connection to markets, to facilitate easy access of these market places by farmers.
After this presentation, Dixon Rogers, an MP from Pujehun, challenged Mr Rose on his claim that 81 percent of the roads had been completed. Rogers said that the roads in his constituency were not even 20 percent completed and that they were even worse than how they were prior to commencement of the project. He noted that there were bridges that were now not usable at by motorized vehicles.
“Government is spending huge money on road projects but little is shown for it. Le370 million is a lot of money to be spent on feeder roads without drainage,” Rogers said.
Jusufu Mansaray, an M from Bo, also raised similar concerns. He cited a number of roads that he said were not completed as stated by Rose.
“Our people think we are doing disservice to them because you are not doing your jobs properly,” Mansaray said.
At this point, Engineer Rose told the committee that they had supervisors from SLRA that supervised the road projects and that they were involved in assessing those projects.
In response to that statement, the Works chairman Kombor Kamara said they were aware of the fact that SLRA supervisors sometimes took photos of other completed roads and add them to documents concerning altogether different incomplete road projects to fast track payment for contractors.
“SLRA is not supervising these projects and we are getting on SLRA very hard this time,” the MP said, adding that they were going to subpoena all contractors to bring forward their certificates of completion because the money involved in those projects were huge.
© Politico 04/06/15
