In 2005, the UN called for governments to mark the third Sunday in November of each year as World Day of Remembrance for Road Traffic Victims. I don't know if Sierra Leone observed the day of remembrance this year, but two of their West African neighbors took the opportunity to commemorate victims of traffic collisions and to acknowledge their responsibility to prevent serious injuries on their roadways. In Ghana and Nigeria, people concerned with road traffic crashes and their consequences ensured that the advocacy opportunity of this day was fully realized. Nigeria's press reported events that ran from the unveiling of a National Drivers Training Manual to awareness walks held by advocates of road safety and road danger reduction. In Lagos, Federal Road Safety Commission officials, dressed in symbolic black, distributed leaflets and flyers about safety on the roads during a candlelight procession for victims of road traffic accidents. Campaigners for road safety and road dang...
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I cringe every time Jacob Jusu Saffa speaks. The secretary general of the Sierra Leone People's Party, who doubles as the party's spokesman, has a knack for grandstanding- choosing his moments to relay negative political attacks in a style he has made all his own. Saffa took the party's 2007 presidential and parliamentary election loss so badly; he wrote in a post-election press release that the international community connived in the "stealing of SLPP's happiness." As if that wasn't bad enough, he repeated the same charge on air in September 2007: "It's part of the international conspiracy, but they will not get away with it," Saffa said ominously. Emotive language. Nine months on, and a few days shy of Sierra Leone's local elections, another sound bite from Saffa has made headlines: President Koroma is behaving like Zimbabwe's Mugabe, he is reported to have said. Saffa has a penchant for sound and fury. Last week, in the weekly brie...
It was a car engine chug-chug-chug-chug-chugging to a stop that made me raise my head up above the veranda's lentern. I could just see the top of a parrot-green car as I arched my back and craned my neck as high as it could go. I shuffled closer and held on to the lentern's edge, pressing my face on my hands. It was Dodo. And I could see she was wearing one of her hugest, baddest street-sweeping kanabi as she stepped out from the half-open taxi door. I had dreamed of wearing a kanabi just like hers ever since the day I had seen her kanabi swoop up a black-mint wrapper and carry it whirring like a little dust devil. She had been flouncing some place. So I followed her wide-hipped behind, and her split back in a halter until she turned where Milton met High Broad Street and she was gone.