Those lovely people at Comium were kind enough to give me four free text messages when I bought my new SIM card from them. Time I used one, I think…
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D-e-a… Deaf Millimetre
(What the – “Deaf millimetre”? Stupid predictive text! Let’s start this again…)
Dear Minister,
Many thanks for your reassuring SMS message of 29 April. It certainly made me feel welcome to receive a personal text message from the Government – not to mention just a tiny bit paranoid, as I hadn’t given my number to anyone. Still, it’s not like you’re a reporter for one of Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers or anything like that, so I guess I’ve got nothing to fear…
But here’s the thing that’s bothering me. You’ve gone to great lengths to assure us that there’s no fuel shortage; that Sierra Leone has enough fuel to last three months, and that the queues I’ve been seeing at petrol stations everywhere I go are “created by unscrupulous people to create confusion.” Someone really needs to pass that information on to the proprietors of the country’s petrol stations – that is, unless they are the “unscrupulous people” you were referring to in your text message. The other day, the car I was in had to completely change its route home because half the road was taken up by stationary cars lined up outside a station whose entrances had been sealed off.
But that’s not the worst thing. I saw someone drive into a petrol station and ask for fuel, only for someone who worked at the station to instruct him to drive a few doors down the road away from the station… where he proceeded to sell him a plastic container full of petrol at an inflated price. I’m not mentioning any names or locations here. But if you guys and your mad espionage skills were sharp enough to obtain my mobile number before I’d even given it to my mum, I’m sure you’re on the case and have probably already apprehended the guilty parties.
All I’m saying here is, the more I walk around Freetown (and I’m having to walk a lot, because flippin’ heck, those petrol queues are causing some serious traffic jams!), the harder I find it to believe your text message. I’m not accusing you of lying or anything like that; after all, you’re the boss round here and I’m just a mere JC, so what do I know? In fact, I’m so much of a JC that yesterday, a white man with an accent from the place English people call “Oop North, like” introduced me to his boss with the words, “This is George. He’s a JC.” So maybe I should just mind my own business…
Kind regards,
George Luke
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Sorry, but your SMS message has not been sent as it exceeds the maximum length. SMS messages must be 150 characters or less.
Oh, crap. Well, at least I tried…
GEORGE LUKE 
Did they charge you an inflated rate to receive your text?xx
So what’s a JC?
‘JC’: “Just Come”. A term generally used to refer to foreign visitors, but mostly used in a somewhat derogatory manner to refer to people of Sierra Leonean origin who have lived out of the country for so long (or who’ve never actually lived there), they don’t really fit in.