Focus ^onSierra Leone
Dedicated to the dead, maimed, underprivileged and long-suffering citizens of Sierra Leone
Welcome …and thank you for visiting the web site of Focus on Sierra Leone. Our on-line newsletter has been foremost and forthright in reporting and analysing political and social events in Sierra Leone, giving pointers to the way forward for peace and reconciliation between our divided people. Our reporting of Sierra Leone is thoroughly researched. Moreover, we will maintain this tradition, which aims to be objective and fair, and to present the facts and our analyses of them truthfully and honestly. Focus does not aim to please or to appease but to bring home truths about our national life and individual ways, including unpalatable aspects that others prefer to sweep under the carpet. We will continue to unmask public frauds whenever we see or hear about them. Our investigating finger will have no bounds, and will reach the highest and lowliest in our community without any distinction. We will blow the whistle on wrongdoing wherever it occurs, when it presents an affront to the dignity and the well being of Sierra Leoneans everywhere. We will suffer no cheats in public life, especially those who hide behind the powers conferred on them by virtue of their public office. Equally, Focus will continue to put forward fresh ideas and give innovative directions for the shape of things to come, including those for bringing the present civil conflict to a satisfactory conclusion. In addition to promoting our ideology (see here), we will strive harder to instil in every Sierra Leonean, but especially those who are in charge of our governance, the ideal of rendering service and not being served. The absence of this basic value in our national character, which is typified among a disproportionately large number of public officials, has caused the visible and seemingly irreversible embarrassing decline in standards in Sierra Leonean public life. Sierra Leoneans have been wracked with the pain and suffering of 10 years of civil war. A lot of blood has been shed during that time. Tens of thousands of lives have been lost, and many more thousands of our citizens everywhere, and on all sides, have been maimed - most of them irreversibly. The country itself, not to mention the properties and livelihoods of its citizens, from the poorest and most vulnerable to the well to do, has been reduced to ruin. These sobering statistics alone ought really to have taught us, Sierra Leoneans, the salutary lesson that after all the mutual name-calling, bad-mouthing, and the very public and malicious levying of wrongful accusations against innocent people (so often cloaked in the guise of legality), there have been no winners in this fratricidal conflict. The totality of all that has happened in our country is the grim reality that each and every Sierra Leonean – rebel or non-rebel – has become a hopeless loser. Focus on Sierra Leone again appeals to every one of our decent citizens – by which we exclude those barefaced opportunists now jockeying for political office in the midst of a paralysing nationwide security gridlock and the political vacuum of indecisiveness - not to lose sight of the objective of peace and of bringing this civil war to a peaceful conclusion. Let us who want true and lasting peace in Sierra Leone, work together and harder to create conditions that are the best for peace to take root and flourish in our communities. As we have done countless times, we appeal again to especially the RUF, the CDF’s Kamajohs, Kapras and Donsos, ex-Sierra Leone Army personnel, and any other bellicose groups out there, to chose the path of peace and reconciliation and stay on it, to end this wasteful war. We encourage them to take up the challenge to disarm their fighters, and participate in a new political dispensation for Sierra Leone. We do not need the guns of any side for us to coexist, because we will simply end up destroying each other, everybody, and everything around us. We must work doubly hard to remove the guns from our society. For that to be attained there must be trust. At the moment, there is no trust between the parties in our conflict or in any of the processes that have ostensibly been put at their disposal. This calls for new and genuine political initiatives. We also detect a profound distrust for the present Government among the civilian population. But we must begin to trust one another. The best way to make that happen speedily is to create political conditions inside the country that are, at the same time, both reassuring and appealing to those who feel disconnected from the mainstream of national life, and fair to those who are not in, or connected with, the present government and its own supporters. All Citizens of Sierra Leone, without exclusion, must be made to know that the country belongs to them, and to feel that they too can belong to it if they want to, provided that they also play by the rules. This means that the rules themselves must not only be fair but be seen by them to be fair …and transparent in every sense. This is the message and mission of this web site. Long live the Independent Republic of Sierra Leone!