By Isaac Massaquoi
In less than ten weeks, Franklin Bode Gibson will be one year in office as Mayor of Freetown. I am not sure he will be celebrating too loudly because residents of the city are asking a lot of questions about the way he is running the place, and unless he does something really dramatic in the weeks running to his first anniversary as Mayor, many in Freetown might just decide to give up and wait for the next three years.
I listened to the Mayor as he campaigned for his party's ticket to run for the job. He spoke with passion, conviction and some brilliance. He left me convinced that he knew exactly what to do about Freetown. And because he was already a sitting Councillor under the leadership of Herbert George-Williams, I should be forgiven for believing at the time that Gibson would hit the ground running and that change was in the air. Today, I am hanging dangerously between continuing to believe that the man is still in charge and falling to my death over King Jimmy Bridge or being swept away by high seas along the bay area of Freetown.
What does the Mayor really think about congestion all over Freetown particularly in the Central Business District and in those places where vehicles carrying commuters to the suburbs of Freetown pick up passengers? I am talking about Charlotte Street, just up the road from NACSA, Regent Road in central Freetown, Lumley junction, and other such areas. I urge the Mayor to visit and observe the goings-on in these places at different times of the day over a period of one week and tell us his findings. Or he can pay researchers to collect high quality information for him. That’s very urgent.
I understand fully well that there are other layers of authority at work in Freetown but I believe that Mayor Gibson and his council are so missing in action that I get the feeling he needs some good lessons from his counterparts in Dakar and Kampala for example to make any real impact. The Mayor should coordinate and bring about some organisation in this business of running a modern city that we think Freetown is.
Any resident of this city who has driven a car to the Central Business District recently will testify to the fact that what was just a casual affair is now both impossible and dangerous. All along major streets are groups of young men who block parking areas with sticks, stones and rotten vehicle tires, facilitating parking into those spots for a fee of between two and five thousand leones. Apart from that being criminal it's a disgraceful waste of youthful energy.
I have been extorted like that many times. Once I had a slanging match with a man of about 22 years, and forcefully parked my car into a space he wanted to sell to me. As I left the place, he hauled insults at me, calling me names – suggesting we are the "big men who steal the country's money". Well anybody who owns a car in Freetown should be prepared for such insults. There are many such people who have been made to believe that ordinary middle class people who try to make the best of the bad situation in which we are today are responsible for their predicament.
As I left the scene, I thought about what might happen to my car in my absence after the confrontation. I called the young man and made peace with him promising to give him some cash on my return. On my return I gave him five thousand leones. He quickly gave me his mobile phone number and told me to call him whenever I came to the city centre and he would help me get parking space.
The Mayor must really tell me why the council is not collecting such payments in clearly demarcated parking areas and protecting our cars while we work or do business in Freetown as part of the package.
There was an article in one newspaper this week about the remains of the former City Hall Building now being used as an unofficial car park. I don’t think there is anything wrong with that as long as Bode is still looking for money to re-build the facility. But who is collecting money from that “unofficial car park” and how much have they collected so far? We can talk later about what the council has or would do with that money. The important thing at this stage is for Mayor Bode Gibson to organise Freetown in such a way that people will feel and see the council at work.
Collecting the mandatory local tax has been a real headache for Bode’s council. And I know why. People just can’t feel the presence of the Freetown City Council in their lives in a measure commensurate with their taxes, and the organisation’s handling of taxpayers’ money leaves much to be desired. When this is mixed up with the general reluctance by people anywhere to pay taxes and a Mayor who came to office through a party that is prepared to manipulate any policy just to satisfy their volatile support base, what results is absolute paralysis.
The people of Freetown have just been put through another very crude and anti-democratic cleaning exercise which, to me, smacks more of desperation than of the beginnings of a calculated attempt to rid Freetown of heaps of rubbish and releasing the city from the choking stench of rubbish. Just because the authorities want to do massive cleaning of the city, they declare what walks and quacks like a wartime curfew order ruthlessly enforced by some police officers who are always looking for an opportunity to harass civilians.
I purposely visited known rubbish sites in Freetown two days after the cleaning exercise and found more rubbish on the ground than before the cleaning programme. It doesn’t mean it was a bad thing to have embarked on the exercise but I am just fed up with seeing my city reverting to the same tactics that produce only short-term results in a blaze of badly organised propaganda.
No resident of Freetown ever believed that State House and Mayor Gibson would move against traders at Abacha Street in the same way they treated traders in other parts of the city and in faraway Kenema. This government has been sufficiently blackmailed into believing that without the women on Abacha Street and the criminals who steal from people shopping in that area, they will be thrown out of State House.
One senior government official once suggested that the votes of the Abacha trader or criminals are the same as that of a University professor and that was picked up by some in the media. Well a man trapped in such crude blackmail can say anything. Such a man would refuse to countenance the issues that would normally inform the University professor’s voting preference. All he cares about is a politically-uneducated, deprived and subservient populace that can be easily manipulated to vote one way or the other because only one man can guarantee their survival.
Operation WID is only now about SLRTA ambushing and collecting hundreds of thousands of leones from motorists for parking in the “wrong place”. If this government and our Mayor were so convinced about opening up places like Abacha Street to traffic, why did the whole thing collapse after that traders’ march to State House? In the name of raw politics, hardly anything gets done these days and Mayor Bode Gibson who came to office promising to turn things around is playing along.
One final point: We have asked many questions about just what is happening at Victoria Park in the centre of our city. I am putting together some figures that came through to me a few days ago on this issue and trying to talk to two more people. After that I will put the case of the people in the public domain. What I can say for now is that the state of Victoria Park is symptomatic of the very political infrastructure we call Freetown City Council.
Unless Bode frees himself from the political tight corner of his party and makes conscious efforts to make his mark, he may go the way of those Committees of Management at the FCC which brought us people like Victor Reider.
(C) Politico 12/09/13
