Earlier this week, the Honourable Vice President of Sierra Leone Dr Mohamed Juldeh Jalloh extended the olive branch to the main opposition, All People’s Congress (APC) asking the party to join the government of Sierra Leone and work together on accomplishing the Big 5 Game Changers.
The idea of both the SLPP and the APC working together towards national development will be a BIG GAME CHANGER, considering the Big 5 Game Changers being a national development blueprint. It therefore requires all hands on deck, irrespective of political, regional or tribal leanings. The call by the Honourable Vice President is a laudable call for bipartisan approach towards getting things done for the people that transcend political dispensation.
The Big 5 Game Changers agenda is President Julius Maada Bio’s second term manifesto promises and formed his key campaign message during the electioneering period of the 2023 presidential race. The Big 5 Game Changers include: Feed Salone, Human Capital Development, Youth Employment Scheme (YES), Revamping the Public Service Architecture, and Tech and Infrastructure (TIPEG).
Feed Salone is an initiative to boost agricultural productivity to ensure food security and inclusive economic growth. The president’s top priority in his second term is for Sierra Leone to be food self-sufficient. The government will boost agricultural productivity by increasing investment, which will fuel inclusive economic growth, boost food productivity and self-sufficiency, reduce hunger and poverty, create jobs, boost export earnings and build our resilience in the face of climate change.
Human capital development is education-based and involves nurturing the skills of the society for 21st century industry. The government of Sierra Leone envisions an inclusive economic growth that relies on skilled and educated human capital. In the next five years, the government will invest in developing the technical and vocational skills required to grow the economy focusing particularly on creating equal opportunity for women. The government promises to invest in health systems to develop a healthy and capable workforce for a 21st century economy.
Youth employment scheme (YES!) is a presidential initiative to create 500,000 jobs for the youth in five years by harnessing their energies. These jobs will include skilled and unskilled, long-term and seasonal jobs across all sectors. This will be done by providing incentives to the private sector to hire, train, and upscale skills levels, especially young women and girls.
Revamping the public service architecture involves a focus on delivery, efficiency and professionalism, something that has been lacking in public sector institutions since time immemorial. But the government, over the next five years, will continue its mission to fostering a professional and meritocratic public service that is fit for purpose and delivers on its mandate. The goal is to attract, support and retain the best and the brightest to serve the people of Sierra Leone. Over time the human resources capacity of the government of Sierra Leone has left much to be desired as there is routine accusation of a lack of training, education and professionalism by people in government employ.
Tech and infrastructure represent the pathways for sustained economic growth (TIPEG). It is almost impossible to engage in any meaningful endeavour without having to employ the use of technology.
The government of Sierra Leone promises to accelerate the inclusive growth agenda by investing in infrastructure, technology and digitisation. This will be done by investing in energy generation and transmission, the construction of roads and bridges, expanding energy access across the country, and making it easier to link production centres and markets. GOSL aims to digitise the financial sector to expand financial inclusion as a way to increase economic participation.
The idea of any political party running the government of Sierra Leone or any country, once it has been owned, approved and promoted by the government, belongs to the people of the country.
Meanwhile Sierra Leone’s political landscape is toxic. Supporters of the different parties would tell you this. Because of the rivalry involved in the sharing of job and other opportunities in the preserve of the government, it is unheard of for political parties to work together, even in the interest of the people and country. Party supporters and their leaders routinely refer to rival political parties and their supporters as enemies.
Ideally, political parties represent the different ideologies or visions of how the country is to be governed including the rights, security, privileges and benefits of the citizenry. Preferably during the reign of a particular political party running the government, it is of great benefit to the people and that party’s plans for them to work together with all the other political parties to accomplish their promises to the people, which also include those in the political parties. Therefore, for the plans of the government to work it is incumbent on the president of the state, far from being a divisive figure that keeps the parties apart, to use the executives of all the political parties to work together, polling their ideas, human resources, connections and wealth in the furtherance of the government’s Big 5 Game Changers agenda.
Therefore, patriotic Sierra Leoneans from all sides of the political divide have said they admire the call made by the Vice President to the main opposition APC to work together for the country to achieve the ambitious Big 5 Game Changers of the government.
Far from being an SLPP idea, once the Big 5 Game Changers are owned by the government of Sierra Leone they become the property of the people and citizens of this country. Because these ideas are for the betterment of the society then we have to own them as a collective and do all in our power, even diverting resources for them to work. If they succeed it will be the success of the entire society, not one political party.
In our political history, the supporters, members and leaders of the political parties and their government tenures have not worked together. The ideas and plans of a predecessor regime, no matter how good and beneficial they are, no matter how much money has been expended to see them to fruition, are routinely dropped by the winning political party who, instead of continuing such great plans or ideas, would side line them and put forward their own ideas. Therefore the continuity needed to see that an idea or plan of the previous government is achieved in the interest of the country, is ignored because of political rivalry.
Although the SLPP and APC are not known for working together in the interest of the people, if they heed the call of the Vice President and succeed, then we can safely say it is better getting it done late than never trying at all.
It is important for government communications, media and public relations people to promote the ideas of the government as belonging to the people, that way the people from all sides of the divide will own and so work on the idea for its optimal success, just as the Agenda For Change (2007-2012) that saw massive infrastructural development across Sierra Leone was achieved by the people. The Agenda For Prosperity, on the other hand, didn’t work because of the succession battle that ensued to replace Ernest Bai Koroma.
FORUM hopes that the scramble for power in the ruling party government will not cloud out the potentials of the Big 5 Game Changers to change the people’s narrative.
