Accuse of Government of Negligence
By Joseph S. Margai in Freetown, Sierra Leone
The collapsed Mabang Bridge has been neglected since February 2013
Residents of Mabang and Makoi villages have expressed their disappointment over government’s negligence to reconstruct the Mabang Bridge, which collapsed since 2013.
Mabang and Makoi villages are situated in the Ribbi Chiefdom, Moyamba District, southern Sierra Leone and Koya Chiefdom, Port Loko District, northern Sierra Leone, respectively. The Mabang Bridge serves as boundary between the two chiefdoms and districts.
Our Correspondent in Freetown says the bridge collapsed on Friday, February 22, 2013 sinking a truckload of local produce, and leaving many passengers wounded. Local residents say it was one of the colonial monuments that did not undergo any major maintenance since independence on April 27, 1961.
Our Correspondent on Saturday, August 5, 2017, embarked on a fact finding mission in order to get first-hand information about the plights of the inhabitants of the two villages, including business people who depend on the direly needed route for their economic activities.
Alhassan Sesay, a harbor master of Mabang, Ribbi Chiefdom, Moyamba District in southern Sierra Leone, said the Mabang Bridge collapsed about five years ago and ever since the government has not done much to salvage the situation for them.
He said the only way to transport people is the locally made canoes where passengers pay one thousand Leones (Le1, 000, about $0.13usd) to convey them. He said if passengers have goods, they pay more.
“Life in this part of the country is very difficult. We are going through a lot of constraints to get people and their goods across the river. We don’t have outboard machines boats, all we have here are paddling canoes, which are very risky, but there is no alternative to it,” Sesay lamented.
He said their predominant activities are farming and business but that has been very slow because of the collapsed of the Mabang Bridge and the bad road condition.
The Headman of Makoi Village was unavailable at the time our correspondent went there but his elder son, Hassan A. Kargbo, told Groove 106FM that he remembered one Friday in February when the Mabang Bridge buckled and fell apart.
“I am a commercial motor bike rider and when the bridge was there we were having access to convey passengers directly to villages across the bridge. Since it collapsed, we have lacked the access and much money has not been realized ever since,” he said.
According to him, the government has never taken the reconstruction of the Mabang Bridge seriously at all.
A woman who has been doing business along the Mabang-Waterloo route for 12 years now, Sallay Kanu, said life without the bridge has been very tough for them – the business people.
She said in the last five years, they have been struggling to convey their goods to Waterloo more than all the years she has been on the route and the transport fare has increased five times than the previous amount.
“Previously, we used to pay ten thousand Leones (Le10,000, about $1.33usd) from Mabang Village to Waterloo, but we now pay sixty thousand Leones (Le60,000, about $8.00usd) or more depending on the goods you might want to transport,” she said, adding that the government has never put premium on reconstructing the bridge.
Member of Parliament representing Constituency 57, Abu Bakarr Koroma, said when the bridge collapsed, he urged government to visit the scene and take action after several meetings were held.
He said the construction of the bridge was a grant from the EU but the Portuguese contractors were not making any progress and with the recommendation of the government, their contract was recently terminated.
Koroma said government will surely reconstruct the bridge and called on the people to continue to exercise patient.
Sorie Ibrahim Kanu, Public Relations Officer (PRO) of Sierra Leone Roads Authority (SLRA), agreed that the contract for the construction of the Mabang Bridge has been delayed, adding that the expectation of the people has not been met in a sense that the activities to be done on the project site have not been done.
“The contract, which was handed over to MSF, a Portuguese company, and officially commissioned by President Koroma in 2015, was funded by the European Union (EU). The project was expected to have ended by 2017 but since 2015, we did not see significant work done. The contractor was unable to live up to the expectation of the donor, so SLRA, the National Authorizing Office (NAO), among others, on Friday 4th August, 2017, terminated their contract,” he explained in his office on Monday.
He disclosed that SLRA has evicted them from the project site and all their equipment have been confiscated, adding that the contractors have to pay charges and until those charges are paid, their equipment would remain in the possession of SLRA.
In going forward, the SLRA P.R.O. said, they have asked for bid of quantities from reliable contractors, and the contractors who would become more responsive to negotiations of SLRA, would be reassigned the contract by the end of rains.
He appealed to the public that it was not the intention of SLRA to provide a contractor who cannot execute his job as plans are underway to reconstruct the bridge.
