On our front page today, we have published a photo of a Reuters journalist in Sierra Leone, Mr. Simon Akam. He is a young white male who is always reporting on Sierra Leone in a very negative manner. According to sources, he first came to Sierra Leone as a trainee Reuters journalist but with the help of disgraced UN diplomat Michael Schulenburg’s ‘leaks’ to him and his alliance with the country’s opposition party, the SLPP, he has carved a niche for himself in our country’s journalism landscape.

This was clearly evident last week when Akam speedily reported loftily on Bio’s Nomination day but refused to file a single line on the fact that the country’s capital city was so much in support of President Koroma that on Nomination Day, the city came to a standstill with hundreds of thousands of youthful supporters.

The photograph of Simon Akam which we have published, shows him in the middle of APC youths which means he cannot feign ignorance of what happened that day.

Simon Akam is not alone. There are such journalists in the country including one from Kenya’s THE NATION MEDIA GROUP going by the name of Kemo Cham. The latter, like Simon Akam, enjoys to file bogus negative reports about the country and about anyone he perceives as sympathetic to whatever cause Kemo Cham is opposed to. Kemo Cham does not seem to realize that he is working in a country where criminal libel laws are intact.

All the same, these international journalists and their local counterpart handlers, should be informed that their mission in doomed. The local populace knows what it wants and no amount of silence from the pens of misguided journalists can make them do otherwise.

These journalists are on a doomed mission.