Sierra Leone Telegraph: 4 February 2020:
State House in Freetown today reports that President Dr Julius Maada Bio has held talks with Jeffrey Thamsanqa Radebe – a senior adviser to President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa, regarding a visit of 30 potential investors to Sierra Leone from South Africa.
Jeffrey Thamsanqa Radebe conveyed the South African government’s plans to organise a delegation of investors to the resource-rich West African nation as soon as they get a date from Freetown. He is said to have told President Bio that the potential partners would be interested in small scale electrification, off-grid power and large scale mining.
Mr Radebe served as Minister in the South African Presidency from 2014 to 2018 after having worked as Minister of Justice and Constitutional Development from 2009 to 2014. He will assist in finalising the team, which he said would need to know about potential projects in those areas of interest and what Sierra Leone’s policy is around private-public partnership.
President Bio also met Jeff Couch, Director at the Orion Resources Partners, a global alternative investment management firm with approximately US$6.0 billion assets under management – private equity, hedge fund and merchant services.
“We have accepted this meeting to better understand the investment opportunities within the Sierra Leone mining sector. Our specific interest is in base and precious metal opportunities,” he said.
The founder of Genesis Energy Holdings, with integrated operations across the industry value-chain of oil, gas and power in South Africa, São Tomé and Príncipe, Guinea Bissau, Benin and others, also held a meeting with President Bio.
Akinwole Omoboriowo II, a UK trained specialist in electricity prices and modelling, said they looked forward to opportunities in developing power plants that utilise numerous fossil fuels such as gas, diesel, HFO and renewable fuel sources such as hydro.
“It should be noted that the planned visit comes after President Bio delivered the keynote address at the Indaba Mining 2020, the world’s largest mining investment event taking place in Cape Town, South Africa, and emphasised that Sierra Leone now needed trustworthy mining partners,” says State House in Freetown.
All I know, the end justifies the means. If president Bio is just travelling abroad without bringing anything good for Sierra Leone, he will surly pay for it one day.
May it come to reality this time around because we are tired of this so called investors that come and go without any improvements to our beloved country mama salone
We are anxiously waiting to see what comes out of this; our nation is frantically craving for meaningful and practical investors. We hope and pray something tangible happens along the line. We are tired of the hardship and skyrocketing of prices of anything useful in that nation.
I know these are the same people that drowned our beloved country Sierra Leone to zero economy. We are not going to seat and listen to so called tologbo propaganda machine. We need a president with vision – like president Bio who refuse presidential spending without any question. The APC party damaged this country for so long, so you cannot expect the president to play magic within two years for the country to become a paradise.
Let us hope that at end of the South Africans visit we won’t hear anything about another memorandum of understanding being signed – President Bio has signed too many of those. This time want to hear of a contract being signed and a firm given for the start of operations.
President Bio should show us something to justify the elaborate traveling that he has embarked on since taking office at taxpayers expense; his ministers, Ambassadors and others have become furniture, gobbling up their salary for nothing in return.
It’s quite probable that President Bio has little or no confidence at all in his ministers,that’s why he does all the traveling himself to attract investors. Take his Thief Minister,David Francis for example: He obtained his PhD from the university of kleptomania. He couldn’t pass the section of his final exam dealing with how one should cover one’s tracks after a heist, that’s why he is caught all the time.
Jusu Saffa,the finance minister,is being found out to be knowledgeable in everything except Economics and Finance, hence his inability, together with the Central Bank Governor, to arrest the nation’s economic woes.
President Bio definitely has problems which he can get off his shoulders by putting his ministers and others to the test by letting them take on some foreign missions, the inadequate completion of which should lead to their dismissal to be replaced by more capable people. Thus the public outcry over the excessive traveling of the President will subside because it helps to drain the nation’s meagre resources.
While the naysayers in the opposition pray for Sierra Leone’s economic doom, president Bio and his men quietly go about the business of rebranding Sierra Leone on the international platform. There is no doubt that Sierra Leone will soon become a major destination for foreign direct investment.
Bio canceling the 2009 crooked mining contracts was the right thing to do. Those contracts only benefited Ernest Koroma and the shady mining investors. True, Sierra Leone needs foreign direct investment. But they should be investments that benefit Sierra Leone and its people. Anything and everything signed by the unscrupulous and useless APC should be torn up and thrown into the garbage of irrelevance – not good for Salone.