No Unit Cost, No Transparency

The failure of our Transport Minister to disclose the unit cost of our 100 new buses has aroused the suspicion of many Sierra Leoneans that the minister is trying to hide a very dreadful secret the exposure of which could be disastrous.

We see no justification in hiding from the citizens the unit cost of buses procured on their behalf using their hard-earned taxes. We view the concealment of the unit cost of our buses as tantamount to lack of transparency on the part of the minister and the Government of Sierra Leone.

The Transport Minister must, of course, know the unit cost of the hundred new buses under whose administration they were procured. If he does not know the unit cost of the buses, then we can rightly conclude that he is not worth his position as Transport Minister of this country.

In fact, the deliberate or inadvertent failure of the minister to inform this nation is equivalent to a flagrant violation of the Access to Information law and a breach of the fundamental principles of democracy, transparency and accountability. How can we be talking about practicing democracy when a whole Transport Minister fails to tell the citizens of their own property? Is that fair? Obviously no!!

We will continue to shout until the day the Transport Minister publicly announces the unit cost of our hundred new buses. The minister must not be reminded that he is a servant of the people and, therefore, he is answerable to them.

If the minster is claiming that the widely-circulated document on the unit cost of the buses is fake and designed to frustrate his efforts, then let him publicly state his own true unit cost, otherwise we will have every reason to trust the unit cost on the allegedly counterfeit document.

The minister cannot give us any justifiable reason for not revealing the unit cost of the buses, so, we will continue to smell the rat.

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