By KABS KANU
This video will shock you , but yes, it is happening in Sierra Leone today under the presidency of Retired Brigadier Maada Bio of the Sierra Leone People’s Party ( SLPP).
A child, accompanied probably by his mother , another woman and another child, is seen in the video getting water from a gutter in Freetown for his family to go use for cooking.
LISTEN TO THE VIDEO
The mother is heard explaining to the citizen journalist producing the video that indeed it is the water from the gutter that they use for domestic purposes, including drinking, cooking, washing dishes and bathing. She asked a rhetoric question that if they do not use the gutter water, how would they drink, cook, wash dishes and bathe.
If this is not a further sign that the SLPP has taken Sierra Leone to the gutters, we wonder what other sign people need. Sierra Leone have reached gutter-level in their pitiful suffering due to neglect by the government.
Yes, indeed, yes . These are the many neglectful things Maada Bio is being made to get away with in Sierra Leone. Citizens are now forced to used gutter water to drink, cook, wash dishes and bathe .
Citizens have been driven into these top-end desperate measures , endangering the lives, because the SLPP Government has failed to sustain water infrastructures and are now not able to provide clean, fresh pipe-borne water in the city for the people, despite the millions of dollars the SLPP Government continues to receive from donor countries to fix Sierra Leone’s infrastructure.
COCORIOKO agrees with the commentator and other Sierra Leoneans that the politicians that have ruled Sierra Leone since Independence are to share the blame for this state of affairs. Sixty -three years of Independence should have by now seen both parties build strong, resilient , sustainable water supply systems that would thwart desperate suffering like this.
We cannot honestly blame one set of politicians only for this problem because it has festered across all the spectrums of leadership in Sierra Leone since Independence.
We are only blaming the SLPP more because they are the party in power and this is happening under their watch. At least, though they cannot be exonerated, the APC had the water pipes running in many parts of the city and the situation was not as desperate as it is now. At least, children were seen with water buckets trekking long distances to go fetch water from areas where the water pipes were running. Yes, there were critical water shortages but at least , some of the water taps were running. But what has now happened is that under this SLPP Government, the water supply system seems to have collapsed completely. The SLPP have sat down and allowed the rickety system they inherited to collapse.
This is a shameful story but we are constrained to publish it because our readers deserve to see how our country is seriously regressing. The SLPP did not prove themselves to be a better alternative to the APC.
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