September 27, 2016 By Alusine Sesay
In a strongly worded letter of complaint written by the Kenema District Civil Society and Human Rights Committee on behalf of Kenema residents, and addressed to the country’s ombudsman, they complained that the once prosperous headquarters of the diamondiferous district has been left neglected and deprived of efficient public service delivery by the current administration.
“One of the key complaints is that Kenema city has been deprived of tarmac for trunk ‘A’ roads, such as the Blama, Hanga and Dama roads respectively. Even where there are records of several demands and lobbying by various stakeholders including the former Minister of State-East, the press, parliamentarians, CSOs, local authorities and councillors, much attention has not been paid by government to all those concerns,” they said.
They stated that although the people of Kenema were aware of the award and signing of contract by First Strickon Construction Company for road works in the township, there was little or no effort of serious mobilisation by the authorities concerned.
“Even the coordination committee that was put in place with the Regional Engineer of SLRA as chairman and the city Mayor as co-chair, has stopped their usual meetings after just two sittings with no information about the progress of the work,” they complained.
They further complained that despite their contribution to the road maintenance fund nationwide, the people of Kenema city have not been adequately rewarded parallel to the level of their contribution.
“This uncultured unequal distribution of resources has warranted the civil society and the Human Rights Committee to question the implementation of the Agenda for Prosperity pillar 4 in its totality,” they stated.
They however applauded the government for the implementation of the Three Towns Water Project, but stressed that the pace at which other cities and district headquarters in the South, West and Northern Regions have been provided with tarmac roads facilities cannot be compared to the Kenema city.
“This situation has caused the Kenema city roads to be in bad shape leading to negative economic and social consequences. There is a total economic effect of such bad roads to the eastern region as a whole. The health of residents, operation of businesses, safety of lives and property are unquantifiable and the bad roads exert enormous damage on government, private and commercial vehicles on a daily basis,” they again said.
The civil society organisations also complained of appalling health service delivery in Kenema.
“We applaud the free health care initiative, though we observe that it is badly hit by the non-availability of gynaecologist and paediatrician. We further observed that the limited supply of essential drugs and challenges of transportation of drugs to the PHUs [peripheral health units] continue to undermine the implementation of the free health care,” they noted.
Also, they raised grave concern over the situation of teachers in the district who they said have resorted to a sit down strike action that prevented pupils from attending schools.