Mayor Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr OBE: Sierra Leone Telegraph: 23 December 2021:
Cleaning is a process with systems, not an event. This is why all Freetonians are required to engage registered waste service providers (tricycle groups or trucks) to collect their household waste, and why the Freetown City Council (FCC) engages the tricycle groups to sweep the main streets daily.
Unfortunately, due to internal challenges at FCC that I have highlighted repeatedly, the tricycle groups had not been paid by FCC for over 3 months resulting in reduced and less effective street sweeping and the consequent deterioration in the cleanliness of our city.
I would like to thank World Vision for stepping forward to partner with FCC to address this crisis during the Christmas season! With funding from the Heineken Foundation delivered through the Sierra Leone Brewery, World Vision is supporting FCC to pay the tricycle groups to undertake an intensive three-day cleaning exercise across the city.
Thanks also to Masada for offering trucks and skips pro Bono basis for tomorrow’s cleaning. With the oversight and involvement of ward councillors, the Deputy Chief Administrator, the ESO and the FCC Sanitation department and the Metropolitan Police, yesterday’s activities are already bringing our city back to the way it was when it was being effectively swept on a daily basis.
I will continue to raise concerns about the internal challenges with appropriate authorities and trust that we will be able to start the New Year with the resumption of the systems and processes needed to keep our city clean all year round!
Freetonians, please play your part: don’t through garbage on the streets, fields, gutters and waterways; don’t give your garbage to those collecting with baskets or who are mentally ill.
Register with a waste service provider – call 8244 or go to findmeinfreetown.com for contact details of the waste services providers nearest to you!
As always, Mr Jalloh, your comments are detailed, appropriate and cogently made. Yes, the ongoing cleaning (cleansing) of Freetown should be expanded into a full-scale fumigation of State House and Parliament and even beyond, including government ministries, departments, agencies and other public bodies. The aim being to root out completely the financial and other forms of malfeasance holding our country back and soiling its image on the world stage.
The example set by our hard-working and deeply patriotic Mayor in seeking to rid our capital city of filth and waste is of great moral and practical significance. The Presidency, Parliament and the Judiciary and other institutions of governance should all copy her example and conduct own house cleaning (cleansing) to restore trust in public office and rebuild the country’s battered image abroad.
Totally agree with you Mr Yillah. I certainly support your idea that this three days cleaning exercise for the city of Freetown, dreamt up and put into practice with our ever vigilant Mayor, Akin Sawyer, that is never short of ideas of how to improve the quality of life for the people that placed their trust in her, should not be limited on the streets and pavements of our great city, but should be extended to State House and the wells of our Parliament. This is what leadership is all about. Be open, transparent and accountable to the people that elected you. Worry about the social and economic issues that affects your people, like health care, education, roads, energy and social security and mobility, instead of worrying about what your yesmen think of what the people think of the popularity of your government.
Also help identify the problems and bring the communities together to help sort them out. Sierra Leoneans have always readily answered to that call of duty. Maybe dip cleaning and a wholesale reforms of our administrative structures that allows a tiny clique of individuals, occupied the top echelons of running of the affairs of State. Because it is there that we have the cess pool of corrupt politicians that have pursued corrupt policies, that have not only reduced some parts of Freetown to a giant mountains of rubbish heaps, kroobay, and kissy Yard , where children, pigs and vultures can be seen competing with one an other to make a living. Clearing the mess created by the central government has been the main focused of Mayor Akin Sawyer, and her team in the FCC.
Sierra-Leoneans don’t need leaders, but quality leadership that can point them to the way forward, signed posted of how to overcome, this psychological mental barrier we have as a nation rich in every thing under the sun both in human, and natural resources but unfortunately, due to the unpatriotic, actions of a selfish and corrupt cabal, they have become the massive logjam in realising our country’s potential.
I have been wondering whether Mayor Aki-Sawyerr’s three-day programme of the intensive cleaning of our capital city currently underway can be extended to devote an entire day to the cleaning (cleansing?) of that den of malfeasance called State House, sitting atop of Tower Hill.
Indeed, if revelations allegedly contained in the 2020 Auditor General’s report are anything to go by, the official seat of executive power seems to have grown into a mountain of corruption – a cancer needing urgent surgery so as to give the people of Freetown and of Sierra Leone more generally that breath of fresh air – financial and economic opportunity – that they have been denied by the NEW DIRECTION POLYTRICKS of Team Bio.
That said, kudos to our indefatigable woman of action, known the world over for her grace, charm, acumen, pragmatism and accomplishments as a public official. Our Mayor has all the attributes of a future occupant of a cleaned (cleansed) gleaming, corruption-free State House.