What a disappointment for us
Like other Freetonians, I had looked with great anticipation to Friday’s commissioning of the Bumbuna  project by his Excellency President Ernest Bai Koroma. Most, if not all newspapers gave the event great prominence including superlatives on the achievements of the President and the zeal with which which he addressed the issue. I have often criticized the APC government, but on this Friday I was going to put everything else aside and give the President more than a prominent paragraph.
My misgivings began early yesterday morning when the light at home went off before 7 o’clock; we had had it throughout the night. At first I thought it was in readiness for the commissioning later in the day. But there was no power all day into the evening and I began to wonder whether the commissioning had been postponed. Out of curiosity I called a few friends in other parts of the city; some had light while a few others like me didn’t have any in their area.
Wasn’t Bumbuna supposed to supply all the whole city and its environs? Was it load shedding and if so was that we were to expect from Bumbuna? OR!!! Was it just the usual unequitable distribution of light with Sumaila Town being the number one victim?
I then decided to wait for Saturday afternoon when I normally write my byline for the Monday papers; that disappointment at the none availability of light to our part however compelled me to write the first part of the column on Friday night in the hope that by morning NPA would come out with some explanation. Well, there has been none on SLBS news which is the official mouth piece of the ministry of information and broadcasting. Maybe there will be some explanation late on Saturday which would make sense. For now I simply can’t make any reasonable sense out of the situation.
I repeat, we had been made to believe that the commissioning of Bumbuna would solve all of the city’s energy needs plus more. AND NOW THIS. huh!
I wonder what must be in the minds of some APC editors with regard to the intelligence of their readers. In what I can only describe as crooked thinking, the editor of the new citizen newspaper uses two columns to deceive his readers that contrary to Emerson’s bombshell, yesterday could not be better than today. I pity the poor chap because he takes us back to the war years of senseless mayhem and destruction. When there was no food and the citizens of this country lived in constant fear for their lives. Memunatu at the age of three had both arms amputated; pregnant women were dismembered (opened up) in order to determine the sex of the fetus in their womb. Compared with today, the newspaper concludes with unconcealed glee that yesterday could not be better than today. But when Emerson wrote Bobor Belleh and the other artists came up with Three Foot Arata etc., did they have those terrible years in mind? The answer is an emphatic NO. Mr. Editor is very conscious of the period about which Emerson and his colleagues sang in 2005/2006 and his shallow response to their lyrics of “Yesterday betteh pass tiday” only demonstrates that he and his patrons have no feelings for the hardship to which the people of Sierra Leone continue to be subjected under this regime.
In the meantime all they delight in incessantly drumming in our ears is Bumbuna (which could not even cover the whole city on the great commissioning day) and other projects which were already ongoing when they assumed power. HOW LONG? huh!
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