Sierra Leone is going ‘normal’
Towards the end of May this year, President Ernest Bai Koroma responded feverishly to a 21-day ultimatum earlier initiated by the National Youth Coalition in collaboration with other civil society organizations in the country.
The youth groups had threatened that if the price of fuel was not adjusted to a reasonable level before June 5th, they would mobilize a mass protest against the prevailing hardship in the country which they say was occasioned by the recent sharp increase in the price of fuel.
The youths had almost succeeded in conscientising the populace who believed their survival was no longer a matter of localized politics. For them, it was a bread and butter issue, a matter of death or survival. This thinking was universal – ‘if we don not act now but remain silent, we’ll die in silence,” the people seem to have said to themselves.
So, when President Koroma sensed that these ‘small boys’ were serious in their demands and that the agitation for a reduction in fuel price was real, he stooped down and ‘listened’ to the people.
While the president was announcing his price adjustment of Le 500 per litre, many of his compatriots were thinking otherwise. Some skeptics saw the price adjustment as incredibly ridiculous. But the youth coalition including some section of civil society gloated over the reduction and heaped praise on the president for removing a mere Le 500 from the unprecedented and overwhelmingly annoying Le 5,000 increase announced earlier in the month.
Before his intervention, public indignation over the Le 5,000 increase and its rippling effect had no doubt touched the doorstep of His Excellency the President.
As an affected individual, as I see it now, it was not a matter of Ernest Bai Koroma being a listening president, he was clever and smart too, he knows 2012 is around the corner. Therefore it was not so much of having his people at heart, but a matter of protecting his political ambition. So, he has to ‘listen’ and respond to the needs of his voters.
So, on a weekend of May 2011, he thought he should listen to his people and accordingly remove a token of Le 500 from the previous Le 5,000 per litre of fuel. He did not stop there; he ordered that prices of all commodities return to their normal pre-May rates.
From that moment of his declaration, all prices returned to ‘normal’. This means, for instance, a bag of rice that suddenly shot up to Le200,000 per bag following the May 1 increase in the price of fuel should revert to its ‘normal’ price, that is, before 1st of May.
Sadly though, since the President made that pronouncement nearly two weeks ago, prices of essential products, both imported, and locally produced, remain ‘normal’, meaning the prices are still the same as they were even when the president had removed Le 500 from the fuel price. For them the Le 500 reduction was insignificant and not commensurate to the drastic increase of Le 5,000.
And here were some members of civil society who publicly declared that they will monitor the implementation of the new price policy. Whether they are doing it or not is not for me to say. The fact of the matter is that prices are still at their ‘normal’ rates as indicated by the daily cry of the people who continue to groan severely under the weight of economic hardship.
But the consumer association chairman, Ibrahim Kabia was on SLBC TV the other day saying prices have scaled down especially on rice but however failed to tell his viewers the current cost of rice per cup or bag.
The situation is further exacerbated by the shortage of public transport which now results in commuters spending long agonizing hours in queues waiting to be transported from one end of the city to another, simply because the attitude of commercial drivers is not anything one could describe as patriotic. Like the traders, they too are behaving the ‘normal’ way: exploiting a system that is perfectly defective.
And so when one evening my uncle whispered to me and said every thing in Sierra Leone was going ‘normal’, I charged him for an explanation.
“Don’t you see,” he went on, “every thing is normal”, he said to me. “Prices have either gone up or remain normal as they were, regardless of the president’s directive”.
In other words, as I digested his thinking later, things are running normal in Sierra Leone, that’s why we are silent about the hardship eating deeper into our souls – the heartbeat of our suffering as a people!
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