Sylvia Blyden
Sylvia Olayinka Walmina Oreshola Blyden (born 1 October 1971 in Freetown, Sierra Leone) is a Sierra Leonean journalist, political commentator, newspaper publisher, and former Sierra Leone minister of Social Welfare, Gender and Children Affairs under erstwhile President Ernest Bai-Koroma from 2016 to 2017. She served as Special Executive Assistant to Sierra Leone's former president Ernest Bai Koroma from 2013 to 2015.
Quotes
[edit]- Dr. Blyden admonishes her APC comrades attacking her, that “ungratefulness is a very bad sin” and says people should stop provoking her as she was deeply hurt by the betrayal of the APC leadership when she needed them the most.
- Dr. Blyden then quotes a parable “about a man who is deep in slumber on his bed dreaming a lovely dream and fire blazes inside the bedroom but the man is fast asleep enjoying his dream”. She says if someone sees the fire, bursts into the room and quickly wakes up the sleeping man, “the sleeping man will initially get annoyed from being woken up from his lovely dream.”
- It is only when his sleepy eyes open up and sees the fire that he will start to appreciate the person who woke him up”. Using this metaphor, Dr. Blyden says she is alerting her APC Comrades that are fast asleep amid serious legal and constitutional problem that is raging around them which needs technical handling to sort it out.
- As a Politician, I feel sad for any President having an Attorney General (AG) who misleads with bad legal advice that affects the entire Nation. Since I want to serve as a Sierra Leone President in the future, I’m capacitating myself to detect bad advice from my AG.
- I do believe colours should not divide us.
- To avoid peer taunts caused the huge majority of Pregnant Girls to decide not to go back to school when Schools re-opened. Going by pre-Ebola data, it was clear that the majority of these girls will decide never to re-enrol back into school. It meant many potentially highly educated women will be lost from reaching their full educational potentials. This sadly meant a widening of the gender gap amongst educated adults in the future. Clearly, His Excellency who is very gender-sensitive and always striving to close the gender gap, realised Sierra Leone had a future Gender Crisis on its hands if all those thousands of girls dropped out of school. To combat the Crisis, our government had to be innovative and think outside the box. We developed an Innovation which was ALTERNATIVE SCHOOLING FOR PREGNANT GIRLS.”
- Pregnant Girls could now be assured that in the company of fellow pregnant girls at the alternative Schools, peer taunts were impossibility as everyone in the classroom was pregnant. The pregnant girls rushed to enrol. We provided classes for them in Core Subjects & most importantly, WE PROVIDED COUNSELING TO REBUILD THEIR CONFIDENCE TO GO BACK TO SCHOOL.
External links
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Media related to Sylvia Blyden on Wikimedia Commons
