When the Sierra Leone People’s Party, SLPP, put forward Mohamed Gento Kamara and Reverend Samuel Babatunde Thomas, it was a genuine attempt at the foundational blocks to address the wretched state of affairs in the country’s capital city, Freetown. Essentially, the SLPP came to the conclusion that the future of Freetown will remain bleak under a Council led by the All People’s Congress, APC.
The evidence by which the SLPP reached this conclusion is abundant in the fact that since Local Government was introduced in 2004, the APC has controlled the Freetown City Council. Under successive APC Mayor, Freetown’s situation has worsened year after year.
The election of Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr as Mayor of the Freetown Municipality offered some hope to non-partisan Freetown citizens and even many within the SLPP that respite would come Freetown’s way. Unfortunately, Mayor Aki-Sawyerr proved to be no better than her predecessors, with the same nefarious motivations.
She has been re-elected as Mayor of Freetown. There is no point pondering whether she has reincarnated or not. If she has reincarnated as a person now willing to cooperate with the central government and cease her Facebook and Tik-Tok racket, that would be good news to Freetonians in particular and Sierra Leoneans, generally. However, if President Julius Maada Bio wants to leave a legacy around Freetown’s survival, then he must accept the need for a particular agenda for our nation’s capital city.
As the President, he needs to create a special purpose agenda for Freetown’s survival, renewal and development, strategically pushed within the confines of the central government. This will in no way appear to undermine the mayor and her agenda for Freetown. Essentially, the Freetown City Council remains to do its work and the government shall endeavour to provide Yvonne with the fullest support.
Incidentally, there are issues pertaining to stemming the growth of slums and unplanned settlements, environmental management of Freetown’s hills, capital intensive provision of certain public goods like high-rise car parks, shopping mall, and social housing among others that President Bio’s government must provide direct leadership for.
Meanwhile, after ten years, Sierra Leoneans could look back and say that President Bio left his own mark in transforming Freetown. There are many examples from around the world of urban renewal led by the Presidency. Freetown can be saved, and it is a legacy assignment that President Bio must set himself through a special-purpose agenda.
Today, urban renewal is central to world-class city aspirations on the African continent. From Abuja, Nigeria under President Murtala Muhammed in 1976 to Kigali, Rwanda under President Paul Kagame, especially in the last 10 years to the Greater Accra Region in Ghana that is administered at two different but complementary levels – the traditional and political levels, we see that demolitions and evictions exemplify the power of the state, and not the city council, to restructure urban space, prioritise elite forms of accumulation and enforce aesthetic norms of cleanliness, order and modernity.
Now you understand why is it that President Bio’s government must not and cannot leave the growth of Freetown in the hands of FCC alone. This is because some of the main factors that have led to the growth of cities mentioned above are: (i) Huge and Surplus Resources (ii) Industrialization and Commercialisation (iii) Development of Transport and Communication (iv) Economic Pull of the Cities (v) Educational and Recreational Facilities. All of these are capital-intensive.
