Ahmid Munir Fofanah makes strong case for Sierra Leone Local Councils in Brussels
The National President of Local Council Chairmen in Sierra Leone and Chairman of the Port Loko District Council, Ahmid Munir Fofanah has told members of the European Commission in Brussels that, ‘the Commission should allow people to participate and make their decisions for their own destiny rather than Donor Agency officers to just sit down in big cities and determined what kind of life the village people should live’. (Photo: (r) Ahmid Munir Fofanah, Chairman of the Port Loko District Council and President of the Local Council Chairmen in Sierra Leone)
Chairman Fofanah was contributing to the Third Assises of Decentralised Cooperation for Development organised by the European Commission in Brussels last Wednesday, April 10th.
Since this is the first of such a programme on local and regional authorities to be organised by the European Commission in which Africa and most specifically Sierra Leone was invited to participate, Fofanah used the occasion to hammer the point that, ‘it is becoming a global phenomenon that governance can no longer be an issue of centralised system, because if you look at the development trend in the world, it is only those countries which believed that the total participation of its citizenship in the aspect of developing their localities will bring speedy results and impact on the living standards of the people’.
Lecturing his fellow participants, Chairman Fofanah informed that, ‘for Africa, Decentralised governance has been the initial belief of our people, until when the Colonial Masters came to Africa. They made everything possible to make sure that they get all the Kings and Chiefs under their control on a Centralised system of governance. This was easy for them, because they wanted to assert their authorities at the level of the least man in the village’.
He furthered that over the years, this same Colonial Masters have accepted the fact that Centralised system of governance has no impact or rather you cannot find legacies of their interventions at the grass-root. This, he added, is reflected at the level of poverty within the people.
Chairman Fofanah mentioned that poverty itself is prevalent among the local or village people, because, ‘you will not find very poor people in urban settlements’. Poverty, he emphasised, is associated with the local people. ‘So, if you actually want to alleviate poverty, you have to bring development right in the villages and the only way to do this is through a Decentralised system of government. You should allow people to participate and make their decisions for their own destiny, but when you sit down in big cities and determined what kind of lives the village people should live, then you are not sincere, because you can never know their problems and priorities more than they do’.
It would be recalled that the European Commission does not have a budget support to Local Authorities, but with the emerging financial meltdown that is currently crippling European countries, the Commission has now made commitments that by 2014-2020, it will ensure that it has a budget line for support to Local Authorities.
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