The Director of National Budget in the Ministry of Finance Mr. Tasima Jah has assured the Ministry of Internal Affairs that his Ministry is committed to the construction of a new correction centre that will replace the overcrowded Freetown Male Correctional Centre at Pademba Road in Freetown.
He made this disclosure during the ongoing budget hearing in the conference hall of the Ministry of Finance in Freetown after the Internal Affairs Ministry had presented its Fiscal Year 2021 budget.
The Pademba Road Correctional Center was built for 324 inmates now houses over 1,300 prisoners.
In Sierra Leone, prison and detention centre conditions are harsh and life threatening due to food shortages, gross overcrowding; consequent upon an inefficient justice system, lack of sufficient correctional facilities and personnel, lack of clean water, inadequate sanitary conditions, and lack of medical care, according to the 2019 U.S. State Department Human Rights Report.
The report shows that, the country’s 20 prisons, designed to hold 2,055 inmates, held 4,559 as of August 2019. The most severe example of overcrowding was in the Freetown Male Correctional Centre, designed to hold 324 inmates, which held 2,089. Some prison cells measuring six feet by nine feet held nine or more inmates, according to the Report.
Jah said, “This is a very laudable project and it is high time we started seeing some resources allocated to it for it to be achieved in the next couple of years.”
He added that since the idea of relocating the Pa Demba Road Correctional Centre was brought up by late President Ahmed Tejan Kabba some 20 years ago very little has been done to ensure that it is achieved.
During the budget presentation, the Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs Mr. Lahai Laurence Leema said the prison break that took place during the reign of late President Ahmed Tejan Kabba necessitated the relocation of the prison to Songo outside the capital of Freetown.
He claimed that the move was already on the pipeline since he took over as a Deputy Minister and a committee has been set up and chaired by the Vice President Dr. Juldeh Jalloh.
“Once the work of the committee is done, then we can move forward,” he said.
The key deliverables of the Ministry for 2021 FY are the alignment of the Ministry’s Strategic Plan with the National Development Plan (2019-2023), operationalize the two Directorate structure of the Ministry as recommended by the Management and Functional Review (MFR) Report of 2007, conduct effective monitoring of Agencies and assessment of funding gap for donor support, roll out implementation of the National Action Plan on Statelessness, and develop a unified intranet platform for the Security sector.
The budget estimate for the Ministry of Internal Affairs for the 2021 FY is (recurrent expenditure) Le 14,379,700,000.00, but it has a budget ceiling of Le 1,281,700,000.00; there is an excess of Le 13,098,000,000.00 recurrent expenditure.
By George M.O Williams
15/10/2020. ISSUE NO: 7931