By Ranger
Sierra Leone is one country where there is a great disparity in income between political appointees and ordinary public and private sector workers with no real concerted effort being made by the political and governing classes to give the highest priority to economic development.
To put this in context, how much has Sierra Leone’s GNP grown since 2000? 22 years ago. And how much have the salaries, employments and retirement benefits of Ministers, MPs and top political appointees grown since?
In the highly stratified society that has been created by the political class and cronies for their benefit only they can now afford three highly nutritious meals a day whilst they proclaim to be fighting poverty.
We are well on the road to reducing poverty when we reduce the country’s ever growing budget deficits, when we understand that we cannot continue to import the foods that we eat, when growing them here on a large sustainable scale can definitely reduce hunger, malnutrition, unemployment across many interconnected food production, processing, marketing and distribution sectors, as it will definitely reduce the huge amount of foreign exchange required to import.
We talk about improving on the people’s standards of living when we see new conducive housing estate going up; when we see mass transport systems in place for the growing number of low-income workers and business people that live far away from work and business places.
Certainly, there is no way poverty and the high cost of living can ever be solved without the focus being on robust sustained economic growth and development and most importantly redistribution of wealth to the masses in the various forms mentioned above.
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