Secretary General of the opposition SLPP has led a high level Diaspora delegation to the British foreign office and House of Parliament to win assurances from the UK government in the ongoing Ebola fight.
Sulaiman Banja Tejan-Sie said they met with senior foreign office official, Harriet Matthews, OBE, the head of the ministry’s East and West African Division, to discuss UK aid package to Sierra Leone where the epidemic had claimed over 1,000 lives since May this year.
He called on the country’s former colonial master to lead other European countries to boost their support to control and contain the Ebola outbreak and to assemble a long-term economic recovery plan.
“Britain must lead the EU in not just helping to end the current threat facing Sierra Leone, but must also lead efforts to rebuild our economy, which has already been severely hit by Ebola”, Mr Tejan-Sie said in a statement released to the press.
The release said his call for convening an international conference on post-Ebola economic recovery was supported by the foreign office, who promised to push for a joint EU-UN reconstruction conference in the new year.
The statement quoted Harriet Matthews as saying that the UK government’s commitment had gone right to the top and was being led by Prime Minister David Cameron.
She revealed that Mr. Cameron had written to other European leaders, urging them to agree on an ambitious package of measures to tackle the Ebola crisis when they meet in Brussels, including the establishment of a 1 billion Euro fund to tackle the disease.
The SLPP scribe also commented on the long-standing historical ties between Britain and Sierra Leone and praised UK efforts to tackle Ebola so far, which included £125 million financial contribution and 750 troops deployed to help establish treatment units and training facilities.
The delegation also met with senior British MP, Sir Malcolm Bruce, Committee Chairman of the UK Parliament’s International Development Committee and Jeremy Lefroy, MP Chairman of the Parliamentary Network on the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.
Mr Tejan-Sie them that “the real lessons learned are not just about the adequacy of the immediate response, it must be about ensuring long-term sustainability of intervention and embedding good governance”, and warned that the outbreak of the Ebola crisis had the potential to undo the positive legacy of Britain’s intervention in the country’s post-war recovery.
He emphasised that the Ebola outbreak was threatening to undo decades of progress on development in both Sierra Leone and the wider region and pointed out the need to have an honest and open appraisal of the long term lessons to be learnt by the Ebola outbreak.
He recommended that the Mano River Union states of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone would need a post-Ebola Marshall Plan to rebuild their economies, embed good governance, build institutions and spread wealth throughout their population.
MP Bruce, who chairs the International Development Committee, agreed to raise the need for a post-Ebola recovery conference with the IMF and World Bank.
© Politico 28/10/14
