Agriculture Ministry to “Agriculture Authority”
In order to stimulate greater efficiency, and provide better service to government and the people in a vital area in the public sector, the SLPP government of President Tejan Kabbah proposed that the then autonomous agencies of Income Tax Department and Customs and Excise Department be merged with innovative ‘Think Tank’ departments – Monitoring Research and Policy; Public Affairs and Tax Education; Policy and Legal Affairs, Internal Controls and Audits, etc. – to form the “National Revenue Authority”. The SLPP majority in Parliament gave the executive concept legislative endorsement in the NRA Act, 2002. The APC government in 2007, with similar thinking, refused to revive a separate Ministry of Youth and Sports which existed in Kabbah’s government, and has opted for the lean and fit National Youth Commission. One more government bureaucracy that should be urgently freed from its governmental chain and manacles, and its flab made into combatively tough muscles, is the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Food Security – to be morphed into an Agriculture, Forestry and Food Security Authority.
This idea of an Agriculture, Forestry and Food Authority came into my mind after reading on October 9, 2010 in the Freedom of Information-Sierra Leone cyberspace forum (FOIC-SL) rapturous praise from Armhen, Netherlands-based Kailahun-born “SLPP Continental Europe Party Spokesman and Strategic Political Adviser”, Dr. Jeff MacCarthy (a.k.a. Ngor Jeff): “The Minister of Agriculture, Forestry and Food Security (Dr. Joe Sam-Sesay) is one of the country’s best agriculture ministers ever, if not the best minister with an outstanding performance track-record in the current APC government and APC history”….Dr. MacCarthy wrote that Minister Sam-Sesay should have “unfettered moral support, motivating him to continue pursuing… practical initiatives …”
Dr. MacCarthy, a specialist in development, agriculture, marketing, tourism from one of the top universities in Europe who did consultancy work in Dr. Sam-Sesay’s agriculture ministry a couple of months ago, could not come up with the details I asked for to justify his rousing kudos for Minister Sam-Sesay on the FOIC-SL cyberspace forum. Dr. Sam-Sesay, on the other hand, a member of the FOIC-SL cyberspace forum, too, did post to me (even while in the Americas) a summary of his ministry’s achievements between 2007 and 2008. Before I quote from this document blazing with abstractions, may I stress here that the issue is “Food Security”, not well phrased words on paper; certainly not propaganda. The food emergency gripping our nation involves filling the hungry stomachs of our hungry majority who over the past year or so have been enduring the hunger pangs resulting from 50% to 100% rise in their staple food, rice. I had asked Minister Sam-Sesay to avail me the opportunity to “see….feel….hear…” the dramatic progress so glowingly reported on paper by his agriculture ministry – to see the mountains of rice grains; and clutch plump yam tubers; to hear the farmers being ecstatic about an increase in their yields and income; to hear traders reporting the ease of getting farm produce from the farms to the urban centers over newly constructed farm-to-market roads which the documents claims are being concentrated mainly in the South-East of the country.
In the FOIC-SL forum –being read my highly educated Sierra Leoneans in Freetown, and the Diaspora; and ‘trawled’ by Google – Minister Sam-Sesay (who should be given the highest national award for “Courage” for probably being not only a member of a usually combative cyberspace forum, but, regularly contributing, and debating) copied four staff in his ministry to facilitate my ‘seeing’. The agriculture ministry bureaucrats apparently ignored his order. None of them even responded to the e-mail copied them. They have put him – and, implicitly, his boss, President Ernest Bai Koroma – to shame in the face of the world.
Dr. Jeff MacCarthy writes about what could be going on in that ministry that responded with such affront to the Minister’s orders: “Of course, there is an agriculture information centre -AIC – in Dr. Joseph Sam-Sesay’s ministry headed by one Mr. Alusine O. Kamara on the 2nd floor of Yuoyi Building, with operational budget and official staff to run that unit. According to my knowledge of the specific ministry, and what I can hereby confirm, is that all technical units and their responsibilities fall under the Director-General’s task as the professional-head. Ministers are political authorities, answerable to the President/cabinet and the Sierra Leonean public. Civil servants in these ministries are answerable to the Public Service Commission -human resource department now headed by Mr Pessima. That structure has its binding regulations which means that ministers do not hire or fire incompetent civil servants/or the ones they don’t get along with…..(So) you can attest the justification of why the Honourable minister brought in Mr Serry to cover-up for the information dissemination on issues relating directly to his own output, isn’t it quite logical?….”
“Mr. Serry” there is the 26 year olld Samuel Serry, a recent mass communication graduate from FBC, University of Sierra Leone, who edits for the NEW CITIZEN newspaper in Freetown. The hulking Serry, a founding member of the same Youth Arise!!! I am ‘The Guru’ for, did let me have some hard copies of vital documents that would beef up any argument I want to make. What I have read in the documents prepared by Minister Sesay’s agriculture ministry, if well communicated, and, importantly, if the words can be translated into concrete reality on the ground and on the plates of the hungry masses, could mean that the APC government of President Ernest Bai Koroma would earn the biggest landslide victory ever in a free and fair elections in Africa – come 2012. To get to the stage where words on paper translate into food on plates, there must be a new dynamism in the agriculture ministry. Normal government in Sierra Leone moves at an annoying snail-pace, with a vexing ‘I-don’t-care-it-is-not-my-papa’s-business’ attitude. This must change.
A number of countries in Africa – for example, Nigeria, Malawi, and Ghana – have responded to the apparent apathy, incapacity or overly bureaucratic approach of generalist ministries of agriculture towards agricultural development by establishing autonomous or semi-autonomous regional agricultural development authorities. It could be necessary for our parliament to fast track a law that would make managerially robust the agriculture sector of government – like the Smallholder Commercialization Programme (SCP); Agriculture Business Centers (ABCs); Agricultural Machinery and Equipment Hire Purchase Scheme – to give them sociological, economic, even, political meaning. The significant funds that Minister Sam-Sesay have been able to attract for the agriculture sector in our country can best be utilized with a ‘Food Authority’ with a private sector emphasis to attune with the private sector urgency being injected into rural farmers – and banishing the current ‘Food Ministry’.
The Global Agriculture and Food Security Fund approved on June 21, 2010 the APC government’s request for U.S. $50 million in support for the Smallholder Commercialization Programme. The Islamic Development Bank, in collaboration with the Malaysian Government, on June 23, 2010 approved the sum of U.S.$15 million for the second phase for the expansion of the oil palm project in Mattru Jong, Bonthe District. A 16 million Euros project has been approved by the European Union. This will mean the expansion of farms for the cash crops of coffee and cocoa in the traditional growing areas of Kenema, Bo, Pujehun and Kailahun. As if the entire world is competing to shower money on the agriculture sector in our country, the World Food Programme (WFP) – whose Executive Board applauded Sierra Leone as the first country to incorporate social protection and safety net in its agriculture programme – has approved U.S. $80million for all activities along the value chain of our agricultural programme.
The ambitious Minister Sesay is still being ‘aggressive’ in trying to mobilize more support to operationalize the agricultural objectives of President Ernest Bai Koroma’s Agenda for Change. He co-authored an article in the New York-based ‘The Guardian’ newspaper with his counterpart Rwanda minister of agriculture, Agnes Kabilata.
The article, published on September 26, 2010, among other things, made a strong case for Sierra Leonean farmers who have clearly woken up to the reality of abandoning subsistence farming practices for mechanized commercial agriculture. The article further reads: “…Africans, on whose shoulders the responsibility of transforming agriculture rightly falls, have devised a powerful initiative to support smallholder farmers using the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Process (CAADP)…” The ministers reminded world leaders of their pledge to contribute a colossal $22 billion towards food security in Africa….
I doubt whether any cabinet minister in any government in Sierra Leone’s post-independence history has ever written an article on his/her activities and have it published in one of the leading newspapers in the world – like Minister Sesay has done. And, Minister Sesay has the PR savvy to fuse our post-war country’s message with that of post-genocide Rwanda, an ‘icon’ of the international community; a country, in per capita terms, attracting the largest donor funding in African in recent years. Minister Sesay, whose feet and head are well-placed in the 21st Century – he comes up with quick responses on the FOIC-SL cybespace forum; not, probably, like his other minister colleagues who mostly would never punch a keyboard; and would take a whole day drafting a single letter for their secretaries to type – should be not fettered to agriculture ministry bureaucrats whose mindsets and attitudes are still imprisoned in the 20th Century.
Dr. Jeff MaCarthy, well positioned in a university Think Tank in one of the richest countries in the world, Netherlands, is full of contempt for such bureaucrats, and their political overlords: “The BIGGEST problem in Sierra Leone today is that most of the politicians are Masterpiece liars ….”
I still have to examine the ‘Truth’ in the documents on the agriculture ministry of Minister Sesay through seeing, and feeling. As far as ‘food’ is concerned, ‘Truth’ is not a philosophically contentious matter. A hungry man knows when he is hungry. A blind man knows when he is eating food. A child knows when his stomach is filled with food, and cannot enjoy platitudes when hunger gnaws his stomach. Spin doctors can never convince a hungry man that his stomach is full. A nation that politicizes the food business is suicidal. That is why there is a burning need to harness the powers of ‘Truth-Speaking’ intellectuals like the SLPP chieftain in Europe, Dr. Jeff. MacCarthy – and many other such ‘food experts’ from Europe to China, Vietnam to Argentina – to accelerate Minister Sam-Sesay’s plans becoming food on the plate we have to accelerate morphing our ‘Food Ministry’ into a ‘Food Authority’.
Oswald Hanciles, Freetown
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