Sierra Leone: The Oswald Hanciles Column - 'Troubled' SLBC - Implicitly Or Calculatedly 'Sabotages' President Koroma

analysis

Freetown — The title I started off for this piece echoed how one former UN Radio - now Sierra Leone Broadcasting Corporation (SLBC) - staff derisively described the current Board and Management of the SLBC: "Square pegs in round holes....". I changed the title after my experience with the SLBC over the past one week as I researched the piece. It accentuates the reports to me of some SLBC staff; and underlines the conundrum that could be faced by any Sierra Leone government in trying to reform any public institution shackled by their by jaded and jaundiced staff; staff made largely sterile by their absolute I-don't-care-attitude to work; and with too many of them made near-useless by their total contempt for productivity.

On Monday, 8th August, 2011, I persuaded the Director-General of the SLBC, the eloquent, erudite, 'Leadership Expert', former lecturer in a U.S. university, Elvis Gbanabom Hallowell, to help give T.V. publicity to Volume One of the biography of President Ernest Bai Koroma, titled, "NATURAL BORN LEADER"; that I have written, and which will be launched at Taia Hotel on September 2, 2011. He immediately summoned to his office the Head of Television in SLBC, Samuel Valcassel. On Friday, August 12, one T.V. editor Valcassel had delegated the work to, Josephus Olu-Mammah, interviewed me on film. Josephus informed me that the interview would be aired on SLBC TV on Saturday, August 13, at 9.30 a.m. It wasn't aired. Then, he shifted the time to 2.00 p.m. It was never shown. In his SLBC headquarter office at New England in Freetown, I met the Head of Television, Valcassel, on Saturday, August 13, to lodge my protest. He assured me that he

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