JOSEPH KAIFALA CONSULTING (SL) LTD

When I arrived in Kailahun for a consulting work, I knew there was something else I needed to do for me and my younger colleague, JoJo, before I left this ancient town, named in honor of a Kissi warrior chief, Kai Londo. Kailahun means Kai's town.

"JoJo, let's go to the Slaughter House." I said.

This was a test. I wanted to know if JoJo knew about the Slaughter House. She is younger and a witness only to the end battles of our decade-long civil war.

"Where is that and why?" She asked.

In her ques...

There is nothing special about bondo bush. It is a place where old people fidget with little girls vaginas. If you want to teach girls culture send them to school. Again, we don't need any bush cultural barracks. FMG is harmful to little girls and an anachronistic cultural practice. Our inability to accept that and change is indicative of a general developmental stagnation and unprogressiveness in our society. 

You should stop senzationalising bondo bush. There is no cultural ...

Photo: Umaru Fofana

In Sierra Leone, victim always languish in their victimization. From our civil war victims to ebola survivors and orphans, the Freetown mudslide victims should have known that in this country their suffering is purely their burden. When the funds are raised and the immediate tragedy ends, our government is not in the habit of caring for those for whom its coffer is filled by those who care.

Among the odd constitutional changes recommended by the Sierra Leone Constitutional Review Committee is the undemocratic idea of constitutionalizing the power of a president to remove her/his vice president without due process. Including this provision in the future constitution will enshrine the recent unconstitutional decision of our president to remove his vice president because of issues arising within their party, hors the power of parliament to impeach.

The response of the Government of Sierra Leone through its Attorney General to the ECOWAS Court has always been an adamant adherence to the incompetent position that the court had no jurisdiction in the case of the petitioner, former Vice President Sam Sumana, against his former administration. In order to understand the ruling against the Government of Sierra Leone, I begin by dismissing the position, as the court earlier did, that a court established by the Economic Community of West Africa...

In the past week, I have witnessed with horror and outrage as individuals, businesses, NGOs, Plenipotentiaries, foreign heads of state, and even our own local government ministries make direct donations of cash, cheques, and supplies to the president and vice president for victims of the recent flood and mudslide in Freetown. These donations, amounting to millions of dollars, are made under no concrete instruments of accountability. C’est a dire, these donations are not for t...

From a distance one could hear the sangbes, accompanied by a segula and the soothing voice of a female Mende singer, the sort of griots I grew up hearing in the town squares of my Southeastern villages. But I was faraway from the villages of my childhood, where dust clouds rose from the feet of dancing women, and their waist, adorned with beads, moved like the spinning threads of a kondi gula. I was in the west of Freetown, and for a moment, a conference room in the luxurious R...