By Ralph Sesay
Victims of the mudslide disaster at Matormeh, in Freetown, have urged the new Minister of Housing and Public Assets, Mr. Raymond De Souza George, to consider allocating the houses built for them at Mile 6 outside Freetown.
Speaking to this medium, the survivors of the mudslide flood, who are currently squatting in different slums in the City of Freetown, have accused the past APC government of failing to provide them with decent accommodation to house their families after they lost their homes in that unfortunate disaster at Matormeh in Freetown on the 14th August ,2017.
They and their families are suffering immensely after they were evicted from a temporal camp created at Old School in the west of Freetown by the government. Despite the huge international funding and support that has attracted the disaster from International Financial Institutions, NGOs and other well-meaning philanthropists both within and outside Sierra Leone the situation remains a misery for these survivors.
It could be recalled that government, as part of the post mudslide recovery project, had built houses through the support of three local indigenous construction companies -Davenport, Gento Group and Secon – at Mile Six (6) outside Freetown.
The facilities would eventually accommodate sixty families and have an orphanage, church, mosque, community center and other facilities. Work had since been completed in these buildings and former President Koroma had commissioned the facilities in January, 2018, where he had pledged to ensure that survivors of the flood would be allocated with these houses.
Nightwatch had sometimes back in February visited the facilities and discovered that all the houses are locked and the Sierra Leone Police is providing security at the facility. It was revealed to our reporter that the three local companies had since handed over the facility to the government of Sierra Leone, precisely the Sierra Leone Housing Corporation whose task was to ensure that these houses are distributed to the mudslide survivors.
With the emergence of a new administration and the subsequent appointment of a substantive Minister for Works, Housing and Public Assets, it is the hope of the mudslide survivors that the houses will be speedily distributed so as to end the suffering of a good number of mudslide survivors who cannot afford the huge sums of money to rent houses and currently squatting in very disaster prone areas in different part of Freetown.