For the second time in less than a year, the Executive Director of the Sierra Leone Road Safety Authority (SLRSA), Ibrahim Sannoh, has been suspended from office by the organization’s Board of Directors. The period of suspension is indefinite.
At an “emergency meeting” on 3 November, the board found Mr. Sannoh “liable of insubordination to the person and authority of the chairman, board of directors, disrespect to the deputy minister…deliberately stalling the implementation of a contract between the government of Sierra Leone and Autospect (SL) Limited”.
Politico has seen a letter written by the Senior Permanent Secretary in the ministry of transport confirming that minister Kabineh Kallon “has approved the recommendation” to suspend the Executive Director of the SLRSA from duty.
According to a letter of complaint written by the chairman of the board of directors Sheik M. Bawoh, a copy of which was obtained by Politico, the deputy minister of transport, Rex Bonapha invited him to join him at SLRSA headquarters to “look into the matter between Mr. Sannoh and Autospect after the Executive Director had twice, in less than a week stopped the company from carrying out its work”.
Bawoh said: “the Executive Director became more intransigent, insisting that he would only allow the company to work at the fitness center in December this year”. He added that he then told the deputy minister that ‘the waiting game will seriously undermine efforts to meet the February target’, to formally launch operations.
The board chairman said: “it was at this point that Executive Director Sannoh referred to him as ‘Project Manager of Autospect’. According to Bawoh the Executive Director then ‘hissed at me to the hearing of bystanders”.
Bawoh noted that: “For the Executive Director to claim that I have been bribed to support a project which already has the expressed approval of his Excellency the President…could only be viewed as an attempt to besmear my hard-won reputation. I need not emphasize the fact that the Executive Director’s disdain for the project which seeks to sanitize the SLRSA is tantamount to undermining the core objectives of the President’s development aspiration for the Authority which is blighted by lots of leakages”.
In reply to the query which followed the board chairman’s letter of complaint, the SLRSA boss who is attending the Climate Change conference in Glasgow, Scotland said: “the misunderstandings between the Board Chairman and I are predicated on the Chairman acting as an executive board”.
Sannoh then went into explaining in intricate detail the contract with Autospects and the role of the board chairman in its realization and how, by his reckoning, its implementation could adversely affect the growth and development of SLRSA.
The Executive Director said: “I have never insulted neither hissed and will never do such to anyone, let alone the board chairman. I pray for an understandable working relationship between myself and the chair moving forward”.
Sannoh was first suspended from office in December 2021 for his handling of the same Autospect contract.
Copyright © Politico Online (08/11/21)
