The NCP Chairman was speaking in an exclusive interview in China’s capital city of Beijing, recently. He said the New Direction administration will ensure that monies generated by public entities will rotate within the country for the betterment of all Sierra Leoneans.
“When I took over as chairman few months ago, I firstly looked at the NCP Act of 2002 and the commission’s mandate and I decided to look at the experiences I have accumulated over the years, to bring some positive transformation to the commission,” he recalled.
He added that as a lawyer by profession, he does a lot of corporate practice. Napoleon said he looked at the commission from a purely business perspective and said to himself that if government has placed these various public entities under the NCP, they should yield dividend for public use as a matter of must, to which he is dedicated, he added.
“According to the NCP Act of 2002, where privatization is not possible at the time, the commission has a mandate to provide oversight, manage and regulate these public entities. Government established them to make profit which will be used to develop the state, and if they are not making profit, there are questions to ask and be answered,” he said.
He told journalists that he had also called in most of the heads of public entities and had a very clear discussion on what the commission wishes to undertake to make them vibrant and more proactive.
He noted that in that meeting, he talked about redefining the roles of the institutions and to live within the lines of the “New Direction” policy, which particularly talks about providing discipline leadership, and delivering services in the interest of the people.
“One of the activities we have undertaken is to replace the management of some of the public enterprises. We brought in people with specific mandate to positively turn around things in those institutions. Such actions have brought steady improvement in those public enterprises. Most of them now understand that the next financial year, they should start to make profit and pay dividend to the government,” he said.
He revealed that he has told the new managements that government is not going to subsidize or put money into public enterprises listed.
“They have to generate their own revenue to take care of themselves to survive whilst the government is looking for strategic partners to come and invest in these listed public enterprises by extending them so that they could make more profit for the people of Sierra Leone,” he added.
