Sierra Leone Telegraph: 26 January 2015

The latest figures released by the ministry of health in Sierra Leone suggests that daily average recorded number of new cases has dropped from about 60 in late December to about 10 in the last two weeks.

This is a remarkable drop of more than 80% in new cases, recorded on average every day, across the country.

But some medical experts in Freetown are disputing the ministry’s figures published since the end of December, 2014, when president Koroma took on a new determination to achieve zero new cases by March 2015.

It now seems the National Ebola Response Centre (NERC) and officials at the ministry of health are working on all cylinders – massaging the figures, in order to achieve the president’s ambition – by all means necessary.

And this over-zealousness is being pursued, with the alarming under-reporting of the number of new cases, rates of transmission and deaths from Ebola.

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Sierra Leone Telegraph: 25 January 2015

When the annals of the Koroma presidency are written after the 2017 elections, what will be remembered most, is the president’s lack of leadership skills and inability to make good and timely decisions.

Yet, few will question his loyalty to his foot soldiers and political allies that have stayed true to his cause.

Last Friday, with one mighty swoop of his pen, he was able at long last to find the courage to sack the country’s Chief Justice – Umu Tejan Jalloh, after months of public outcry and calls by the Anti-Corruption Commission for the Chief Justice to step down from office, having gone well past the retirement age.

Will she now be asked to refund every single penny she has collected from poor tax payers by way of salaries and other benefits, to which she clearly was not entitled? Will she be prosecuted by the Anti-Corruption Commission for any possible allegation of fraud?

But the most shocking decision by the president last Friday, however, was his appointment of two of his foot soldiers, who are suspected to have been responsible for covering the truth about the scale of the Ebola crisis in the northern district of Koinadugu – Momoh Konteh and Mohamed N’fah-Alie Conteh.

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Sierra Leone Telegraph: 21 January 2015

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the World Food Programme (WFP) are warning that Ebola may be retreating, but hundreds of thousands of people are now facing hunger in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.

According to a report published a month ago by WFP and FAO, the number of people facing food insecurity due to the Ebola epidemic in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone could top one million by March 2015.

Access to food must drastically be improved, and measures put in place to safeguard crop and livestock production in order to avert another disaster in those three countries, the report warns.

Border closures, quarantines, hunting bans and other restrictions are seriously hindering people’s access to food – threatening their livelihoods, disrupting food markets and processing chains, and exacerbating shortages stemming from crop losses in areas with the highest Ebola infection rates.

The loss of productivity and household income due to Ebola-related deaths and illness, as well as people staying away from work for fear of contagion, is compounding an economic slowdown in the three countries.

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