Contributed to the Patriotic Vanguard
Fatmata Claire Carlton-Hanciles (photo), the Executive Director of the Sierra Leone Legal Aid Board, Tuesday exhorted the various strands of traders groups in the country to “end their subtle rivalry” and “unite in a single umbrella coalition” to better take advantage of the legal and Justice services being offered by the Board.
She told them of the Board’s budding Citizens Advisory Bureau’s intention to lessen the work of the police by getting civil society to intercede in petty civil disputes which outwardly smack of criminality and have hundreds of volunteer senior citizens and local leaders interceding and settling disputes between and among people and, more importantly, to set in motion a ‘trader’s bank’ that could have assets in the billions of Leones, and be like a loan source for the finance-starved traders.
On the 3rd February, 2016, at the Legal Aid Board’s conference room, Guma Building, Lamina Sankoh Street, Freetown, Carlton-Hanciles spoke to the following leaders of the traders: the Sierra Leone Traders Association’s Gibrilla Turay who said that “even with Le1,000 daily contributed by the traders, we will easily raise billions of Leones for the suggested trader’s bank”); United Commercial Indigenous Petty Traders Association’s Bureh Kamara who begged for “sincerity”, and an end to “duplicity”, Sierra Leone Concerned Traders Association’s Foday Sayid Kamara whose organization has written a letter to the President expressing their “disgust” with the Sierra Leone Police’s now famous “AIG Memuna”; a point punctured by their Secretary General, David Sasipo Sankoh, Abacha Traders and Development Association’s Joseph Kamara, who said that twenty years ago he was just a “labourer”, but today is an importer, National Rogbangbay Traders and Agriculture Association’s Ahmed Sulaiman Denkeh), Abacha Youth Development Traders and others.
The traders gave Carlton-Hanciles a rousing welcome when she entered the conference room, a sign of their growing appreciation for the unprecedented work the Board has been doing in less than a year,work that seems to have benefited the traders immeasurably by giving them free legal advice and legal representation, facilitating their freedom from police cells and the maximum security Pademba Road Correctional Center and so on.
All the leaders of the trader groups pledged to unite as one body to take greater advantage of the Board’s legal services, and to fast-track the vision of a Traders’ Bank.
Speaker after speaker showered praises on President Ernest Bai Koroma for setting up the Legal Aid Board.
Journalist and social commentator Oswald Hanciles was also praised by several speakers for the role he played in 1998 in waging a media campaign for the petty traders against the SLPP’s then Interior Minister, Charles Margai, who was running roughshod over the traders.
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