News Story

FREETOWN: THE NEW VISION: Since the first Gulf War of 1991 when the allied forces led by the United States championed the liberation of Kuwait after her invasion by Iraq, a new world order emerged. The insecurity and instability the war created in the Middle East plus a combination of other factors precipitated a drop in the production of oil in the world. The ascendancy of radical leftist governments in the some oil producing countries like Venezuela necessitated a change of posture of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). All of these variables and some others have meant a paucity in the production of oil which has had a knock on effect on other items like food. When the world began to fight the race against the reduction in oil production, food production began to truncate. In effect, the global trends in oil and food are not new entirely as the APC government is trying to package to the gullible populace. We can only admit that it has taken an alarming dimension over the last three or four years. For developing countries like Sierra Leone, it is fast becoming an anathema, with our over reliance on food importation and dependence on the west for subsidy.

The land that we love our Sierra Leone is tethering on the brink of a precipice. The sagacious ex-Pres. Kabbah had foreseen the crisis lurking in the dark and entreated Sierra Leoneans to take farming to a new national level where food production and variety will take prominence over importation. Thus emerged the much maligned and highly politicized food security. Tejan Kabbah initiated the food security program in 2002, long before the Maputo Declaration which seeks to encourage African countries to allocate at least 10% of the national budget to Agriculture. Our innate ability and unbridled propensity to self destruct and manipulate gravitated us to the path of ridicule of an important national and international crisis. The opposition then which is now ruling schemed against the clarion call and put it in topsy-turvy to their supporters. The then opposition leader who has now been hoisted to the presidency, feasting on the gullibility of the people adulterated the former president’s food security pledge for political gains. Our democracy cannot thrive in the face of blatant dishonesty and flaunted insincerity to the people by the political elite. We don’t learn and therefore we cannot grow as a people and as a nation. In western democracies when issues of national interest are tabled, party politics takes the back seat and everybody pursues the national cause. Because the ruling party now when in opposition failed to embrace national calls, some people don’t want to hear ‘kaka’ about global increases. After all we are at Congo, Kroo town and Dove Cut markets not global market.

There is something baffling about this global increases rhetoric which card the APC is over playing: the globalization of the local. People still don’t know why the increase in the price of foo-foo, garri, ogiri that are locally produced is tied to global, and we are not going to delve into the crystal ball for them. There is a latent danger looming in the horizon which the government officials have failed to peer into. This global rhetoric will blow up in their faces if they keep tying everything to it while doing nothing to fill the stomachs of the people or create the enabling environment for that to happen. Already some ministers have incurred the wrath of people by openly declaring that they can do little about the global food price increases since it is a universal phenomenon. Stupid, arrogant and reckless statements that speak volumes about the insensitivity of the government that we have; and a philosopher had once remarked that a people deserve the government they get.

By cabinet minister being so brazenly bold to admit that they can hardly do anything about the global food increases is enough indictment for them and demonstrates their incompetence and inability their incompetence and inability to govern. What is still inexplicable is how they conjectured that thoughtless theory of how to provide light for Freetown but don’t know (by their acceptance) how to combat global food price increases. The quandary that we have found ourselves in is that while the global trends bite, the local food stuffs prices keep soaring and the government has shown a clear inability to perform. Where does this take us? Add everything; global+ local x APC incompetence = disaster. Full stop.