Information reaching this medium has revealed that APC dominated councils are using the monies allocated to them by the central government to recruit and strengthen their support base by exclusively recruiting APC youths to support the Saturday cleaning exercise rather than spreading out the process to all youths in their communities and local councils.
It will be recalled that few months ago, the central government handed over the administration of the Saturday cleaning exercise to Local Councils away from the Central Government.
The rationale by government was to ensure that the decentralization process is further strengthened and cemented for effective service delivery.
The issue of how the funds are managed by the local councils as far as the implementation of the Saturday cleaning exercise is concerned, continues to be a subject of discuss.
A popular program at Radio VOPAD, Waterloo, outside Freetown in which the radio host, Mr. B.W. Bockarie, a senior member of the Strategic Communications Unit at the Ministry of Information and Communications has revealed that for July, 2019 government allocated a whooping Le3.9 billion to local councils across the country for the July 2nd 2019 cleaning.
A huge chunk of these monies, according to the popular and widely listened program, was allocated to youths in the Wards in the Freetown Municipality and WARDC Councils.
For example, the Freetown City Council and the Western Area Rural District Council received Le192 and 48 million Leones as stipend for youths respectively.
Each youth, according to the plan, should receive Le 40, 000 to participate in the cleaning exercise.
It was also disclosed that other budget lines provided for in the Le3.9 billion budgets also includes funding for coordination, tools and chemicals and also for trucks etc.
We are reliable informed that APC dominated councils are recruiting youths that are only APC to participate in the national cleaning day exercises and that this has left youths who are not members of the APC disinterested in the entire process.
Government has been accused of largely disbursing these monies with very little supervision to check how such funds are utilized.
Most Communities are left with dirt’s days after the cleaning exercise largely because these councils hire very little trucks to gather dirt’s generated out of the process.
In WARD-C, callers to the program have praised some councilors for attacking or holding council officials to book to provide vehicles to their respective wards to facilitate the cleaning.
The ruling SLPP Government should not be seen to be sleeping on its wings by allowing the APC councils to be using government monies in the trying times to cement their bases ahead of the 2023 elections.
They are merely digging up their own graves to be eventually buried in these graves in the ensuing elections.