Sierra Leone Telegraph: 11 December 2022:
United States Ambassador David Reimer last week provided funding, totaling USD 40,000 to eight Sierra Leonean led community organizations that work to improve economic and social conditions at the local level.
The funds will support projects in seven districts in the east, west, north, and south of Sierra Leone. Projects receiving funds this year include:
Programs to support adolescent girls and women with limited economic opportunities through skills training
Programs to provide clean water and conduct campaigns to promote hygiene best practices to reduce the risk of water-borne diseases
Programs to support income generation and food security through aquaculture, rice cultivation, plantain and banana cultivation and grain store construction
Ambassador Reimer congratulated the grantees and noted the important role played by the communities themselves, who are actively engaged in the planning and implementation of each project.
These initiatives are funded by the Ambassador’s Special Self-Help (SSH) Program, which supports small, community-based projects throughout Africa. These projects are designed in cooperation with community members, who contribute their own resources, usually in the form of labor and in-kind donations.
Ambassador Reimer said, “The Ambassador’s Special Self-Help Fund is one way that the U.S. Embassy supports economic development in Sierra Leone. We do so by working directly with grass-roots leaders like yourselves to implement projects in your communities. This is one of my favorite programs because it allows us to respond directly to community requests and to fund projects that have an immediate impact on communities in Sierra Leone. The key is that they are Sierra Leonean-led development projects, and we would like to see more of those in future.”
It always sickens me when something looks like we need pity all the time, and lack national and personal pride. This is not to discount the help we receive from the American Government, but it is not the responsibility of foreign governments to detect and solve our problems, whatever the nature of them is. With all the natural wealth that we possess, it murders the mind that Bio cannot cough up $40,000 to help the downtrodden.
Bio cannot cough up $40,000 because he and his ministers share the bulk of the nation’s budget among themselves. The remainder is used by Bio to charter jets at a cost of $5,000 or more per hour. I struggled with mathematics in school, always just doing enough to avoid failing, but simple arithmetic informs me that a round trip to London is about twelve hours. I need help to confirm that twelve times $5000 is $60,000. How many such trips has Bio taken since becoming president? Now then, to fly to Vietnam from Freetown (which Bio did) is twelve hours one way. What’s the cost to the nation – I need help.
So for Bio to be sitting on his backside for twelve hours on a chartered jet, at a huge cost to the nation, suggests, to me at least, that the man’s mental balance is astray. That’s why he feels no sense of shame that foreign governments should be giving us handouts all the time. APC are no better, they even stole from the dead and dying, as we witnessed during the Ebola outbreak as well as the mudslide disaster. This was the Earnest era.