By Kanthe Knana, Quebec, Canada.

Nations are gradually coming to terms with the realities of the 21st century. Not because they would like to change ties but rather they have seen the necessity to explore new relationships and strengthen existing ones to avoid the inconvenience of a colony culture. Even some members of our African diaspora appear to have succumbed to this thinking.

Raymond Dele Awoonor-Gordon

You can’t kill the dead, can you? One of our problems is that having outsourced virtually our very existence to other cultures’ understanding frameworks, our society has now funked, as it slithers down the slope of poverty in both the spiritual and economic kind – a cause and effect syndrome.

However, watching the slow death of critical thinking and public honesty as well as the boldness of the lies politicians tell, and our propensity to accept them unquestioningly, I’ve come to realise that it is our complacency, our acceptance of socio-economic backwardness as the norm, our love of deception which feeds our delusion, that are the true causes of today’s recession.

By Dr. Nemata Majeks-Walker, Founder & first President

My dear sisters, it’s almost unbelievable that fifteen years have gone, as if it were yesterday when, barely six months before the 2002 general elections, we boldly launched the 50/50 Group 2001. I say boldly because we did something unprecedented in Sierra Leone. Amidst all the opposition, misunderstanding and criticism of what we were about, we did it! Not only was the occasion graced by the then Head of State, his Excellency, Alhaji Dr. Ahmed Tejan-Kabba, who actually launched the organisation, but also the venue was the Sierra Leone House of Parliament. The keynote speaker was no less a person than Emeritus Professor Eldred Durosimi Jones, who said among other things,

By Albert Momoh :

As the results of the crucial constituency elections come flying in, amidst a thickening cloud of “camp-ish” recriminations, the rhetorics keep rocketing high where goodwill should have taken firmer grip and served as a safe landing platform to cool down frayed and jangled emotions!

I see no “winner” here!

By Lansana Gberie

When American film actor Robin Williams, who suffered from depression, committed suicide two years ago, Kenyan humour writer Ted Malanda feigned incredulity.

“I can’t wrap my mind around the fact that depression is an illness…In fact, it is such a non-issue that African languages never bothered to create a word for it,” he wrote in his newspaper, The Standard, under the headline “How Depression Has Never Been an African Disease.”

The people of Africa may invariably be better off today economically and socially than they were sixty years ago – with an increase in average income per person and higher rate of literacy. But health outcomes continue to significantly lag behind their Asian and Latin American counterparts.

Far too many Africans are still dying from simple illness and disease that can be easily cured.

In countries such as Sierra Leone, where health outcomes and quality of life are much lower than the continent’s average, it is obvious that government’s spending of less than 0.5% of national income on healthcare is seriously impacting on mortality and morbidity.

Dr. Kandeh K. Yumkella

On October 3rd 2016, our government finally accepted the reality that our economy is bankrupt, with the publication of a press release from State House. The statement detailed  austerity measures they will take to improve revenue mobilization and fiscal sustainability, as a result of the gross mismanagement of our national economy.

However, within eight weeks, they decided that in fact “we the people” should pay for their mismanagement.

Two of Sierra Leone’s Ebola hardest hit districts have benefitted from a new USD 1.5 million project to help improve their livelihood and basic services in rural communities on November 18, 2016.   

The initiative, launched by the Minister of Local Government and Rural Development, Hon Maya Kaikai, is part of the government's post Ebola recovery strategy aimed at giving power to the local communities to be at the helm of decision-making process on development and basic services delivery.  

The border community-led development and governance project will empower the VDCs, particularly women to sit side-by-side with the local authorities using healthcare as entry point to identify and priorities health related issues affecting their communities. The initiative seeks to strengthen community capacities and participation in the local development planning processes in the major border districts of Kambia and Kailahun.

Two of Sierra Leone’s Ebola hardest hit districts have benefitted from a new USD 1.5 million project to help improve their livelihood and basic services in rural communities on November 18, 2016.   

The initiative, launched by the Minister of Local Government and Rural Development, Hon Maya Kaikai, is part of the government's post Ebola recovery strategy aimed at giving power to the local communities to be at the helm of decision-making process on development and basic services delivery.  

The border community-led development and governance project will empower the VDCs, particularly women to sit side-by-side with the local authorities using healthcare as entry point to identify and priorities health related issues affecting their communities. The initiative seeks to strengthen community capacities and participation in the local development planning processes in the major border districts of Kambia and Kailahun.

Last Friday, 18th November 2016, Sierra Leone’s finance minister Momodu Kargbo delivered the government’s budget statement for 2017 to parliament. It is a budget the government is hoping will address the growing abject poverty, that over 70% of the country’s population is now suffering.

Whilst his statement was warmly received by a House dominated by the ruling APC, it seems there is now a sense of trepidation and uneasiness from several parliamentarians, across the political divide.

IMF conditionalities have returned to Sierra Leone with a vengeance; or have they?

Many in Sierra Leone are saying that the current economic downturn and austerity being imposed upon the poor people of Sierra Leone by the Koroma government, are the result of almost a decade of poor governance and massive corruption in high places, which have little to do with the IMF.

And there is growing sympathy across the country for mass peaceful demonstrations, against the government’s imposition of drastic spending cuts, that will further cripple the economy.

Idris Elba is an English actor, musician, and DJ. His father is Sierra Leonean and his mother is Ghanaian; they were married in Sierra Leone before moving to London.

He is best known for his roles as Russell “Stringer” Bell on The Wire, Detective John Luther on Luther and Nelson Mandela in Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom. 

 “Under the astute and dynamic leadership of His Excellency President Dr. Ernest Bai Koroma, the protection of Sierra Leone children especially the Girl Child, remains a priority but sometimes our friends and partners, though with very best intentioned motives, can actually prove to be counter-productive to the ultimate success of the laudable objectives that they share with us,” was how Sierra Leone’s Honourable Minister of Social Welfare, Gender and Children’s Affairs, Dr. Sylvia Olayinka Blyden opened her power-point presentation on Monday November 7th 2016 at the United Nations Conference Centre in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

As more and more programmes for the agenda for austerity, oops; sorry, I mean prosperity, are rolled out by the government and my mind wonders to the goings-on in Sierra Leone, I offer my silent prayer to the God that designed us with a thinking box -not the One that deactivates it.

The panic and painful mixing of the proverbial oil and water, after the government had for long disconnected from concrete reality and had instead doubled as the very depth of societal corruption and human corrosion, unveils the hitherto toga of hypocritical and shallow shadow of progress that had been used for so long to create the illusion of dynamism.

Two former child soldiers from Sierra Leone have threatened legal action against a private security company over psychological harm they say they suffered when they were recruited as adults to work as mercenaries in Iraq. 

The men were recruited by Aegis Defence Services as child soldiers in the country’s brutal civil war, which ended in 2002, their solicitor Rebekah Read of Leigh Day told the Guardian in the United Kingdom.

Years later, as adults, they were hired to work as security guards for Aegis in Iraq, she said. 

Aegis, which is chaired by Tory MP Sir Nicholas Soames, won contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars to provide security to United Sstates military bases during and after the Iraq war. The company was taken over last year by the Canadian security company GardaWorld.

A former Royal Marines commando, Major Phil Ashby, who was held hostage in Sierra Leone, has addressed the third TTG Media Tomorrow’s Travel Leaders conference in London, where he explained his ordeal in captivity.

At 28 he became the youngest officer to be made Major in the British Armed Forces. Born in 1970 the former commando officer was notable for his escape and evasion in the jungles of Sierra Leone in 2000.

Arriving in the conflict-ridden country as rebel forces were re-starting the civil war, the lives of Ashby and his co-workers were put in grave danger when a local warlord turned on them and they were taken hostage.

After years of long distance correspondence, John Pessima and Michael Mudge recently met when the Pessima visited Cumberland, a historic county of North West England with an administrative function from the twelfth century until 1974.

Pessima is bishop of the United Brethren in Christ for the nation of Sierra Leone, West Africa. Mudge is the founder and pastor of Bethany House of the Lord, a congregation in South Cumberland.

The African bishop was hosted in Mudge’s home for several days and spoke to the Bethany House congregation. Of the local area, Pessima said, “The steep streets and houses built on hills remind me of my home in Freetown,” which is the capital of Sierra Leone.

A documentary exploring criminal justice in the unique case of an international war crimes tribunal will be shown in Newberg and accompanied by a facilitated discussion.

“War Don Don,” released in 2010, focuses on Issa Sesay as he prepares to stand trial in the Sierra Leone capital of Freetown.

Sesay was a military officer and commander in the Revolu­tionary United Front during the Sierra Leone Civil War. He is accused of “heinous crimes against humanity” and is called a war criminal for actions during the war, although his supporters describe him as a “reluctant fighter” who protected civilians and was involved in ending the war and bringing peace to the country, according to the film.

It  cannot be denied that the cost of living  has been  affected  by the removal of government subsidy on fuel –which was not really a government creation but  one of the conditionalities given by the IMF  to help mobilize local resources to confront the economic slowdowm brought about by the ebola outbreak and the decline in the price of our iron ore in the international commodity market.

Titus Boye-Thompson, Communications Expert

When the first country in the World comes up with an election result that not only surprise everyone but baffles right thinking people about the sanity of a process that would see a winner of the popular vote being relegated to second place because of a formula that should have long been become obsolete. The result of the American election has for the first time created a crisis of confidence in electioneering that far outraged those who were entangled in the chards issue, about whether the chards were hanging or botched. When one considers the prospect of tampering in this election, it becomes clear why the tried and tested way of counting ballots are held in such high esteem. The crisis of confidence stems from the pressure to report in real time, to the extent that technology has now supplanted the fixed eyes of voting agents and as such the disregard of accountability of the voting system is replaced with speed and the technical possibility of manipulation.