By Mabinty M. Kamara
Amidst uncertainty caused by the Coronavirus pandemic, the Sierra Leone Government has reassigned 24 Press and Information Officers recently appointed to serve in the country’s foreign missions abroad.
The information officers, also known as Press Attaches, will be attached to Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) across the country, according to a directive by the Ministry of Information and Communication (MIC).
A statement issued by the Ministry on Monday outlined the deployment of the attaches, alongside those of other information officers.
Emmanuel A.B Turay, Acting Director of Information in the MIC, told Politico that the deployment of the attaches will serve both as a learning platform for them to prepare them better for the task ahead when they would have gone to their respective missions. He said it would also serve as a temporary measure in filling existing gaps within the information departments in the MDAs.
The 24 attaches were appointed back in March to serve in missions including the United States, Switzerland, Belgium and Ghana. Eight of them are women.
Turay said there had been a “huge vacuum” in the information sector, noting that there were only nine information officers to serve over 100 MDAs in the country, hence the need to improvise with the attaches as they await departure to their respective locations.
“Because they have been appointed and we have seen the information gap, for instance to be updating our websites, to get information from the spokesperson, so we have assigned them temporally,” Turay said.
He added that this will be for a temporary period while the government put other modalities in place. He noted that the timeframe for this will be determined by how soon diplomatic relations are resumed, after the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as resumption of flights in various countries of their assignments.
“As for now, while they are going through the necessary training and preparations in terms of necessary documentations, they will be assigned to various MDAs to serve the purpose internally,” he said.
He added: “For now they would not be on salary, because it’s like an internship. They are starting the training tomorrow (Wednesday June 10), from there they will be deployed and then we begin to see their output. With that we will even be able to determine who is more efficient and proficient for multilateral or bilateral locations,” he said.
To create room for the deployment of the attaches, some senior information officers were redeployed from MDAs to the MIC. Turay said they considered the transfer of senior information officers to the Information Directorate as a promotion for them. He said the Public Sector Management Team was processing the applications of new batch of information officers who will be replacing the information attaches when they would have gone for their overseas assignments.
“I am the only person in the Directorate of Information at the Ministry of Information. I need other experienced staff who have been working in government and working as information officers, which is about four of them, to fill the vacancy in the office and replace some people. They are superintending in other words, to oversee those that are in the relevant MDAs. So for me it’s a promotion,” he explained.
Some of the attaches are based in the provinces and the MIC state said they were deployed in these locations, without specifying.
But according to Turay, such people will be attached to MDAs in the districts and regions they are residing, while some of them will continue on the job they had prior to their appointment.
Two of the attaches were appointed while abroad – US and Guinea. Turay said those two people will remain where they are and report on issues relating to Sierra Leone.
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