By Ladenson Kamah in Bo

Traditional chiefs of Kakua chiefdom in the Bo district said they no longer want the resident magistrate, Adrian Fisher who took up office in the district some two weeks ago.

The traditional leaders had made a formal request for his replacement in a protest letter dated April 26, 2008 and addressed to the provincial secretary south, Alhaji Lansana Koroma.

According to the letter signed by chiefs, Magistrate Fisher was said to have ordered the imprisonment of their chiefdom speaker Murray Margao; a decision they considered as unprofessional, biased, despotic and an effrontery to their authority.

They further argued that magistrate Fisher had openly displayed professional incompetence, ineptitude as well as disrespect for enviable old age traditional leaders.

Magistrate Fisher, who oversees 27 chiefdoms in the district said the level corruption was a problem and that he had discovered that there were 138 cases awaiting his attention. Twenty of these cases he has disposed of while records showed that 36 prisoners were being detained when in fact they were not there.

 

Margao was said to have pleaded guilty in a land matter before magistrate Fisher who then ordered his imprisonment, a move they claimed was a violation of his immunity as speaker.

As a result, chiefs said they were not comfortable working with magistrate Fisher in Bo.