President Dr Julius Maada Bio has completed a four-day working visit to major towns in the Kenema District and inspected the Dodo mini-hydro dam, some 380 km from Freetown and 69 km from the headquarter town of Kenema.
Dodo, a 6 MW run-of-the-river hydropower plant, operated by the Bo-Kenema Power Station, is functional and is a part of a regional grid connecting thermal power plants in Bo and Kenema.
President Bio said he was visiting to inspect the mini-hydro and to get first-hand updates on the status of the facility that had continued to serve that part of the country, adding that his government was also looking at the possibility of renovating and expanding the capacity of the dam.
On separate occasions, His Excellency President Julius Maada Bio, who was accompanied by his wife, First Lady Fatima Maada Bio and senior members of his government, addressed townhall meetings and shared progress by his government in the last three years.
He referred to some statistics from the Ministry of Education to explain to his people who came from across chiefdoms, towns and villages in the region that how much the eastern region had embraced the Free Quality School Education by not only sending more children to school, but by also making impressive progress in public exams.
“In the history of this country and under my administration, we have more children that have accessed the Free Quality School Education than ever before. We have trained and recruited more teachers and have also recruited more nurses. There are more reforms in the justice sector than ever before.
“We have guaranteed freedom of speech by repealing the 1965 Public Order Act that criminalised libel, more access to girls and women empowerment, and very recently, we have abolished the death penalty. Even under the difficult circumstances of the COVID-19, we waged war on corruption, which in previous times, had stalled development in the country. My government continues to work harder to address the needs of our people,” he noted.
He further stated that the people of Sierra Leone were very resilient, having gone through the ravages of the 11 years of civil war, the Ebola that killed many compatriots, the mudslide that also left a devastating effect on the citizenry and the Coronavirus disease that had almost wreck the entire nations of the world.
He, therefore, urged them to exercise some patience while he tried to fix the nation that everyone would be proud of in the near future.