INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S DAY - SIERRA LEONE-STYLE

Today is International Women's  Day and you can guess just what would be going on. The speeches at seminars and workshops etc etc would be there just to justify the funds requested and obtained on behalf of women in Sierra Leone!!

Of course you would not be wrong if on the ground you do not seem to see the real women of Sierra Leone who bear the brunt of it all. No they are mainly in the rural areas - uneducated, disadvantaged and led by the nose by deceptive politicians and rights groups whose main aim is to keep the unfortunate women in their miserable  and disadvantaged state with education, health and other social amenities a dream, while those who say they are their advocates would be winging it abroad for treatment should they have a cold!!!

Ask the UNDP what their officials have been doing to raise the living standards of women and you are bound to have a well-rehearsed mantra drummed into your ears as if you were some fool. Indeed on the website of the UNDP in Sierra Leone would be found this well-worn cliche

UNDP's collective aspiration is to assist the people of Sierra Leone in their quest for a future that is free of violence and extreme poverty, and one that offers equality, dignity and opportunity for a decent livelihood for all.

Now ask them (the UNDP and Sierra Leone government) how many women from the rural areas, the under-privileged, the disadvantaged and the uneducated are ever involved in celebrations marking an effort by the international community to highlight and address their lot. None, you can be sure none.

Kindly ask the self-serving UNDP officials on the ground what they have done to address the extreme poverty that is the lot of women in Sierra Leone and let them take you to villages up country as well as some sections of the capital where they have done something to lift the living standard of the poor and disadvantaged women of Sierra Leone.

And yet year after year, Sierra Leonean women from disadvantaged groups continue to suffer at the hands of opportunistic and elitist women's groups whose chief officials are only interested in keeping their positions while making the best of things for their personal gains.

This morning according to the website of UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown - the Prime Minister would be hosting an event in Downing Street on Saturday to mark International Women's Day. Guests included some of the UK's most successful business women. The Prime Minister would be asking them what the business world could do to help tackle the problems of maternal mortality in developing countries and what more they could do as individuals to help bring on the next generation of women business leaders.

And in another development Gordon Brown has called for more to be done to cut maternal and infant mortality rates around the world. In Prime Minister's Questions, Prime Minister Brown said there could be "no better way" to mark the forthcoming International Women's Day than to reduce the deaths of women during childbirth that currently stands at half a million people a year. In countries such as Sierra Leone, one in seven births results in the mother losing her life, he said.

It is of interest to note that Sierra Leoneans, still not sure whether they are now saddled with a government that in all colours is the civilian version of the AFRC/RUF coalition of evil aka the beasts would want to know what the Ernest Bai Koroma government is doing for the women victims of the atrocities visited upon Sierra Leone's hapless women.

What programme has the government got in place/thinking of...in addressing the tens of thousands of rape victims? It's a new government - some apologists might say, but Ernest Bai Koroma had been an opposition leader for a while and should be aware of just what happened to our women folk.

So as this day is observed, we would urge the Ernest Bai Koroma government to do all it could to serve the women of Sierra Leone.