Return Umaru Fofana as President
With the deadline for nominations now passed, I hereby make the following declaration: Vote by deciding on my record: I promised SLAJ a befitting national headquarters, I delivered! I promised the regional branches an office space each, I have delivered with the south securing theirs this week! I promised respectability for SLAJ once again, we have it in abundance so much that other organisations and unions in the country say we are the most formidable pressure group. I promised transparency and accountability in deed and action, I have delivered it perhaps more than ever before by opening my executive to auditing scrutiny and issuing statements on everything we have done and everything we have received in the name of SLAJ; so much so that those who were used to being corrupt found it impossible to survive.
I promised that in me SLAJ would have a president who would resist the attempts by political parties and business interests to hijack it, that has been made good on. I promised to inspire young journalists to uphold the values of our profession, they feel more inspired today than at any other time. I promised to take up the issue of conditions of service for both public and private media journalists. I stopped at nothing in articulating that, first to President Ernest Bai Koroma immediately after my election when I told him about our displeasure over the acrid reality our colleagues were facing at the then SLBS. Later I did so with private media owners at a conference we organised in May 2009 where the issue of a minimum wage for journalists was discussed and later adopted at our AGM in Makeni.
I said I would ensure that provincial journalists took their rightful place in our association. I have ensured that by sending a provincial journalist whenever a Freetown-based journalist has been sent. I promised that electronic media journalists would also have a say in SLAJ matters, you can see that without me saying it. I promised SLAJ affiliate bodies the support they required, I have helped establish some such as NEDER while I have been involved in restructuring others such as SWASAL. Where SLAJ was offered space for overseas conference, I consulted with my executive and sent a member of the requisite affiliate body such as the conference on extractives which was referred to AJME and the financial conference in London which was referred to NEDER.
In the last two years, I have added a new meaning to service in SLAJ, and a new character to selflessness in leadership. In this time, I have left the comfort of my home to travel to the four corners of the country whenever and wherever there has been an issue with a journalist or a media institution. In this time, I have left the love and companionship of my wife and children to respond to attacks on journalists wherever and whenever they have occurred. In these years, and in all of this, at my own personal expense; with money I should have kept for my children’s future. I have done so simply because I have realised that the majority of those journalists have been young practitioners and the media institutions have been financially and institutionally weak. I have even used my personal money I get from my work myself as a journalist, to attend to even the personal welfare needs of journalists – from Bo to Tombo; from Kambia, to Kabala, to Kono to Freetown. And in this 2-year period, I have quarrelled with my friends in government and in opposition because they have tampered with my people, THE JOURNALISTS. Only a practising journalist knows what I am talking about. Only a good leader knows what it takes. That’s what I am.
But in all of this challenges still remain which is why you should vote Umaru FOFANA to finish the unfinished business. I don’t just need to win… I want to win by a landslide. I will soon inform you about the date of my campaign launch, ahead of the elections next week.
Long Live SLAJ! Long live Sierra Leone! I thank you.
Umaru FOFANA Esq., BBC Correspondent, Sierra Leone
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