AN OVERTLY SUBSTANTIALLY RECOMMENDED COPY CARBON OF GRANDPA, OSWALD HANCILES' PIECE_ BY BISHOP SAHR ISAAC PETERSON

 Dear lazybones, 

As you're here tonight, wanting to understand compressive strength of this article, I say, in my faith-like-person, I bring you ferocious greetings from my humble abode. You're in fine trim, methinks. 

In a bit of my panegyric, eulogia, kindly allow me to usher you through my apostolic faith as a voracious, audacious, and speedy reader. One who has once won Best Students Reader's Award(BSRA), Ghana, 2019; One who reads and teaches language with stylistic encomium.

To complete an exposition of this magnitude is not the labor of a lazybones. 

It demands a scholastic penman with unerring accuracy — a writer who marries empirical observation with ideological critique, and who refuses to settle for press-release politics. 

Oswald Hanciles is precisely that: a development communicator, policy observer, and public intellectual whose prose excavates beneath official rhetoric to interrogate the material conditions of post-war Sierra Leone.

 Such a text could not have been finished, nor its nuance preserved, were I, Peterson, not a voracious, anxious reader — one compelled to chase footnotes, cross-reference ministerial claims with field realities, and interrogate the political economy behind every “giant step.”

Hanciles opens with a paradox that frames the entire column: Sierra Leone possesses “obvious” geological and agro-ecological wealth — world-class diamonds, premium rutile, and billions in FDI from African Minerals, London Mining, and Sierra Rutile — yet the UNDP still classifies its people among the poorest globally. 

This disjuncture between resource endowment and human welfare becomes the analytical lens through which he assesses governance.

The centerpiece is President Ernest Bai Koroma’s commissioning of the _FIRST STEP_ Africa Felix Juice factory in Newton, 22 miles from Freetown, on May 13, 2011. _FIRST STEP_, a subsidiary of U.S.-based World Hope International, represents an ethical FDI model: a Special Economic Zone premised on “Christianity in Action” capitalism. 

The plant, a $4 million turnkey operation with $2 million in Italian machinery from Parma’s “Food Valley,” began production that day. 

Hanciles profiles the venture’s architect, Italian entrepreneur Claudio Scotto, not as a technocrat but as an ascetic, priest-like figure biologically “fused” to Sierra Leone through marriage to Rene Thomas, niece of former Chief Justice Dr. Ade Renner-Thomas. Scotto’s epiphany came in 2003 while holidaying: tasting local mangoes and ‘smooth cayenne’ pineapples, he noted the absurdity of hotels importing juice while 90% of wild mangoes rotted.

Next to the fore, according to Grandpa Oswald Hanciles, rejecting bureaucratic intermediaries — “I do not like middle men” — he dealt directly with 1,500 farmers across Moyamba, Bo, Tonkolili, Bombali, Koinadugu, and Port Loko, with technical support from Ghanaian agronomists. 

The factory employed 55 Sierra Leoneans, including lab technician Mabinty Kabia, and women paid Le30,000 for a 10-hour shift sorting fruit. Products were branded _“Product of Sierra Leone”_ and exported in drums bearing the national colors — a symbolic assertion of value-addition over raw export. 

Hanciles frames this as wealth creation from “that which has been largely of no economic value,” and questions its egalitarian depth. 

He invokes policy instruments like Amadu Massaly’s DENI proposal and rural banks to argue for cooperative farmer-shareholding, so that risk and ownership are socialized, not concentrated.

Politically, Hanciles positions Koroma’s gesture as a test of “enabling environment” creation. 

He contrasts it with the extractive enclave model and asks whether the state can institutionalize such agro-industrial linkages beyond personality-driven projects.

In his July 12, 2026 addendum, Hanciles reflects with bitterness.

 As then-Head of Public Affairs at NRA, marginalized under Commissioner-General Haja Kallah-Kamara, he chose research over complaint. He later pitched Development Communications frameworks to Agriculture Minister Joseph Ndenemah under President Bio’s government in 2018, but the proposals were “squashed” — no questions, no follow-up.

 He laments a governance continuum broken: ECOWAS 2026 approaches with “abstractions, praise singing, thumping of chests” and hundreds of millions potentially squandered, while human capital remains untapped.

The column thus functions on two registers. 

In 2011, it is a case study in industrial policy, South-North partnership, and agricultural value chains. In 2026, it is a political indictment: a reminder that development requires institutional memory, not episodic ribbon-cuttings. Hanciles concludes with a rhetorical pause, refusing to ask the final damning question, but the implication is clear — without continuity, accountability, and inclusion, “first giant steps” risk becoming monuments without movement.

© Bishop Sahr Isaac Peterson

Language Analyst

Literary Scholar

IGCSE, TOEFL, IELTS, among others.

11th, Saturday, July,.2026

Freetown, Sierra Leone

West Africa.