By Isaac Massaquoi
Minister of Transport BalogunKoroma has been all over the place since his recent appointment to that office. He is one minister who enjoys being in the media and over time, he appears to have grasped a trick or two with which he has managed to keep some sections of the media focussed somewhat disproportionately on him. But, as always when people make so much effort to enjoy media attention in this way there is the danger that one day the beam of the media searchlight will be turned on them. In this case, Logus will be under the spotlight.
My information is that he was extremely surprised when he was told of his new appointment following his disastrous attempt to promote a third term project for President Koroma. But now he moves as if hewas expecting to be appointed to a ministerial job. He is moving from one place to another – making one high-sounding speech here, announcing an initiative there, visiting this country, signing some investment memorandum with one company and announcing the imminent arrival of another. He just goes on and on.
If he is not organising a retreat for ministries and agencies under his supervision and announcing telephone hotlines for Road Transport service, he is seen going into the engine room of the Lungi ferry and asking questions about the safety of the service. I have legitimate questions about whether all this is not gesture politics meant to keep Logus in the limelight and at the same time creating the impression in the minds of the people that at last, here is a minister who cares about the people and is selflessly serving them. I have no reason to doubt he is genuine but I have this feeling that his burning desire to attract the media appears to be having an edge over the delivery of high quality transportation service to the struggling people of this country.
How else can we explain the fact that Logus keeps calling a handful of radio stations at different times of the day during his recent travel from Beijing to Toronto to be interviewed on mere proposals and promises of investments in projects like a new airport which some of us have problems with.
In the last two weeks or so, the minister of transport has embarked on another high-sounding initiative that went straight to the headlines but has again failed to deliver any of the objectives the minister set himself from the outset.
The media was full of reports of the minister actually going to Lumley to personally organise the movement of commuter vehicles by checking out queues and ensuring that the notoriously heartless private vehicle owners did their runs according to prescribed destinations agreed in tripartite meetings involving the government, transport operators and passenger welfare people.
As far as the media objective was concerned, that was fantastic. But where are we now since the minister retreated to his office to continue his policy work, which is what he was appointed for in the first place. The minister may not admit this but he clearly found himself so totally overwhelmed by the enormity of the task and the complex realities of those transport terminals that he decided to return to office quietly to plan another media outing.
I was really expecting minister LogusKoroma to be a bit more open with us and in fact to admit that taking everything into consideration – the roads, the number of commuters, the exploding number of private vehicles, uncontrollable street trading, hordes of unemployed young people using the streets for everything, criminals and the attitude of the police and particularly those corrupt traffic wardens and other road users, it is impossible to lift this transportation load from the heads of our people anytime soon with such gestures like the one Logus embarked on. I am begging the minister to disagree with me on this.
In his recent press release, he called on the police to help ease the movement of passenger vehicles particularly at rush hours. That’s not bad. The reality however is that there is hardly anything the police can do because of the factors I have just outlined above and Logus knows that. Even emergency vehicles struggle through Freetown’s notorious traffic. We have no record of how many lives could have been saved if emergency services were as prioritised as they are in other countries.
I am not asking him to put up his hand and accept defeat because of the enormity of the challenge. I am asking Logus to stop creating the impression he could solve our transport problems overnight and to also stop this unnecessary propaganda around his work when, in reality, commuters in Freetown are in real hell on the roads on a daily basis. Let’s deal with some practical issues now.
Look at the situation at Calaba Town where mainly because of the rottenness of that main arterial road in and out of the city from the east, traffic grinds to a halt for hours at any time of the day. It’s so frustrating and if the minister takes into consideration the sheer number of people living beyond Wellington, including school pupils and public sector workers coming into the west of the city daily, he should be worried how the Calaba Town gridlock alone affects the productivity of our workforce and the children’s performance in school.
And this is where I have a little problem with the new airport project that Logus is pushing through. Every Sierra Leonean should be happy for a project like this but when the chips are down some of us are bold enough to ask tough questions. LogusKoroma knows that reconstructing the old road leading to Allen Town and linking up with the Waterloo road will solve the traffic problem at Calaba Town but that road has been so abandoned that today it ranks along the Mattru, Kono and Gendema roads as the worst roads in Sierra Leone. I am tempted to ask the minister to go to cabinet and ask that whatever counterpart funding the government will be putting into this new airport project be diverted to reconstruct the old road immediately and free up thousands of Sierra Leoneans imprisoned in those communities because of the near impossibility of movement.
That new airport will serve mostly upper-middle class elite and foreigners. And Logus must not tell me of investment that will flow from having an airport. Does he seriously believe that Singapore Airlines, Cathay Pacific, Turkish Airlines and big American carriers like United and Delta will quickly fly planes into Sierra Leone just because we would have had a big shiny airport just outside Freetown?
Logus must know that some of us understand that there are many other factors that must fall in place to bring the really significant players in the industry here. So while it will be good to have an airport for the elite and strangers coming here, it makes real sense to spend money in the interest of the vast majority of the people of Sierra Leone who are always on the roads. Some work is being done now in that direction but I must point out that there is a lot more work to be done.
Logus should be talking about building a mass transit system, certainly not on the scale of developed countries, but a system that truly caters for our people and robust enough to facilitate development and growth. He must fight naked corruption and extortion on our roads – in Freetown, traffic wardens who were initially applauded for being upright, are today busy collectingpennies. All checkpoints out of the city are deliberately set up for the purposes of corruption. There are too many rotten cars parked on road corners all over Freetown, and street trading – an issue which Logus doesn’t want to talk about is a big problem. The government hasn’t done anything so far to convince the people of the city that they can deal decisively with this problem.
The minister should know that there are also many informal settlements all over Freetown with thousands of people there putting pressure on the few facilities available, including roads. Does he want me to show him places where people cook and bathe on the streets? So our minister has to deal with big questions around land rights and general town planning.
Logus is now enjoying a kind of Lazarus experience after he was unexpectedly sacked from his job as a minister of state in the vice president’s office without explanation and effectively confined to his political grave. He rose from that to be put in charge of his party’s campaign for the 2012 elections and he coordinated a raucous but successful campaign in true Siaka Steven APC style that made a good many people uncomfortable. While he continues to enjoy that revival, he should be careful not to imagine that we will not see through his media façade.
(C) Politico 24/10/13
