News Story

FREETOWN: MUSA KABIA: Our Freetown sources have discovered another dent in the credibility of the nominees of the president for diplomatic assignments. The sources say that one of Pres. Ernest Bai Koroma’s nominees for the post of Press Attaché to the United Kingdom, Chernor Ojuku Sesay, has been denied a visa by the British High Commission. It is understood that Chernor Sesay was rejected a visa because of discrepancies in his bio-data which has Sesay as PRO of the Sierra Leone Football Association (SLFA) had applied for a UK visa when the national team Leone Stars was to travel to England for friendly fixture with one of the teams in the lower tier of English football, Leyton Orient, last year. He was denied a visa for some inexplicable reasons by the Brititsh High Commission(BHC). BHC had changed its visa policies for Sierra Leone which makes it difficult for anybody who had been denied visa once to be reconsidered for the same in the next ten years. Now that Ojuku has been appointed Press Attache to UK and given another passport, the government filed an application for him for the UK visa. This time again, the BHC did not grant him the visa and he is now a desperate and confused man.

Our information is that the information Ojuku applied with as SLFA PRO does not tally with the one he has on the new passport which has been issued to him by the APC government. Thus, the BHC was not sure which Chernor Ojuku Sesay they were dealing with, and rejected him. (den crab am visa).

A British High Commission source said that although they do not comment on individual cases, it was true that Mr. Sesay's application for Entry Clearance had been '' turned down ''.
He also confirmed that the Director General of Foreign Affairs, Ambassador Umaru Wurie had written a letter to the British High Commission appealing to them to revisit the issue because of the 'special circumstance' of the applicant.
In a very defiant mood, the British High Commission source said that it was highly unlikely for them to reconsider the issue of Mr. Sesay because of the introduction of new Home Office guidelines.
This latest embarrassment has further exposed the credibility of the president’s nominees for sensitive positions.

This is not the first time the BHC is refusing to grant visas to government functionaries. The presidential Press Secretary Sheka Tarawalie (Shekito) was rejected visa to travel with the president to the UK because he was resident in Britain with an asylum status and left UK without proper documentation.

Also, the Deputy Minister of Information and Communication Mohamed D. Koroma was refused a visa by BHC when he should have led a government delegation to the UK to negotiate the international gateway security issue with TELTAC and SIERRATEL. The reason, we were told, is that he submitted information that is discrepant with information on his current diplomatic passport and the ordinary passport on which he had been granted a visa to study in the UK some years back.

The president’s elder sister, Mrs. Admire Marian Sesay, was rejected a visa by the US Embassy sometime in February this year.

The many rejections of Pres. Ernest Bai Koroma’s government functionaries of visas is a serious credulity problem for the new man. It is very uncommon for Embassies and High Commissions to reject government officials visas to travel to their countries. First it was the Press Secretary to the President, then a whole Deputy Minister and now it is the Press Attaché to UK. The writing is on the wall that the president does not have credible people or has not gone in search of them.