The tractors, it emerged, were sitting idle. The loans had gone unrepaid. And the onion plantations that had generated so much social media excitement had yet to produce the kind of verified data that a parliamentary committee could work with.
These were among the uncomfortable realities surfaced when the Parliamentary Oversight Committee on Planning and Economic Development convened its first formal engagement with the Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security a session that began in the language of partnership but quickly hardened into something closer to a reckoning.
The committee’s chairman, Hon. Musa Fofanah, set the tone from the outset. Parliament, he made clear, was not in the business of governing by press release. “We have heard about onion plantations, livestock projects, and several interventions,” he told Ministry officials, “but we need facts from the right authorities.” The Feed Salone initiative the government’s flagship programme aimed at achieving national food self-sufficiency had generated considerable public narrative. What it had not yet generated, in sufficient quantity, was evidence.
The Ministry’s Director of Planning presented the sector’s alignment with Sierra Leone’s Medium-Term National Development Plan for 2024 to 2030, laying out an architecture of ambition: food self-sufficiency as the primary national goal, anchored by pillars covering farmer resource access, climate-smart agriculture, youth and women empowerment, and import substitution strategies targeting the country’s dependence on foreign poultry, eggs, and onions. On paper, the framework was coherent. It was the distance between framework and field that Members of Parliament found troubling.
MPs raised concern after concern. Agricultural machinery distributed to districts across the country including tractors dispatched to Kabala had been found unused or deteriorating, with no credible monitoring system to account for the waste. Infrastructure meant to connect farming communities to markets, including bridges whose economic rationale MPs questioned directly, had not been accompanied by evidence of impact. One legislator challenged the Ministry on the apparent neglect of major food-producing regions that barely featured in the presentation at all.
The issue of land grabbed the committee’s attention for different reasons. MPs flagged growing community-level conflicts over land suitability and agricultural planning, demanding scientific data to justify crop selection and investment decisions — not political priorities dressed in agronomic language. The question of who was actually benefiting from government agricultural land allocations, and at whose expense, was left hanging in the chamber air.
Past loan schemes for farmers drew some of the sharpest exchanges. Members recalled instances in which beneficiaries had defaulted without consequence, leaving public funds unrecovered. Youth agricultural initiatives several of which had reportedly been abandoned after harvest were cited as further evidence of a supervision deficit that neither the Ministry of Agriculture nor the Ministry of Youth Affairs had adequately addressed.
Ministry officials, for their part, did not dispute the gaps. They acknowledged limited funding, understaffing, and logistical constraints, noting that recruitment processes were underway to bolster capacity and that monitoring improvements were in progress. It was the kind of acknowledgement that sounded responsible in the room and would sound hollow in the districts where the tractors remained stationary.
Hon. Fofanah closed the session with a warning pitched as a commitment. “We want to see results that align with our national development goals. Agriculture is at the heart of this government’s agenda, and we must ensure that resources are used effectively for the benefit of the people.” The committee is expected to formally request detailed reports on ongoing projects, funding utilisation, and measurable outcomes and has signalled that field visits to verify implementation on the ground may follow.
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For the farming communities waiting on seeds, machinery, and markets that government programmes have repeatedly promised, Parliament arriving to ask questions is, at least, a beginning. Whether it translates into harvest is another matter entirely.
