Evaluating Progress: A Five-Year Review of SLPP’s Education Promises in Sierra Leone

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June 4, 2023

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Evaluating Progress: A Five-Year Review of SLPP's Education Promises in Sierra Leone

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Evaluating Progress: A Five-Year Review of SLPP’s Education Promises in Sierra Leone

By the Sierra Leone Live Team

Welcome to Sierra Leone Live, where we are dedicated to fostering a rich dialogue on the state of our nation. Today, we embark on an in-depth analysis of the Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) manifesto from 2018 and a review of their achievements over the last five years. This exercise aims to ascertain whether the SLPP has fulfilled the promises outlined in its manifesto, particularly in the area of education.

The first phase of our analysis will focus primarily on Basic and Senior Secondary Education, exploring key themes such as governance, financing, teacher conditions, quality of education, and policy changes. In comparing the SLPP’s 2018 manifesto with their list of achievements over the past five years, we hope to offer clear insights into the areas where the party has excelled as well as those where further progress may be needed.

Following our analysis, Sierra Leone Live will post 25 pertinent questions for you, the citizens of Sierra Leone. Your responses will provide invaluable perspectives on whether the SLPP has indeed lived up to its manifesto’s claims in 2018. We urge all Sierra Leoneans to engage in this important discourse that will shape our understanding of the current state of education and, ultimately, the future direction of our nation.

In subsequent phases of our analysis, we will delve into other crucial aspects of the SLPP’s 2018 manifesto and its five-year record. Our next focus will be Adult Literacy Education, Quality Technical and Vocational Education, and Higher Education. We invite all our readers to stay tuned and engage with us on this enlightening journey.

Remember, your voice matters, and together, we can ensure that Sierra Leone continues to move in a direction that upholds the principles of transparency, accountability, and inclusive progress.

The “NEW DIRECTION” Manifesto (2018) Versus CONSOLIDATING GAINS AND ACCELERATING TRANSFORMATION (2023)

Improving Basic and Senior Secondary Education

Upon examining the SLPP’s 2018 manifesto and the achievements after 5 years in office, there appears to be some progress and achievements made in some of the areas outlined in the original manifesto. Here’s a breakdown of some of the main components:

Education Governance and Financing: The 2018 manifesto pledged to enhance the capacity for education planning, management, and coordination, increase government budgetary allocation to 20% of GDP, and develop a new policy to attract additional donor and private sector investment in education. The achievements document reported that 22% of the government budget had been allocated to education over the past four years. This exceeds the manifesto’s target, suggesting successful implementation of the education financing and management plans.
Improving Conditions of Teachers: The manifesto focused on raising the morale and productivity of teachers through various initiatives like the BEST TEACHER award, a housing scheme for teachers, and free university education for three children of every school teacher with at least 10 years’ teaching experience. In the achievements report, salary increases for teachers, new recruitments, and training were highlighted, with a 45% salary increase planned for 2023–2025. While the achievements align with the general direction of improving conditions for teachers, some specific manifesto points like the housing scheme and free education for teachers’ children were not directly mentioned in the achievements report.
Increasing the Number of Qualified Teachers: The manifesto planned to establish teacher training campuses in all district capitals, expand and improve distance learning education for teachers, provide free tuition for teacher education, and expand the teaching of foreign languages. The achievements document reports the recruitment and training of 25,000 teachers, but it doesn’t specify if the other objectives were achieved.
Increasing Access to Quality Education: The manifesto proposed initiatives such as free education from pre-school to senior secondary school, promoting the development of child-friendly schools, expanding school feeding programs, and removing the double shift system within 3 years. The achievements document reports implementing free education, providing school meals for over 600,000 learners, providing sanitary pads to teenage girls, and introducing technology to support remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, there’s no specific mention of progress on building child-friendly schools or on the double shift system.
Policies, Laws, and Regulations: The manifesto planned to revert to the 6-3-3-4 education system, implement a free education program, and enhance education management. It also detailed plans to develop a new National Education Policy and Action Plan, a policy for public-private partnership, an NGO/donor coordination policy, and monitoring. The five-year report outlines several new policies and laws, such as the Basic and Senior Secondary Education Act 2023, a new school feeding policy, and the Annual National Teachers Award program. It also mentions the reintroduction of civics into the curriculum.
Education Outcomes: The achievements document reports increased enrolment rates, improved public exam pass rates, improved numeracy and literacy, and decreased teenage pregnancy. These outcomes suggest that the education initiatives implemented during the past five years have been impactful, though it’s not clear how they compare with the specific targets set in the manifesto.
Inclusion: While the first document doesn’t emphasize inclusivity, the second document highlights the passing of a radical inclusion policy allowing access to education for pregnant girls, the disabled, and learners in remote areas.

It appears that the SLPP has made some strides in many of the areas detailed in their 2018 manifesto, especially in education governance and financing, teacher conditions, and increasing access to education. However, some specific manifesto goals were not directly mentioned in the achievements document, suggesting that there may be areas for continued focus and improvement. It would be useful to have more detailed information and data to further assess the extent of progress made.

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PRUDENCE AND POPULISM IN SIERRA LEONE POLITICS

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Mahmud Tim Kargbo

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May 31, 2023

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PRUDENCE AND POPULISM IN SIERRA LEONE POLITICS

00:00 / 13:36

PRUDENCE AND POPULISM IN SIERRA LEONE POLITICS

By Mahmud Tim Kargbo

A salutary form of populism can challenge the post-democratic rule of elites in Sierra Leone. But can it govern?

Prudence might seem like the last virtue that should be consulted in our present climate. To some, it indicates timidity, undue caution, and a moral hesitancy to do the things that are most needed. Others associate it with cunning—the savvy achievement of narrow ends.

These popular renditions of prudence need to be informed by their classical dimensions. Such an account of this virtue can improve our politics, guiding those who hold power to exercise it in all of its strengths and limitations. Prudence, Greg Weiner notes in his wonderful study, Old Whigs: Burke, Lincoln, and the Politics of Prudence, “is the virtue associated with reason. It has, in this sense, a deeply normative case, which is to say that the point of prudence is not what Aristotle calls ‘cunning.’”

Edmund Burke warned that in poorly ordered democracies, “moderation will be stigmatised as the virtue of cowards and compromise as the prudence of traitors.” Sierra Leone’s political tenor at certain times, perhaps including our own, separates us from prudence. But that is not because we are more daring or more scientifically certain of our course. Rather, it is due to our moral and political weaknesses. The majority of politicians in Sierra Leone think they know far more than they do. Believing that their ideology and the knowledge it provides will perfect us, they demand less of us than we should. What need is there for virtue and responsibility when you have all the answers and only need to enforce them? One result is that the majority of our politicians, in the first resort, demean those who are our fellow citizens merely because they are locked in disagreement.

Prudence, Burke held, is “the god of this lower world.” On this score, Weiner says prudence is “inflected with caution but not confined to it, bound to circumstances, and finding expression in the particular yet grounded in the absolute.” Aristotle argues that it is a “habit concerned with action under the guidance of reason.” Aquinas adds that Providence is “the principal part of prudence,” showing us “why things are ordained to their end…

Prudence, then, is the habit of thinking, choosing, and acting according to the demands of reason. In civic affairs, those choices involve judgment and deliberation over what matters and what does not, or what at least merits less emphasis. Statesmen must navigate the problems that are upon them with the facts they have, and their judgments could prove to be wrong.

The opposite of prudence is the god of abstraction and rationalist certainty, leading us to project ideological rigidity and rashness, if not violence, in political debate. Burke famously confronted the French Revolutionaries, who demanded absolute freedom and absolute equality in disregard of the principles and circumstances of the French government, religion, culture, and history. This was precisely their point—to pull down foundations and rebuild on unreal premises and ideas. Their separation of principle and circumstance was the source of their revolutionary extremism and violence. From a desire for the totality of freedom, liberated from the French past and its constraints, the revolutionary regime ended in absolute tyranny. Burke’s formulation was that “circumstances… give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing colour and discriminating effect.”

Can populism govern?

Inherently complicating the recovery of prudence for us is the populist moment we labour in. This term is frequently used as an accusation of unseriousness or illiberalism towards a group or party the author dislikes. As John O’Sullivan noted, “liberalism without democracy” is an apt description of the system of government towards which the West has been moving since 1989, and populism is the resistance to it. Sierra Leone is increasingly governed in a post-democratic sense, with bureaucracies and courts imposing their wills or with key issues removed from actual debate by the leaders of one or more parties. Populism challenges post-democratic governance and reopens dismissed or ignored issues.

Populism is part of our democratic republic, but so is the republican principle that combines and shapes how institutions should inform both popular sovereignty and populism. The republican principle grounds our Constitution’s legitimacy in the sovereignty of the Sierra Leonean people by selecting their governing officers. All power is derived from the people, and that ongoing consent must be secured.

Those who govern, however, are not the people themselves. Rather, elected officials take their cues from the duties and limits defined by the Constitution. The performance of their office is not a mere conduit for the popular will. The justice they achieve must come through the process of lawmaking. And those results should emerge through deliberation, reaching an outcome that may not be the exact one mandated by voters but one that they can endorse, approving its rough approximation to their own.

Populism erupts when enough members of the populace believe their leaders have betrayed them. They no longer wish to be governed through institutions that constitutionally exist in a degree of separation from their own will because they think the “republican principle” is no longer efficacious for the achievements of a limited and just government. And this isn’t hard to understand when one considers how many limits and separations of power in the Constitution now seem to exist only on paper and not in the actual procedures and exercised powers of the government.

And there are multiple reasons for the people to believe that their elites have governed in disregarding the people’s will for some time. There has been a breakdown between popular sovereignty and republican institutions. Populism, from this view, is an attempt to secure justice when the officers of these institutions have failed. We see a rise in judicial activism, administrative state power, endless and irresponsible spending, and dubious foreign policy connections. And now comes the importation and spread of narcotics, with the national security apparatus monitoring the destruction of the potential human resources of the country despite government claims of human capital investment. Sierra Leone is almost post-constitutional in practice, replete with capricious power that frequently breeds unreliable policy outcomes.

But can populism, of the left or the right, govern? Populism’s desire for more direct self-government frequently leads to a politics of outrage that is devoid of respect for institutions. Populism’s inherent, if not fatal, weaknesses are seen in its inability to join its deeply felt need for justice to institutions and to republican principles.

The country splits sharply across key issues of lawlessness, the fight against corruption, fiscal policy, favouritism, and national cohesion policy, to name only a few. No one leader or political party is likely to sweep its opponents from the field. Capitulation by either side, given these entrenched divisions, doesn’t appear likely. Those who would lead a democratic republic like Sierra Leone must do so within the tensions, circumstances, and limits that define it.

Populism and Constitutionalism

Such a critique does not ignore that our governing institutions and many policy areas require substantial reform. But prudential populism must account for the elements that obstruct the restoration of constitutional self-government. Populism must join with and be balanced by popular sovereignty and republican institutionalism if it is going to have a salutary effect on our constitutional order.

Our annual national deficit is seemingly beyond the reach of political decisions to curtail it. It just grows, and who is the fool to say otherwise?

Prudence will recognise no compromise here; to compromise on the Constitution is to lose everything, every opportunity for reform, and our continued existence as a people. But this demands pro-institutional politics that we might call prudential populism. Some voices on the right now extend the populist principle to its breaking point, seemingly calling for a new country. They refuse to serve the God of this lower world. To follow them is to accept an unpredictable set of consequences.

Moreover, such prudential populism must work with popular sovereignty to make arguments capable of securing majorities around policies that shape the constitutional republic we want. Part of prudence involves providing counsel and providing explanations to the populace—outraged or otherwise—when they are wrong. Prudence must modulate republicanism to prevent it from descending into a rabble. Election mandates in Sierra Leone won’t be the final word, but deliberation in Parliament in consultation with constituents will be, even as results may not line up, with the most emphatic enthusiasm.

Prudence is the virtue most needed by the conservative populist statesmen who would turn back the rolling progressive campaign to strip the republic of its essential nature—its guarantee of ordered liberty for free and equal citizens. This is countered by the altogether rigorous discipline of progressives, who have made it quite clear that they stand for vast amounts of spending even with less accountability. Progressives articulate well the Sierra Leone they want, and they tirelessly work to bring it into being. But their commitment to unreal abstraction opens them to defeat.

One issue that prudential populism must reopen is fiscal excess tied to the principle of limitless government spending. Fiscal policy is more than just a policy—it defines the very nature and extent of our government. Do we continue to give a wide berth to individual and associational liberty, or is everything compromised by the reach of government?

Dealing with this crisis in government, one that has not been dealt with in quite some time requires a recognition of the circumstances and limitations of the situation. It would also demand rebuilding deliberation within Parliament over the contents of the national budget. This would bring not only the prospect of renewed fiscal probity but also the repair of an institution that has been underperforming in its constitutional role for decades.

The wage bill mini-crisis could be an opportunity to begin a prudential process of spending retrenchment. Our annual national deficit is seemingly beyond the reach of political decisions to curtail it. It just grows, and who is the fool to say otherwise? Annual multi-trillion-leone deficits are the new order of business, a problem that will likely get worse as interest rates stay elevated in the presence of such extreme national crowding out of capital markets.

One of many circumstantial constraints faced by any would-be fiscal hawk is that Sierra Leoneans prefer vast amounts of national spending. Political compensations are popular despite their escalating costs.

A realistic trimming approach acknowledges these stringent conditions and forgoes rhetoric for drastic cuts that are practically unachievable and only turn voters against any spending reductions. There have been numerous attempts by the Sierra Leone People’s Party to attenuate national spending since the Ahmad Tejan Kabbah administration. Most have failed or found limited success, being divorced from what voters will accept in cuts and from what legislators are willing to back. The current situation demands acknowledging these difficulties and planning accordingly.

What’s possible? Could annual discretionary appropriations be frozen? Could you cut hundreds of billions over the next decade? Perhaps this is too limited. But the point is to lay down serious markers for spending reform while understanding that change will come incrementally through a commitment to no longer accept our unyielding deficits.

Prudence demands that we acknowledge the situation we’re in, which spells eventual catastrophe, and devote ourselves to its reform over the long term. While there are limits on what can be achieved now with fiscal retrenchment, the failure to list, detail, and highlight the facts of our fiscal recklessness would be a failure of prudence.

This fiscal struggle will go on for years, pursuing necessary ends while taking assaults from every side. This mix of principle and prudence will need to be conducted at a high and honourable level. To achieve it will mean achieving not only fiscal probity but one of the highest ends of constitutional government.

Why Sierra Leone Need a Politics of the Person?

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May 29, 2023

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Why Sierra Leone Need a Politics of the Person?

00:00 / 8:44

Why does Sierra Leone Need a Politics of the Person?

By Mahmud Tim Kargbo.

Political philosopher David Walsh highlights the givenness of the person in our hypercritical age.

Despite the many and all-too-apparent divisions in our politics today in Sierra Leone, there is one thing that seems to unite us: our near-national tendency to critique. We seem, almost by second nature, to begin an assessment of an idea from a position of skepticism until we decide for ourselves whether an idea has merit. The habit is hard-wired into the way children are taught from an early age: be a “critical thinker,” evaluate for yourself, and accept nothing for which you do not discern your own positive reason for assent. The ghost of late President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah is still very much with us: everything that can be doubted ought to be doubted. One must withhold assent until critical reflection has taken place.

To be sure, this approach has many important advantages. We ought to be critically evaluating public policies, the possibilities (positive and negative) of new technologies, and the actions of our leaders. Much of our progress in material and social well-being seems, at least partly, to result from this tendency. Certainly, the practice is essential for philosophical analysis—if everyone agrees all the time, philosophy becomes unnecessary. As John Stuart Mill so eloquently argued, only through challenging an idea can its validity be truly established.

What is open to question is the national application of the practice. The possibility of critical reflection on an ever-greater share of our lives has resulted in what might be termed an absolutisation of critique. Given the way things have developed technologically, morally, and politically in Sierra Leone society today, there is little left that seems to be an undisputed aspect of the reality within which all of our lives unfold, except the individual’s capacity to critique. This is one of the root causes of our fractured politics.

What happens when, through our ever-advancing mastery of technology and the hyper-politicisation of so many aspects of our lives, critical reflection becomes inescapable? For example, it is not outside the realm of possibility that our children will have to choose whether their lives will end in death. The possibilities of the metaverse may pan out to be equally challenging. Witness the new trend in gender reassignment and “nonbinary” sexual identities. There seems to be a smaller and smaller share of our lives that can be counted on as a given. Reality itself is becoming an object of our own creation. In this sense, we have all become reactionaries: nearly every detail of our lives needs to be critically evaluated and, if found undesirable, modified based on our critique.

Is there anything left that is simply given? In his most recent work, philosopher David Walsh has written extensively on the meaning of the person, laying the groundwork for a new vocabulary for addressing many of the philosophical, political, and ethical problems of our age. Most importantly, he urges us to reevaluate our politics using a revitalised language that reflects the reality of persons.

At its core, the reality of the person means an exploration of the meaning of encounter. Walsh asserts that one can never ask “what is a person”, but who is a person? This leads to the insight that prior to every political or ethical question lies a person with whom encounter is possible. Indeed, the person on the “other side” of the question is always the more fundamental reality. But encounters need not be concrete or face-to-face. Persons always transcend the encounter in some sense, never fully known to us. The person is not a problem but a mystery, a threshold to a deeper reality that we can never fully grasp.

This approach has implications for Walsh’s approach to philosophy: his method is synthetic, both in how he approaches individual philosophers and in how he engages with the Western tradition in philosophy.

Regarding individual philosophers, Walsh always considers the whole person behind the philosophical works with which he engages. Rather than simply casting aside difficult and problematic writers like Nietzsche, Derrida, or Rawls, he knits together a more holistic view, considering their contributions to our understanding of the person. Reading philosophy in this way means trying to penetrate through the sound-bite caricatures of these thinkers and get a sense of the person underneath. This adds up to the realisation that the issues that divide us as Sierra Leoneans can tell us something about ourselves: the deep alienation lying at the core of our modern society in Sierra Leone, our deep woundedness, and the sinfulness at the core of our being.

Of course, this does not mean that we should pass over the honest differences we have with these thinkers. Walsh is not a wholly uncritical philosopher. Rather, it means that he strives for a deeper understanding prior to any critique. There is a responsibility to the person prior to any critical engagement. For example, Marx becomes more than the philosophical precursor to the vast human tragedy of Communism: he provides clues what motivated so many persons to commit such evils as were (and are) witnessed under Communist regimes. What deeper longing lies beneath the penchant to turn other persons into political means? Thus, reading philosophers like Marx, Nietzsche, or Rosseau becomes a meditation on the deep longings of persons, tinged by an awareness of the evil that can result from those longings. Walsh shows the responsibility we have to understand the persons behind these philosophies while simultaneously offering a fierce critique of their shortcomings.

Walsh also applies this synthetic approach in his reading of Western philosophy, particularly in his reading of modern philosophy. Rather than assuming we took “wrong turn at Descartes Western philosophy as a whole, particularly in his reading of modern philosophy. Rather than assuming that we took a “wrong turn at Descartes” and that there is a deep pathology at the core of modern thinking, Walsh attempts to convey a sense of meaning over the long arc of the history of philosophy. As the title of one of his recent books suggests, modern philosophy ought to be understood as an unfolding of “the luminosity of existence.” The very real pathologies of the moment do not merit wholesale rejections of the cultural and intellectual currents that have brought us here; rather, these currents contain within themselves the resources for renewal.

All of this has deep implications for how we ought to approach politics in Sierra Leone. In the person’s politics, the fundamental issues become encounters in which the givenness of the person behind each question is given pride of place. It means a politics of subsidiarity, where problems are not seen as zero-sum clashes between rival national views but as opportunities for persons to engage as given. Rather than a tribal or regional power struggle between rival identity groups, a politics of the person would be one in which persons rather than labels structure relations: who you are in this fuller sense is immeasurably more important than what you are. Of course, none of this means that we ought to abandon those aspects of ourselves that outwardly manifest the mystery that lies behind our uniqueness. It simply means that they conceptualise these qualities as secondary to the basic, given the reality of persons.

A “critical” or “identity” politics in Sierra Leone can only complicate the possibility of encounter, reducing the person to a label that can never contain the underlying reality. Nearly every day, we see examples of how these alternatives turn our politics into ugly, zero-sum power struggles. But this need not be the case. David Walsh urges us to consider the possibility that no description matters more than “person.” The person, as given, is beyond all critique.

SIERRA LEONE WHICH DIRECTION ? LACK OF CLARITY MEANS LACK OF LEADERSHIP

By

Mahmud Tim Kargbo

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May 25, 2023

SLL Audio News

SIERRA LEONE WHICH DIRECTION ? LACK OF CLARITY MEANS LACK OF LEADERSHIP

00:00 / 7:52

Sierra Leone which direction? A lack of clarity means a lack of leadership.

By Mahmud Tim Kargbo.

“Grasp the thing; the words will follow.” Cato’s pithy advice has little traction in modern Sierra Leone, where politicians routinely deploy word screens to conceal either the bankruptcy of their understanding of the issues facing their people or their cynical manipulation of the truth. Speaking for hours without saying anything substantial has become an essential qualification for advancement in Sierra Leone politics, yet it is a shameless parody of the quality without which leadership is impossible: clarity.

Great minds from Plato to Solzhenitsyn have warned of the dire threat posed to civilisation by the corruption of language, but George Orwell charted the dangers for a wider audience in his classic essay, Politics and the English Language, published in 1946. “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age in Sierra Leone, there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics’. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia.”

Clarity-in-the-cloud-small would be that those words would reverberate in our chambers of political debate and our deeply dysfunctional workplaces. And as Orwell further pointed out, “But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” This, of course, has become an epidemic in Sierra Leone since independence.

Clarity is the sine qua non of leadership; doubt and uncertainty are the tools of misleaders. However, in the 1980s and ‘millennium, another dog-eat-dog, win-at-all-costs mood swept the politics of Sierra Leone and business, with a new vocabulary to justify opportunistic policies that hurt both corporations and people. Words like “New All People’s Congress”, “Agenda for Attitudinal and Behavioural Change”, “Agenda for Prosperity”, “New Direction”, “re-engineering”, “progressive alliance,” and “restructuring” tried to hide the fact that many charlatans were simply trying to make a fast buck.

That’s when some politicians, business gurus, and pop psychologists decided to resurrect the old modernist literary device of “ambiguity”. We were told that “ambiguity tolerance” was good and “ambiguity intolerance” was bad, and that leaders who could live with ambiguity were more creative and resilient. Of course, what they really meant was that it was okay to do whatever works for you at any given time. So, vision and strategy went out the window, and the cynical and deceptive rule of short-termism was upon us. Misleaders in Sierra Leone reveled in this new age of license while their ordinary people, their employees, confused and insecure, suffered terribly and still suffer.

This was only one element among many in creating the brave new culture of deceit in Sierra Leone. Developments like the renewed attack on objective truth by people claiming their own arguments to be absolutely beyond question and the burgeoning tsunami of tribalism and regionalism, in which the majority in social positions of trust see others merely as means to their own selfish ends, all tend to promote a milieu of uncertainty, disillusionment, and cynicism.

Consider just some of the evidence of the ongoing catastrophe of this age of uncertainty in Sierra Leone: More data and more communication channels than ever have left the general public utterly confused about pivotal issues like education, the essentials of life, globalisation, and national political tensions; the current Sierra Leone economic malaise is not a systemic but a moral failure with guilty parties on all sides and debt rising to inconceivable levels; the decline of Sierra Leone proceeds apace with massive corruption by both the ruling regime and the opposition as the tip of a monster iceberg, while ordinary folks have no idea of what is actually going on. Of course, the malaise is reflected in popular entertainment by a sense of humour that is at once detached and deeply ironic.

A manager of a now-closed large multinational mining company complained to me about his inability to read his CEO’s inconsistent directions, and he ruefully acknowledged that the impact on his extensive team of direct reports was sabotaging their performance. When I suggested that his boss’s unpredictable behaviour was probably the result of similarly random instructions from his superiors overseas and the Sierra Leone government, he nodded helplessly and confided that he was deeply concerned about the CEO’s state of mind. How do you address a lack of understanding and, therefore, commitment that is eroding the unity of the company at every level?

The loss of clarity has delivered a debilitating loss of trust, and that has undermined the entire social fabric of Sierra Leone. No wonder dysfunctional relationships of all types characterise our society today.

People today, more than ever, want answers, and wanting answers means wanting clarity, which is just another way of saying that they want the truth. To pretend that our limited and fallible human reason puts truth beyond reach and that each individual has the right to make their own truth is simply duplicitous. And it plays right into the hands of the manipulators.

Most of the people I speak to in the workforce, who represent a substantial and diverse cross-section, are uncertain, uninspired, and motivated only by an ever-hardening survival instinct. No wonder money has soared in the rankings of happiness factors in the workplace over the past few years. Just like in the past, people no longer have leaders in either their workplace or the nation who hold up a vision of a better future built on virtue and a clear pathway to get there. They know only misleaders and non-leaders who have abdicated their responsibilities to focus on their own self-aggrandisement.

If this sounds depressing and defeatist, think again, because there has never been a greater opportunity for leaders to stand up and be counted. Of course, counting also demands clarity, but there are definite signs of a silent shift being driven in unexpected quarters. The number of bright and well-qualified young people now choosing to dedicate their lives to helping the less fortunate or to start their own enterprises rather than getting trapped, like so many of their friends, in the petty frustrations of the corporate companies in Sierra Leone is an expression of the desire for clarity.

Likewise, the growing disillusionment with sham democratic politics is becoming a real threat, on many fronts, to the social cohesion we have taken for granted for so long. Tragically, state schooling has ensured that the discontent is severely uninformed and therefore more malleable and dangerous, but it is still a timely warning that more of the same will no longer do.

Human beings are rational animals; clarity is essential for their well-being. That is why, in this age of misleadership in Sierra Leone, the opportunity for leaders has never been greater or more urgently crying out to be addressed.

“Loyalty To The State Shall Override Ethnic and Other Loyalties,” Sierra Leone’s 1991 Constitution

By

Saikujohn Barrie

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May 23, 2023

SLL Audio News

"Loyalty To The State Shall Override Ethnic and Other Loyalties," Sierra Leone's 1991 Constitution

00:00 / 4:06

“Loyalty To The State Shall Override Ethnic and Other Loyalties,” Sierra Leone’s 1991 Constitution.

By Saikujohn Barrie.

As Sierra Leoneans prepare to vote for their president on June 24, I think I should write this piece to remind the Sierra Leoneans who are level-headed of their duties as citizens as espoused in the 1991 Constitution.

I am happy that I am capable and have the capacity to discuss both legal and journalistic issues anytime and anywhere.

Firstly, I want to remind my compatriots that Section 13 of the 1991 Constitution states, “Every citizen shall—(b) cultivate a sense of nationalism and patriotism so that loyalty to the state shall override sectional, ethnic, tribal, or other loyalties.”
I am compelled to remind my fellow Sierra Leoneans about this section of our constitution because, for the past months, I have noticed a pattern of dishonesty and loyalty to political parties as opposed to loyalty to the state being demonstrated during political discussions.

Additionally, I think if there is any time Sierra Leoneans should be reminded about loyalty, it is now. Sierra Leoneans need to be patriotic and genuinely advance the interests of the country instead of parochial political, tribal, regional, and other interests to the detriment of the state.

In as much as the constitution espoused the fundamental human rights and freedom of the individual, wherein Section 15(b) guaranteed freedom of conscience, expression, assembly, and association, this should not mean that loyalties should be attached to political parties rather than the state.

In my view, most of the political party supporters are more loyal to their political parties and their political leaders than to the state of Sierra Leone. The thirst for political influence, money, and other personal interests has blinded most Sierra Leoneans compatriots. People no longer recognise truth and reality as long as they are the beneficiaries of the state’s loot.

In addition, some people just want to be associated with the powers that be, even if they suffer the most.

What I have noticed for the past ten or so years is that most times the opposition tends to speak on behalf of the suffering masses in the country, but as soon as they catapult to power, the way they perceive and deal with national issues changes.

When they assume power, they completely change into non-listening human beings who are arrogant, aggressive, wicked, and careless about the plight of the poor Sierra Leoneans. This should not be the reality of our thinking and behaviour in Sierra Leone.

Being a legally minded professional journalist, Section 11 of the 1991 Constitution states, “The press, radio and television and other agencies of the mass media shall at all times be free to uphold the fundamental objectives contained in this Constitution and highlight the responsibility and accountability of the Government to the people.”

In light of the above, I will always continue to exercise my constitutional responsibility by highlighting the responsibility and accountability of the government to the people of Sierra Leone.

As I have been doing in the past, I will always focus on holding those in power to account, no matter the labeling and name-calling.

To me, I will always strive to cultivate a sense of nationalism and patriotism so that my loyalty to the state will always override sectional, ethnic, tribal, or other loyalties.

On this note, I remind Sierra Leoneans that loyalty to the state should override ethnic and other loyalties.

WHO WILL DO JUSTICE TO LEADERSHIP IN SIERRA LEONE

By

Mahmud Tim Kargbo

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May 23, 2023

SLL Audio News

WHO WILL DO JUSTICE TO LEADERSHIP IN SIERRA LEONE

00:00 / 11:00

Who will do justice to leadership in Sierra Leone?

By Mahmud Tim Kargbo

Thus, you can see it plain:

Ill guidance is the cause of the ill-fame.
The world has earned, this wicked world of pain.
Bad leadership, not nature, has gone to rot in you.
Dante in The Divine Comedy, Book II, Canto XVI (transl. Clive James)

IN A COUNTRY GROWN CYNICAL about politics, it is easy to forget that the essential purpose of government is justice. And if the leadership of the nation entails that primary responsibility, so too does leadership in the workplace, community, and home. The coincidence of the demise of leadership at every level of society and the flagrant erosion of justice in Sierra Leone at large is a signal reminder of the ancient truth that without justice, there is no leadership.

All the major issues of our day represent violations of justice: dysfunctional democracy, corporate malfeasance, financial crisis, people trafficking, violence, social dysfunction, and middle-class decline. In the workplace, excessive workloads, low wages, insecurity, intimidation, inadequate health and safety measures, disruption, disengagement, disloyalty, distrust, state-planned corruption, and more all reflect the erosion of justice and the failure of leadership.

Inevitably, when honest dialogue is stifled by cynicism, sophistry, and state-protected bootlicking, many people will roll their eyes and ask, “Ah, but what is justice?” Most of them will be unaware that the question has muddled minds since the dawn of civilisation. Yet from the start, while people struggled to define the concept, they all instinctively knew injustice when they saw it, as we all do, in the realities of everyday life in Sierra Leone.

Social-justice Of course, the old disputes over the meaning of justice remain. It’s ironic that hardly anyone today has heard of Thrasymachus, yet many in Sierra Leone will agree with his cynical definition of justice as “nothing but the advantage of the stronger.” Celebrities get away with murder, corporations buy influence and bully employees, politicians are a law unto themselves, and money lets wealthy people do things that would get them into serious trouble if they were poor.

So the ancient controversy endures between those who maintain “might is right”, and those who insist that “right is right”, between the advocates of cynical expediency and those who recognise a moral standard that binds both weak and strong, rich and poor, in Sierra Leone. Tragically, few people today know of Socrates’ defiance of the Sophist’s “might is right” argument or Plato’s classical definition of justice as “suum cuique”, giving to each person what is due to him or her. This dictum explains why injustice involves depriving a person of what belongs to him or her by right. The very essence of justice is a debt that has to be paid.

According to this common-sense understanding, justice amounts to the restoration of the proper order among people in a community or country. It is a dynamic process in which the debts constantly incurred in the undertow and upheavals of everyday life are paid and socio-economic equilibrium is restored. Augustine noted that without justice, the state becomes nothing more than robbery.

Justice presupposes that human beings have certain natural rights that precede the authority of the state. If such rights do not exist, then there would be no justice apart from man-made laws, and there would be no way of judging the actions of governments. And man-made laws gave us Nazi death camps, apartheid, slavery, and other legal monstrosities.

The suum cuique recognises that justice depends on natural law and that bad laws can be adjudged as the perversions that they are.

The claims of classical Natural Law are controversial in the climate of moral relativism today, but they are limited and rational. Natural Law appeals to human reason and maintains that there is common ground on which people, even from different cultures, can develop rational arguments for the just settlement of disputes. Objective moral principles can be known by all people through rational arguments built on premises about human nature and Sierra Leone that do not depend on religious, tribal, or cultural standards.

The first principle of natural law is: seek good and avoid evil; do good to others; injure no one; and give each person their due. Sound philosophy, common sense, and science clearly specify what is good for us and what is bad for us. As rational, relational animals, human beings need meaning, purpose, freedom, knowledge, respect, community, work, and material sufficiency in order to flourish and should not be deprived of them. By precise contrast, meaninglessness, futility, enslavement, ignorance, contempt, isolation, unemployment, and poverty diminish and destroy humanity.

The concept of natural rights is primordial and was recognised as self-evident by classical philosophers and even some modern thinkers like Locke. A natural right is an inalienable possession that belongs to each of us as human beings, flowing from our recognition of the realities of personhood, human dignity, morality and law, and mutual obligations.

However, the defective foundations of modern philosophy promoted the denial of human nature, initially in theory, but ultimately in practice. The 20th century heard Sartre intone, “There is no human nature”, and witnessed totalitarian tyrants behave as if there were no human rights. Inevitably, when one rejects the rational conclusions of natural law, one is left with the cold utilitarian expedient: mold people any way you wish if you have the power. And Ivory tower professors, power-hungry politicians, and callous corporations have been doing precisely that ever since in Sierra Leone.

Justice is the great challenge for leadership in every field in Sierra Leone because the purpose of leadership is human flourishing, which starts with a proper understanding of the meaning and purpose of human life. Beyond the more spectacular violations of justice, the proportions of the crisis are readily discernible in the many injustices perpetrated daily against ordinary people in the workplace and communities.

The near extinction of courtesy and civility reflects the repudiation of basic social obligations by most people today in Sierra Leone. Backstabbing, so common in our country, was once condemned as a violation of justice because it used deceit to deprive another person of work, friends, support, and respect; derision too used to be regarded as an injustice as it shamed another person, undermining their dignity and social standing; Lying and cheating are other serious injustices sniffed at today in Sierra Leone, regardless of the damage they do; the undermining of free speech by political correctness is another insidious violation of justice in our everyday lives; by definition, the self-gratifying promiscuity causing such widespread psychological damage and social dysfunction is injustice in many guises; and the forgotten obligations of respect for parents, teachers, doctors, soldiers, and the police, once models of integrity and people whose selfless service created debts that could never really be paid in full reveals how far short of a truly just society we now fall.

These seemingly minor injustices create the social milieu in which many much greater injustices are perpetrated in Sierra Leone and all too frequently go unchallenged. The failure of leadership at every level of society brought us to this juncture, and only leadership, standing firmly on the principle of justice, can restore the harmony and vibrancy of communal life in Sierra Leone.

Justice is a principle on which all people should stand. Capitalism and socialism are not principles but socio-economic theories that give rise to specific policy commitments, and the same is true of conservatism, liberalism, and libertarianism in the political arena. Capitalists, socialists, and the rest should be flexible in their policies—and we know they are very adaptable when it suits them—but non-negotiable in principles, like justice.

When they treat their theories and the policies that flow from them as principles, refusing to make concessions under the principle of justice, they expose themselves as ideological, automatically imposing restrictions on rational debate. And while they try to define justice in the confused categories of utilitarianism or contractarianism, they generate only the seemingly irreconcilable divisions currently tearing Sierra Leone apart.

In the workplace, a manager who has no interest in the well-being of employees, caring not a whit about financial hardship, long hours that eat into family time, anxiety about job security, and other common workplace woes, plainly does not understand justice and therefore no meaningful commitment to leadership. He merely fuels poor performance in business and the social dysfunction that then swells the tax burden and the size of the government.

Justice is a condition of human flourishing, and it is one of the Cardinal Virtues. The advancement of justice requires first the renewal of the life of virtue in Sierra Leone and, therefore, the reintroduction of the humanities in schools and universities. This remains the only way to inspire informed reflection on the human condition, as manifested in all times and all places in Sierra Leone: by helping the young to know what it means to be human and teaching them to rationally question authority and strive for justice.

The 19th-century British Prime Minister, William Gladstone, observed,

“National injustice is the surest road to national downfall.”
His warning applies equally to people in social positions of trust, community, and business, and at this critical moment in history, everyone should ask this simple question: In my roles as a politician, civil servant, parent, neighbour, business leader, and citizen, am I promoting justice in our society, or am I one misleader?

Combating Fake News: A Guide to Fighting Fake News in Sierra Leone’s 2023 Elections

By

SLL

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May 12, 2023

Attention, Sierra Leoneans and stakeholders in our democracy!

“Combating Fake News: A Guide to Fighting Fake News in Sierra Leone’s 2023 Elections” is a crucial resource that Sierra Leone Live is pleased to share.

This enlightening book strives to inform and equip our candidates, political parties, and other stakeholders with a thorough awareness of the fake news epidemic endangering our electoral process. This resource illustrates the repercussions of disinformation in an age where it may spread quickly and presents workable solutions to combat it, allowing us all to contribute to preserving a free and democratic election process.

The disruptive impacts of fake news are not immune to the diverse political landscape of Sierra Leone. It’s important for everyone to acknowledge and aggressively confront the role that fake news plays in influencing our electoral environment as the important June 24, 2023 elections draw near.

Together, we can maintain the credibility of our electoral systems, encourage voter confidence, and create a more secure and long-lasting democracy for future generations.

The best part is that you can get this information for FREE, thanks to Sierra Leone Live!

To download your copy, please follow this link: Combating Fake News: A Guide to Fighting Fake News in Sierra Leone's 2023 Elections (321 downloads )

#SierraLeone #Elections2023 #FakeNews #Democracy #FreeResource

Share this message widely, especially on WhatsApp groups, to ensure we’re all equipped to combat fake news. Let’s stand together for a #FairAndFreeElection!

Empowering Sierra Leone: A Guide to Eight Campaign Strategies to Win the Elections

By

SLL

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May 8, 2023

Introducing Our FREE eBook: Empowering Sierra Leone: A Guide to Eight Campaign Strategies to Win the Elections.

Dear friends and fellow citizens,

Sierra Leone Live is proud to present our latest eBook, Empowering Sierra Leone: A Guide to Eight Campaign Strategies to Win the Elections. This guide is dedicated to all political candidates and citizens who are passionate about creating a better future for our beloved country.

Inside, you’ll discover an 8-step plan that covers:

Crafting a compelling campaign message
Building a strong campaign infrastructure
Implementing effective digital strategies
Combating fake news and misinformation
Empowering women and engaging the youth
Fostering community-building and grassroots organization
Focusing on voter engagement and education
Continuously evaluating and adjusting campaign strategies

As we approach the local council, parliamentary, and presidential elections on June 24, 2023, this guide aims to support candidates and citizens alike in ensuring a free and fair electoral process.

Special Offer: To encourage active participation and informed decision-making, Sierra Leone Live is offering a FREE digital copy of this eBook to everyone.

How to Access: Simply click on the link below to download your free copy of A Guide to Eight Campaign Strategies to Win the Elections:

Empowering Sierra Leone: A Guide to Eight Campaign Strategies to Win the Elections (327 downloads )

Spread the word and share this message with your friends, family, and fellow citizens. Let’s work together to create a brighter future for Sierra Leone.

Best regards,
Sierra Leone Live

Sierra Leone Broken Bridges We Should Mend

SLL Poems

By

SLL

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April 22, 2023

Broken Bridges We Can't Mend in Sierra Leone. Sierra Leone News

SLL Audio Poems

Sierra Leone Broken Bridges We Should Mend

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Sierra Leone Broken Bridges We Should Mend

A Poem by the Sierra Leone Live Team

Across the rivers wide and vast,
In times of future, present, past,
Broken bridges, scarred and worn,
The bonds of friendship, love, and trust now torn.

Once we stood united, family and friends,
Believing in each other, our dreams would never end.
But as the June 24th election nears,
We face the broken bridges, drowned in our tears.

Friends turned to enemies, how did we lose our way?
Will the wounds we bear ever heal, we pray?
What are friends for, if not to lend a hand?
To lift us up, help us withstand?

Sierra Leone Live is on your side,
To share your struggles, your dreams, your pride.
The challenges we face, both then and now,
Together we must survive, no matter how.

Let us be honest about our problems deep,
Through unity, freedom, and justice, we’ll leap.
The Green, White, and Blue we proudly hail,
A symbol of our nation, our flag will not fail.

This land is ours, our pride and our home,
No matter where we wander, or where we roam.
Oh, Sierra Leone, in you we trust,
The only one to save us from darkness and dust.

As we vote on June 24, 2023,
Let us embrace love, forgiveness, and unity.
For the bridges that are broken, we must strive to mend,
A future of peace and harmony, together we’ll tend.

Sierra Leone Broken Bridges

Strengthening the Financial Sector: Has the SLPP Delivered on Its Promises?

By

SLL

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April 22, 2023

Strengthening the Financial Sector. Bank of Sierra Leone. Sierra Leone News at Sierra Leone Live

SLL Audio News

Strengthening the Financial Sector: Has the SLPP Delivered on Its Promises?

00:00 / 4:30

Strengthening the Financial Sector: Has the SLPP Delivered on Its Promises?

By the Sierra Leone Live Team.

As the June 24, 2023 elections approach, Sierra Leone Live investigates the Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) government’s progress in implementing its 2018 manifesto promises. In this article, we explore Part II, “Transforming The Economy – Developing the Private Sector,” with a particular focus on strengthening the financial sector.

The financial sector plays a critical role in promoting productivity and economic growth. The 2018 SLPP manifesto highlights the importance of a strong, sound, and effective banking system to increase access to both short-term and long-term capital for investment purposes. Several challenges faced the sector, such as weaknesses in the central bank, weak infrastructure, inadequate bank coordination, shortage of skilled professionals, and insufficient technological resources.

The SLPP’s “New Direction” aimed to address these issues by focusing on six key areas:

Capacitating Bank of Sierra Leone: Strengthen regulation and supervisory roles, improve risk-based supervision, review the current Banking Act, rationalize remittances, develop ICT infrastructure, strengthen payment systems, develop a manpower development plan, and create policies for foreign currency lending.
Strengthening Commercial Banking: Review policies and laws, support government-owned commercial banks, strengthen the Association of Commercial Banks, and develop a Code of Ethics for the banking industry.
Expanding Micro-Finance Opportunities: Review policies and laws, strengthen Micro-Finance Institutions, and design and implement a credit guarantee scheme for SMEs and agriculture.
Re-establishing Development Bank and Strengthening Commercial Banking: Re-establish the National Development Bank, delink community banks from the central bank, and link them with the Development Bank.
Strengthening Non-Bank Financial Institutions: Review NASSIT, develop a framework for regulation and supervision of NASSIT’s investment arm, review the Insurance Act 2000, strengthen SLICOM and SLIA, improve insurance supervision and regulations, strengthen the capital market, and develop policies for issuing long-term government debt.
Improving Training: Revise the curriculum for banking training, establish a national school of banking and finance, and organize an annual financial sector conference.

As Sierra Leone Live investigates the SLPP’s progress in achieving these aims, we will examine the following:

Has the central bank’s capacity been improved in terms of staff competency, systems, and technology?
Are there noticeable changes in the regulatory and supervisory framework for commercial banks, microfinance institutions, and non-bank financial institutions?
Has the re-establishment of the National Development Bank taken place, and are community banks effectively linked with it?
Are there new training initiatives and institutions for the financial sector, and has the sector’s curriculum been revised in line with international standards?

The investigation will provide an unbiased assessment of the SLPP’s achievements in strengthening the financial sector, enabling voters to make informed decisions in the upcoming elections. The financial sector’s development is a critical component of economic growth, and it is essential to determine whether the SLPP has delivered on its promises in this area.

In the coming weeks, Sierra Leone Live will provide an in-depth analysis of the SLPP’s performance, shedding light on the progress made in developing a robust financial sector and offering an evidence-based evaluation of the party’s efforts in achieving its manifesto objectives.