By Alusine Fullah
If you’re looking for a list of significant recent achievements by the Freetown city council, good luck finding any online. A quick google search will mostly get you a Wikipedia page rife with grammatical errors, a Facebook page completely devoid of any kind of information and dozens of old media articles criticizing the FCC’s lack of performance as well as their involvement in one financial scandal or another.
The Freetown City Council describes itself as one of the “most powerful municipal government in Africa” whose powers include but are not limited to:
- Collecting local taxes
- City cleaning and trash collection
- Ownership of its own municipal police fore
- Controlling streets and petty trading
- Issuance of business licenses to shop owners and petty traders
- Monitoring of motorcycles and bike riders
- Removal of abandoned vehicles from the streets
A simple walk from one end of Siaka Stevens Street to the other is enough to inform even the most casual to that the “most powerful municipal government’’ has not been able to deliver to any degree of satisfaction on any of these “power.’’ The City Council’s status as a punching bag for not only the media but disgruntled citizens has become something of a running joke. After all Freetonians have, for the most part, learnt to live with the filthy streets, the out of control street trading and the carcasses of old cars littered around the city. Many find it funny, for instance, that the City Council would complain about not being able to do their work due to non-payment of Local Taxes by the public, even though as a commenter puts it, they can “hardly” point to a project they have embarked on and successfully executed…’’
For the past years the Freetown City Council Metropolitan Police have gone beyond expectations when it comes to harassment, abuse and collect money from poor traders. Many traders have complained about the negative attitude of FCC Metropolitan Police in terms of harassment, money collection and abuse. So in that case, we in this medium throw the question to general public especially the management of FCC to vividly tell us the functions of FCC Metropolitan Police.
