By Foday Moriba Conteh
Kamakwie Town which is geopolitically, strategically placed and its central location in the new Karene district gives it an edge over any other town to be the District Headquarter Town. Its multi-ethnic character is an ace and the town is well positioned as it stands astride the trade routes between Kambia, Falaba, Koinadugu, Bombali and Port Loko Districts.
Kamakwie offers better educational and healthcare facilities with five secondary schools (two senior and three junior) and a vocational institute. The town has one of the best hospitals in the country, the Kamakwie Wesleyan Hospital founded in 1959 by the Wesleyan missionaries and this hospital has not only supported the people of Karene District but the entire country compared to Batkanu that doesn’t have all these facilities to become the Headquarter town for Karene District and that Kamakwie has been completely transformed by rapidly changing economic and social developments as a result of its proximity to Guinea.
Moving the headquarter town to Batkanu primarily because of the tombstones of rogue colonial administrators would invoke the British as a prototype, a point of reference and the symbol of imperial legitimacy and identity. The relics in Batkanu are a reminder of colonial wrongs. We trust the maturity and reasoning of the current political leadership and strongly believe that they would not allow any persons with vested interests to cloud their reason. For those of us who have a long memory we know what consequences there might be when a group of people feels marginalized along political lines. We hope that just weight would be attached to this argument.
It stands to reason, therefore, that the choice of Kamakwie was far from being political. The choice was borne out of sound reasoning and stoutly supported by both national and world history as has been seen above. In a world where life seems to be fast-paced and dynamic, where places are becoming more and more reachable because of their central location, we cannot afford the luxury of having the headquarter town of Karene District moved to Batkanu, an impoverished colonial town on the edge of the new district with limited chances of social advancement. The speed of urbanization would lag behind if it were so, and the cost of building a headquarter town from scratch would be too huge a financial burden for the Government to bear more so when there are more important issues to grapple with. Kamakwie already has the infrastructural foundation which can greatly reduce cost.
A case study was the headquarter town of the new Falaba District is Mongor Town and it was chosen because it is centrally located. Mongor is nearer to all chiefdoms in the district. Although Kulor and Sendugu Chiefdoms are still far away but Mongor is still the mid-point and that any attempt to shift the headquarter town to some other town would be a great disadvantage to other chiefdoms. Our case should be looked into from that standpoint because at the end of the day the overall objective is to spread out much needed social and economic developments to hard-to-reach chiefdoms like Tambakha on the Guinean border.
It could be a greater mischief to the country and its people than propagating wrong notions concerning the country’s colonial past. Many reject with all their might the bold attempt to mislead the country and take the greatest exception to any calculated attempt by a selected few who think they can overtly exploit political affiliations to rewrite the history of the country in order to give life to their unpatriotic whims and aspirations.
