“We are creating policies that will nudge our citizens towards utilizing the media for enhancing respect, providing evidence, and increasingly knowledge of global national trend,” he said.
The state of the nation address attracted lots of stakeholders from the ruling All Peoples Congress Party, APC, the minority Sierra Leone Peoples Party, SLPP, representatives from various ministries, departments and agencies.
President Koroma disclosed that his government’s input to national development was visible in all parts of the country, and further stated that even though the prices of iron ore drastically plummeted in the international market, the situation never stopped the country from its development gains.
As a democratic state of two major political parties, APC and SLPP, some Sierra Leoneans had lauded the president on what some said were empirical developmental strides during his nine years in governance, they also said the system was largely a mess.
Opposition Member of Parliament for Constituency 70, Mohamed Tholley, said the only development in the APC-led government was road infrastructure, arguing that all other important areas like agriculture and education were a complete failure.
“The millions of dollars the government was budgeting for the importation of rice depicts failure in the agricultural sector across the country”, he lamented.
Meanwhile, President Koroma said despite all the challenges in the country his government had launched the school feeding programme, a programme he considered to be a winning and the biggest social transformation in the country.
He added that through the Ministry of Education they had established a situation room which would receive information from 1,192 community monitors to register quality assurance in schools across the country.
In the agricultural sector President Koroma stated that his government’s objective, under the recovery programme, was to employ 10,000 people across the agricultural supply chain, increase agricultural production and productivity.
He said as a result of that the ministry of agriculture had distributed 65,000 bushels of seed rice, 42,000 bags of assorted fertilizers and millions of different varieties of tree crops and seedlings to individual farmers and farming groups.
