THE CONDUCT OF THE SIERRA LEONE PEOPLE’S PARTY DISTRICT ELECTIONS

On 17th of April 2021, the leadership of the party met and discussed in details the issues relating to the conduct of our Executive Elections, reports submitted by the Southern Region and Western Area Elections Complaints committees and the recent PPRC directions in relation to the executive elections in Kenema and Kono Districts.

The Leadership of the party has come to the following conclusions which, I have been directed to communicate to the entire membership of the Sierra Leone People’s Party in the Republic of Sierra Leone.

1.  WESTERN REGION.

i)    All district elections in the Western Region scheduled to take place today 17th April 2021 are hereby postponed with immediate effect.

ii)   Any election/elections conducted on today’s date 17th April, 2021 in the Western Region of the Republic of Sierra Leone, is/are hereby nullified.

A)  EAST RURAL DISTRICT.

1.    Elections in constituencies 105, 106, 107 and 108 are to be re-conducted under the supervision of the PPRC and other persons designated by the National Secretariat for that purpose.

2.    The Secretariat is directed to convene a meeting of the district and constituency executives to meet and scrutinise the delegates list for the conduct of these elections.

3.    The date for this meeting shall be communicated.

B)   EAST URBAN DISTRICT.

1.    Results for elections conducted by the District Executive in constituencies 114, 118, 120, 122, 123 are hereby upheld.

2.    For elections in constituency 115, the Secretariat is directed to convene a meeting of the constituency executive. Further directives on this constituency will be communicated after the said meeting.

3.    In constituency 116, the elections shall be re-conducted after the list of delegates has been duly verified and signed by the Constituency Chairman and Secretary.

C)   CENTRAL DISTRICT.

1.    In constituency 124, the District Executive is hereby directed to declare and install Mr. Mohamed Brima who legitimately won the elections for the position of Young Generation Leader and duly submit the list of executive for that constituency.

2.    The action of the returning officer in that election to declare another person in-stead of the above named winner, is hereby nullified.

D)  WEST WEST DISTRICT.

1.    In constituency 128, the Secretariat is directed to investigate the issue of the creation of additional Zones and thereafter give directions on the constituency elections so held.

2.    In constituency 130, the result for the elections conducted is hereby upheld.

E)   WEST RURAL DISTRICT.

1)   In constituencies 110, elections for the positions of Women’s Leader, Financial Secretary, Treasurer and Organising Secretary are to be re-conducted.

2)   In constituency 111, the secretariat is directed to convene a meeting of the parties involved to discuss and give further directions.

3)   In constituency 112, the elections to be reconducted after a full verification of the delegates list.

3.    SOUTHERN REGION.

A)  BO DISTRICT.

1)   Executive election for the SLPP Bo District is hereby postponed, a new date will be duly communicated.

2)   That the Chiefdom elections in Komboya and Badjia chiefdoms be re-conducted.

3)   That the sectional elections in Bagbe chiefdom be completed and the chiefdom election be conducted.

4)   Elections in Bonthe, Moyamba and Pujehun are to proceed without any hindrance.

4.    EASTERN REGION.

a)    The party leadership will very soon complete its discussion of the directions given by the PPRC in respect of Kenema and Kono and shall proceed thereafter to issue its own statement.

b)   District election in Kailahun should proceed on today’s date.

5.    NOTHERN REGION.

1.   The party leadership is monitoring the elections in Bombali, Koinadugu, Falaba and Tonkoli to ensure that the party’s constitution and Rules and Regulations are strictly complied with.

2.    The party shall nullify any elections that are conducted in breach of our Party’s Constitution and Rules and Regulations.

6.    NORTH WESTERN REGION.

1)   The elections in Karene, Port Loko and Kambia are to proceed without any hindrance.

All re-run elections shall be duly conducted in a very transparent manner and all election processes shall be duly recorded and presented to the Leadership of the party.

All party members and supporters are advised to maintain the peace throughout the process and continue to be patience.

_________________________________________

UMARU NAPOLEON KOROMA

NATIONAL SECRETARY GENERAL

SIERRA LEONE PEOPLES PARTY (SLPP),

1.           National Leader

2.    Deputy National Leader

3.    National Chairman

4.    Deputy National Chairman

5.    Regional Chairmen

6.    District Chairmen

7.    Constituency Chairmen.

8.    PPRC.

9.    Sierra Leone Police.

 

Chad’s President Idriss Deby has died

-Army spokesman

Recently re-elected president dies of wounds suffered on frontline as country’s soldiers battle rebels, army says.

The 68-year-old son of a herder was one of the longest-serving leaders in Africa [File: Aurelien Meunier/Getty Images]

The 68-year-old son of a herder was one of the longest-serving leaders in Africa [File: Aurelien Meunier/Getty Images]

Chad’s longtime President Idriss Deby has died of wounds suffered on the frontline in the country’s north, where he had gone to visit soldiers battling rebels, the armed forces said.

Deby, 68, “has just breathed his last defending the sovereign nation on the battlefield” over the weekend, army spokesman General Azem Bermandoa Agouna said in a statement read out on state television on Tuesday, a day after Deby was declared the winner of a presidential election.

The exact circumstances of Deby’s death were not immediately clear. The army said the president had been commanding his army at the weekend as it battled against rebels who had launched a major incursion into the north of the country on election day on April 11.

KEEP READING

Chad President Idriss Deby: The West’s ally in the Sahel region?

Chad’s Idriss Deby wins 6th term as army fends off rebel advance

Chad counts votes as President Deby seeks to extend 30-year rule

Chad’s Deby takes early election lead as rebels near Ndjamena

Agouna also said a military council led by the late president’s 37-year-old son, four-star General Mahamat Idriss Deby, would replace him. A curfew has been imposed and the country’s borders have been shut in the wake of the president’s death.

“It is worth noting that in case anything happens to the president, it is not a military council that should be leading the country – the speaker of the legislative assembly should be leading for 40 days until a transition or elections are held,” said Al Jazeera’s Hiba Morgan, reporting from the capital, N’Djamena.

“[But] the military announced that the legislative assembly has been dissolved and that the constitution also has been dissolved, so what they are doing is that they replaced the constitution with their own set of rules.”

The shock announcement came a day after Deby, who came to power in a rebellion in 1990, won a sixth term. Provisional results released on Monday showed that Deby had taken 79.3 percent of the vote.

Deby postponed his victory speech to supporters and instead went to visit Chadian soldiers battling rebels, according to his campaign manager.

The rebel group Front for Change and Concord in Chad (FACT), which is based across the northern frontier with Libya, attacked a border post in the provinces of Tibesti and Kanem on election day and then advanced hundreds of kilometres south.

But it suffered a setback over the weekend.

Agouna had told Reuters news agency that army troops killed more than 300 fighters and captured 150 on Saturday in Kanem province, around 300km(185 miles) from N’Djamena. Five government soldiers were killed and 36 were wounded, he said.FACT said in a statement on Sunday that it had “liberated” the Kanem region. Such claims in remote desert combat zones are difficult to verify.

Relished the military culture

Deby was a herder’s son from the Zaghawa ethnic group.

His latest election victory had never been in doubt, with a divided opposition, boycott calls and a campaign in which demonstrations were banned or dispersed.

Deby had campaigned on a promise of bringing peace and security to the region, but his pledges were undermined by the rebel incursion.

The army said a military council led by the late president’s 37-year-old son Mahamat Idriss Deby, a four-star general, would replace him [File: Marco Longari/AFP]

The government had sought on Monday to assure concerned residents that the offensive was over.

There had been panic in some areas of N’Djamena on Monday after tanks were deployed along the city’s main roads, an AFP journalist reported. The tanks were later withdrawn apart from a perimeter around the president’s office, which is under heavy security during normal times.

“The establishment of a security deployment in certain areas of the capital seems to have been misunderstood,” government spokesman Cherif Mahamat Zene had said on Twitter on Monday.

“There is no particular threat to fear.”

However, the US embassy in N’Djamena on Saturday had ordered non-essential personnel to leave the country, warning of possible violence in the capital. Britain also urged its nationals to leave.

France’s embassy said in an advisory to its nationals in Chad that the deployment was a precaution and there was no specific threat to the capital.

The Tibesti mountains near the Libyan frontier frequently see fighting between rebels and the army, as well as in the northeast bordering Sudan. France carried out air raids in February 2019 to stop an incursion there.

In February 2008, a rebel assault reached the gates of the presidential palace before being pushed back with French backing.

SOURCE: AL JAZEERA AND NEWS AGENCIES

RELATED

Deby, from the Zaghawa ethnic group, took the classic path to power through the army and relished the military culture [File:Getty Images]

Chad President Idriss Deby: The West’s ally in the Sahel region?

Deby’s death cut his 30-year political career short and will likely throw Chadian politics into disarray.

Chad military says it killed 300 rebels after attempted incursion

Chad military says five soldiers were also killed as it put down an armed rebellion in the country’s northwest.

The vote was boycotted by top opposition leaders [Djimet Wiche/ AFP]

Chad’s Idriss Deby wins 6th term as army fends off rebel advance

Veteran president, who came to power in a rebellion in 1990, took 79.3 percent of the vote in the April 11 election.

PUBLIC REVIEW ARTICLE

Horrible Grammatical Concern in the textbook ‘Essential English Language for Senior Secondary Schools

 By Alie Sonta Kamara

It is part of my classroom practice that at the end of each topic, I tell my students to bring me examples from other sources and from past questions to concretize the importance of what we have covered.

What I got this time, as it happens occasionally, caught my attention and filled my heart with much fear. We had just finished a lesson on ‘ adverbial clauses ’, and I had asked the class to bring me more examples from other sources.

A boy  in the third seat close to the front row opened a textbook titled “Essential English Language for Senior Secondary  Schools”, written by Latilo T.A & Beckley A. T. He dictated the following example:

I was so tired *that I could not eat after cooking .

Having written down the example, we cooperatively underlined the required aspect of the sentence that is adverbial in nature, the bold printed portion in the sentence above.

 Earlier, I had told the class that any word group that could tell us more about a verb, an adjective or an adverb is indeed adverbial in nature. That is the name it should bear. Its function will have more to do with a verb or an adjective or an adverb depending on which one of them appears in a given context. This was well explained as we took more than ten examples to ascertain the validity of the claim.

It was clear from a knowledge based approach that the bold printed aspect of the sentence in question (from the book) tells us more about the adjective ‘tired’ than anything else.

 If we ask the adverbial question ‘to what extent’ on the word ‘tired’, we get the word group ‘that I could not eat after cooking’ as the response.

See:

 To what extent was I so tired ?

Answer

 that I could not eat after cooking ..

The relationship between the word ‘tired’ and the word group ‘that I could not eat after cooking’ is consanguineous, or parentally linked in nature. Such a tie is grammatically unique in the sentence in question.

But here is the problem. When I asked the boy who had volunteered to help with examples to tell us the function of the aspect underlined as it is provided in the book, he dictated the following:

It modifies the verb ‘ was tired ’.

Really?! A combination of surprise and fear crawled up my spine, for the response really hit me with utter shock. I demanded that the boy relook the function from the very book. He did, and the result was the same. The mistake was serious.

Now

The word ‘tired’ in that example is nothing short of a predicate adjective. It has an intensifier ‘so’ to indicate the degree by which the overt subject ‘I’ was tired. In fact,  if we want to analyze it further, we can say that ‘so tired’ amounts to an adjective phrase, with ‘tired’ being the head since every phrase has got to have a head. We can determine the name of the phrase by the head. If the head is a noun, then the phrase is a noun phrase; if the head is an adjective, then it becomes an adjective phrase. And this is what we find here.

Intensifiers like ‘so’, ‘very’ and ‘too’ are meant to create adjective phrases and adverb phrases. That is the structuralist view.

 Additionally

The taxonomic rule of analyzing words in their respective parts of speech states the following fact:

All words that occur in the same syntactic context belong to the same paradigm and thus share the same word class . This means that all words that can appear in the same grammatical position in a sentence belong to the same group and therefore share the same part of speech.

Look at this:

I was so tired or so worn out or so fatigued or so exhausted or so sleepy or even so weary ….. the list goes on. We can bring in more adjectives as substitutes to the word ‘tired’ and the sentence will still remain fully balanced and overtly coordinated. That is the structuralist view of how to determine word classes.

 The Worst Case

Writers of the textbook in question regard ‘was tired’ as a verb phrase. This beats my imagination. I had to question my grammatical knowledge about whether I had not given much thought to the problem.

There is no denying that the word ‘tired’ comes from verb, but it has not been used as a verb; it is a verbal, an element that comes from verb but does not do the work of a verb. There are three kinds of verbal in English as follows: gerund ( ending in ‘ing’ and functioning as a noun), participle (ending in ‘ing’, ‘ed’ or ‘en’ and functioning as an adjective), and *infinitive* ( containing the ‘to’ particle with a base form verb as in ‘to eat’, ‘to sleep’, ‘to pray’, etc).

The authors switched from the adjective phrase ‘so tired’ to a predicate concept ‘was tired’. I will not call this a verb phrase because I was not taught to regard it as one.

And when I finally asked for more examples from the same book, I got another problem doing with the difference between ‘when’ and ‘while’.

So imagine the scenario of those who are not well versed in grammar using this book as a reference portal.

A matter like this makes our new approach to learning the parts of speech on Learning Garage very rewarding.

I rest my case while still in fear…

©️ *Learning Garage*

 

HRCSL decides on Rodney Michael and 2 others VS Sports Ministry & SLFA matter

 

The Human Rights Commission of Sierra Leone (HRCSL) has on Friday April 16, 2021 delivered its decision on a complaint filed on 14th February 2020 by Rodney Michael, Nasiru Deen Othman and Abdul Kanasieu Rollings against the Ministry of Sports and the Sierra Leone Football Association.

The complainants alleged that their rights to fair hearing, as well as freedom of assembly and association as football stakeholders following their suspension from all football activities in July 2014 was violated by the Respondents.

Representative the Ministry of Sports, the Permanent Secretary, Mr. Adikali Samura told the Commission that the Minister of Sports had no issues with the complainants.

However, General Secretary of SLFA, Chris Kamara denied allegations against them and stated that an Investigation Committee was set up to look into allegations by the complainants but they refused to attend the proceedings on grounds that the Committee was illegal.

In order to reach a decision, the Commission examined three key issues for determination; right to fair hearing, right to freedom of association and entitlement to any remedy by the complainants if both rights stated above were found to have been violated.

Based on the evidence provided, the Commission found out that the Ministry of Sport and SLFA breached due processes in suspending the complainants as they failed to inform them of any wrong doing in a press release dated 10th March 2015, nor did they give the complainants the opportunity to be heard for any alleged wrongdoing, thereby violating the principle of natural justice and rights to fair hearing contrary to Section 23(2) of the Constitution of Sierra Leone 1991 and Article 20 of the UDHR, article 22 of the ICCPR and article 10 of ACHPR.

The Commission also ruled that the Ministry of Sports failed in its supervisory responsibility to ensure that SLFA lift the suspension imposed on Rodney Michael and the two others as was instructed by the same Ministry on March 2015 and the said suspension prevented the complainants from participating in football activities organised by SLFA.

According to the  Commission, refusing these football stakeholders to participate in activities and events of SLFA was a violation of their rights to freedom of assembly and association under Section 26(1) of the 1991 Constitution.

Human Rights Commission of Sierra Leone therefore ordered the Ministry of Sport and SLFA to apologize to Rodney Michael and the two others, officially lift the suspension, expedite hearing of the allegations on Nasiru Deen Othman, and compensate all three for loss of earnings and psychological hardship suffered from July 2014 to December 2020.