On the occasion of his eightieth birthday, the poet and novelist writes a Letter to his Country.
‘ Civilisation has nothing to do with the size of our grain crop or the tallness of our buildings. It is about the quality of the men and women that a nation produces!’
- George Santayana
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It was inevitable…………..this fall from grace: our descent into the whirlpool of amorality, after our Independence from colonialism. It was inevitable that we would allow the best inherited virtues, institutions and laws to collapse, after they fell into the hands of those who, by some acts of chicanery, managed to come to political power, and then wasted no time showing their true intentions of shameless corruption, greed, and, worse, a complete disinterestedness in the welfare of the state.
Some sixty years later, the shame of opprobrium has finally caught up with us ; ending with, along with Guinea Bissua, our becoming only the second West African nation to be tarred with the brush of cocaine trafficking, plus hiding one of Europe’s most wanted drug lords, in some highly protected comfort. Earlier, on March 23 ,2025, in the Standard Today newspaper, there was a report , from Karachi, that the ‘ Pakistan Customs had seized Rs 2, 8billion ( about US10 million) worth of smuggled tramodol, ‘disguised as towel export to Sierra Leone.’ In addition to all the maledictions from which we were already suffering, it transpired, from numerous sources that we had become a Narco State, in the eyes of the world.
As if the above was not shocking enough, here comes the latest mind-blowing piece of news: that Sierra Leonean citizenship can be obtained by four different groups, of so-called investors, who ‘ can simply pay $140k,’ in crypto-currency, to become citizens , without any background check, within ninety days. Specifically, ‘the first target market is foreign businessmen doing business in West Africa; foreign businessmen who have issues renewing their permits and visas, in places like Ghana and Nigeria. The second target market is wealthy individuals, who want to leave a legacy for their children and grandchildren. The Sierra Leonean citizenship by investment goes down the generations. The third target is passport freaks: people who just go around collecting passports, because it is their hobby, and, essentially, they find it funny. Target number four are people who want flexibility; so the KYC process can be completed in less than three months, and you can pay in crypto-currency!’ LORD, what did we do to deserve this curse on our nation!
With these reports, and the rapid spread of the Kush drug problem, the Mpox crisis, and other health issues, we have undoubtedly become a pariah state; a safe haven for drug lords and other master criminals; the majority of our indigenous citizens despised, their passports stamped with ignominy and disgust, by most immigration officers abroad !
A dark cloud hangs over you, Sierra Leone! One that has been spreading its evil omen for almost sixty years: a period marked by the greatest disinterest in the welfare of any state on the continent that was ushered into independence with an abundance of natural wealth, moral rectitude, the envy of its neighbours, and a proud legacy of leadership in education and other institutional traditions!
Do we need reminding about where we were, long before we became independent? I am eighty, and one of the advantages about ageing is, hopefully, to do so with some humility and wisdom, so that we do not become the laughing stock of the younger generation; as when, during the storm scene, after King Lear had come to realise the folly of his intemperate actions, his fool said to him: ‘ If thou art my fool, I would have had thee whipped, for being old without wisdom!’
Contrast this admonition with what the great Nelson Mandela said about how to lead:
‘When I was on Robben Island, I was there with men who were better educated, well read and wiser than me. But they chose me because they thought I had the qualities of a leader. However, I soon realised that to be able to lead, you must have HUMILITY! When you are humble, people will listen to you and follow you!’
To the unprincipled, avaricious and indiscipline men and women charged with the destiny of our state, over the last sixty years, I believe that what the fool proscribed for King Lear should apply; considering what they have done to the country. Now, many of them are gone- dead! But to borrow a line from James Baldwin ‘ they will have no name on the street’; except for, in my view, one of ignominy! As for those still alive, I am sure it won’t be long before, as we say, in Krio, ‘ den conscience begin for flag dem, ‘ when they start a post-prandial assessment of their gluttonous ruination of the country.
In the beginning, for those who read history, Freetown, Sierra Leone, was the administrative centre of British Colonial rule in West Africa. We were the first to give women the vote; the first to have judges and magistrates in the colonies. The memory of how we pioneered Post- Secondary and secondary school education, for boys and girls, in the early 1800s, should make us proud; although, horror of horrors, there was a time, very recently, when one of our presidents had the temerity to consider turning the hallowed grounds of the Anne Walsh Memorial School into a MARKETPLACE, for street traders, and was only stopped by the fury of some old girls! Can we imagine this happening to ACHIMOTA College in Ghana?
Blessed with abundant fertile land and several small rivers crisscrossing the country, although the rocky terrain was sometimes a challenge, we were the first to have a railway, postal service and banking system in West Africa. Our harvests were spectacular and varied. We produced enough rice to feed ourselves, and exported the rest! With a well- trained cadre of African civil servants taking care of day to day matters, in this then blessed land, we were a proud people- at least, some of us! Consequently, after the independence flourish in Ghana and Nigeria, the British packed their bags and left. Thanks to the prevalence of mosquitoes, we didn’t suffer the horrors of White settler domination and carnage: the stuff that Ngugi wrote about, in Kenya, and Dambuzu Marachera’s untimely death cut short his writing about Zimbabwe!
Seldom had a country been blessed with so much, as we were, when the reins of government were handed to us. In comparison, Singapore was, basically, a backward island, in the Malaysian strait, with a reputation for some prostitution, for British soldiers, before she became independent, the same year as us.
But, Lord, look at what Lee Kwan Yoo did to it? Look at what a proud, principled, UN-CORRUPT, no nonsense leader did for his country? With no mineral resources, but with his honest, moral and disciplined leadership, and giving his people a first class education, he turned his island nation into the Pearl of Asia: a first world nation!!
With all of our resources, why didn’t we progress after independence, along similar trajectory? There are those, including yours truly, who will argue that our resources were a curse, instead of a blessing! Sadly, for the people of Sierra Leone, this abundance of natural wealth produced one of the greatest social dichotomies in the region: the abandonment of any kind of moral, social conduct and relevant education, for the majority of our people, while the few got on the get rich quick Bandwagon, soon after our independence.
When Siaka Stevens came to power, after the political and military imbroglio of the early sixties, I am now quite certain he did not have a clear vision of where he wanted to take the country; bearing in mind that he was the first opposition leader to win an election against a sitting government, in the aftermath of independence, in English-speaking Africa! Looking back at his seventeen years in power, it would seem to me, and some others, that he had no clear vision about how to develop the country; yet he embarked on a needlessly expensive conference, to boost his fragile ego, removed the railway, and thus ruined our bountiful agricultural productions and, when challenged by some of his own political lieutenants, sent them to the gallows on trumped-up charges, aided by a compromised judiciary!
But none of this would have been possible if there was not the prevailing atmosphere of sycophancy, for Stevens to use what was probably his most effective weapon: the gift of the gab!
Most readers my age would recall that Siaka Stevens took over the reins of government when a new crop of graduates was either coming down from Fourah Bay College or returning home from abroad: men and women who, with their newly minted status as intellectuals, should, in most instances, have served as examples of probity, with a moral compass, in the new republic! Regardless of what their degrees were in, it was the hope by some people not so lucky to have gone to college, that some philosophical principles about public morality would guide these new Greeks, as they assumed their various roles in the nascent republic! It was hoped that many of these public servants ( for that was what they were) would help guide the new government from any drift towards unprincipled actions, (especially as quite a good many of the new ministers were political novices,) and into a new example of leadership and statehood. Sadly, this hoped- for New Jerusalem did not come about: the REASON WAS SIMPLE!
Without any prevarication, I place the blame squarely at the feet of many members of my generation- those born between 1940-50 who, in spite of having received ( on paper, at least) some of the best education that money could buy, lacked the innate quality for true moral and lasting success!
An immensity of public morality was not required; but as the Spanish- American philosopher George Santayana put it:
‘Civilization has nothing to do with the tallness of our buildings or the size of our grain crop. It is about the quality of the men and women that a nation produces!’
Indeed! I am sure there are hundreds of millions of people who, looking at those that have made their nations great, will readily agree with this contention. Yes: the scientists, farmers, artists, environmentalists, engineers, designers , sculptors, craftsmen and women, spiritual diviners, educators, housewives, architects and Human Rights lawyers , not working for the fleshpots of wealth, but for the greatness and pride of a state; these are the men and women that have built the nations that the vast majority of people admire !
Have we produced them? We did, in the past, before our toxic political expressions turned this nation upside down; before our political passions not played out on any ideological plane, but on sometimes crude, sectarian extremism and, occasionally, with violence, became the new reality!
I look at the gallery of some of the men and women of my generation, and what I see is mostly abysmal failure, on their part, when it comes to the governance of this wounded nation. For as soon as Siaka Stevens was esconsced in power, it didn’t take the wily fox long to discern that many of the so-called intellectuals were ripe for the picking; that they were really like the paw-paw plant: beautiful and calling for attention on the outside, but with a cylindrical emptiness on the inside. Here, it should be pointed out that, with a prescience born out of what was going on in other newly independent states, the handful of old public intellectuals such as the doctor and writer Raymond Sarif Easmon , the doctor Mohammed Forna, and the journalist Ibrahim Taqi had figured out what the president might be up to, in those early days. Even before Stevens’s obsession with turning this country into a one-party state became loud and clear, these men had raised objections about the lack of any consultation amongst people, about where he aimed to take the country. These were not just armchair intellectuals, as those old enough to remember will recall. They were three of the handful of men and women whose patriotic and passionate opposition to Albert Margai’s earlier obsession with the same idea of a one -party state, had galvanised the Freetown intelligentsia to throw its weight, support and money behind the APC; without which, it was almost impossible for the party to have won the 1967 General Elections.
Feeling deeply betrayed by Siaka Stevens, they made their views known; for which Taqi and Dr. Forna were arrested, tried and sent to the gallows on a trumped-up charge of attempting a coup, and the venerable Raymond Sarif Easmon was detained at the Pademba Road prison. I have it, from impeccable sources, that once Stevens realised what a terrible mistake he had made, by jailing Dr. Easmon, the then prime minister went to the doctor’s house, after his release, to try to make amends. For those interested in the outcome of this drama, I suggest you read my second novel Sacred River, loosely based on the seventeen years of Siaka Stevens’s misrule, and on the drunken disaster that was the ten years in power of Joseph Saidu Momoh!
Some people might argue that, following his spate of executions and detentions, all the guardrails to the Stevens government were removed. And once the wily fox had discerned that the new crop of intelllectuals was not going to oppose him, and not interested in imparting decency and honesty in government, he baited them with this sickening mantra: DEN SAY BAILOR BARRIE, YOU SAY DAVIDSON NICOL! And even went further, with this pernicious maxim: DEN SAY ASK FOR HED, YOU SAY YOU GO GRAMMAR SCHOOL!
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Thus began the rot of the country: a place whose capital was once named the so-called Athens of West Africa: to which students from all over English- speaking Africa came for an education!
If anything typified our fall from grave, it was the collapse of the educational system; so that , only recently, a book entitled The Rise and Fall of Fourah Bay College was published. This would not have been possible if the new crop of so-called intellectuals had been interested in teaching. Instead, the college became a stepping stone to the apotheosis of their greed! As Stevens set about starving the college of funds, and in the shameful absence of local philanthropic support, by a good many wealthy Sierra Leoneans that could afford it, the once vaunted college began to decline, so that it is now not listed amongst the top fifty African colleges or universities!
It was no secret that a good many of the teachers there would be glued to their radios and telephones, waiting for a call from His Excellency, when he was reschuffling his cabinets, to see who amongst the academics had been plucked from Fourah Bay , to become a minister; after which the Jellibas and Jellimusus would troop to their houses, to sing and dance about ‘ their blessings!!’
In this climate, it was only a matter of time before the other arteries of our development were cut to pieces; such as when, on the alleged advice of the IMF and a Man for all Seasons ( a lawyer, accountant, surveyor, auditor and economist) our railway was uprooted and sold as scraps to a consortium headed by Jamil Saed Mohamed, who everyone realised had a virtual stranglehold on our economy! Nowhere else, on this PLANET, has a vital artery, like the railway, been uprooted and sold.
But it happened here, while other states were expanding theirs; while Ivory Coast was using theirs to get their vast agricultural products to the sea, and thus becoming one of the richest African nations!
The unpredictable movements of history have a way of kicking us in the right places; with the results of our follies and arrogance! As those interested in the minds of the gods of ancient Greece will testify, one thing that they did not tolerate from lesser humans was HUBRIS! And so it was, when after this calamitous act of UNRAILWAYLING our country, the 1973 Middle East war sent oil prices sky-rocketing and inflicting severe damage to our already unproductive economy.
But nothing would deter some of the young Greeks from further plundering the country; as when the once productive cow of the economy- the SLPMB- was slowly killed; with the fattest portions going to build a useless casino complex called Lagoonda that was probably best suited for a production of Tennessee Williams’ play The Glass Menagerie than for any other purpose, because more than ninety percent of the people did not go there, for economic reasons. When you add this extravaganza to the La Mancha style mansion, on Juba Hill, both of them builty by the then managing director of the S.L.P.M.B. Musa Suma, ( most certainly with the approval of His Excellency), you begin to get a picture of the several economic abortions the state would suffer in the coming years! With the Tomabum Rice Project, and other small scale industries effectively killed, after the railway was removed in one of the most short-sighted decisions, it only took one great blow for the economy to finally collapse. But, before then , the silence on the part of our so-called intellectuals was palpable. Where were the public intellectuals and Legal luminaries when the state was being stripped of its meat? The handful of brave, young ones such as the lecturer ( later journalist) Olu Gordon and the journalist Paul Kamara were regarded as troublemakers, and either lost their jobs, at F.B.C. or were jailed!
In one of our many conversations at his house, over many years, the late, revered literary critic and principal of the then highly vaunted Fourah Bay College, Professor Eldred Jones, told me about the day the then powerful VP S. I. Koroma went to see him, to appeal to him to get a brilliant law lecturer to stop attacking the government. But in his usual charming and refined manner, Professor Jones told the politician that one of the expectations of being an academic/intellectual was the exercise of free will in our lives; provided we did not slander or insult anyone. Consequently, he could not sanction the lecturer , as that would also run counter to the college’s charter.
They say every man has his price, and His Excellency knew how to offer the right bait; so that it wasn’t long, after S.I’s. visit to Fourah Bay College, that when an official announcement about a cabinet reshuffle came out of State House, it had the bombshell that our legal luminary / critic had been appointed the new Foreign Affairs Minister!!
In his new job, one of the sickening and unpalatable acts that he was required to defend was the walk to the gallows by Dr. Forna, Ibrahim Taqi and others, after the compromised courts had sent them there, on trumped-up charges!
I was a Visiting Professor in the English Department of The University of The Phillipines when the ghastly action was carried out in Freetown. For a whole week or more, I couldn’t sleep or eat much, recalling the role that Taqi had played , as a journalist, along with Dr. Sarif Easmon, in the nascent days of the A.P.C. If His Excellency had no conscience, in sending Taqi and Forna to the gallows, surely, the moral eqivalence of intellectualism and good breeding should have prevented our new Foreign Minister from defending the indefensible! When he was studying law, or in his private readings, did he not come across this cautionary contention by the American philosopher Paul Tillich, that ‘ a moral imperative is not obedience to any order, religious or secular. It is the actualization of what we potentially are; what we can become?’
Obviously not: And I daresay that after his obedience to His Excellency’s call, it became more or less a Domino Theory , as other so-called intellectuals were easily plucked from the university, to go and sit in various central government positions.
The results were devastating for Fourah Bay College. Very little funding went into its upkeep; research, program support ( even when many of those ex-academics sat in the Momoh cabinet, and could have fought to expand the programmes), dwindled, until, finally, the college became a sad shadow of its once glorious past! But it warms my heart to know that, not too long ago, a philanthropist like Engineer Tunde Cole donated US$1.m ( One million US dollars), for new engineering school buildings; which only goes to show that charity really begins at home!
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With the failure of so-called intellectualism in helping to shape this country’s public morality, there is no point dwelling on the remaining aspects of the disastrous Stevens’ years; except that , with the grandiloquent extravagance for the OAU convention, he ensured that this country’s currency would be rapidly de-valued, its coffers emptied, and the majority of its citizens beginning to live in abject poverty!
Handing the reins of the country over to Major-General Joseph Saidu Momoh was really a big slap to its face by Stevens. Because, long before the general conceded that he had been a failure, as president, anyone with a modicum of intelligence could see that he was a disaster!! In its most perverse manifestatioin of corruption, neglect and other vices, this period of political life in Sierra Leone can only be compared to the nausea of Sodom and Gormorrah! Symbolically, the wanton miasma of amorality, drunkenness and filth that was so common in Freetown, and I would assume, in some other parts of the country, recalls tha biblical tale! Momoh’s tenure will be remembered not just as the Time of Debauchery, but also of the wanton neglect of the state. I recall, as I am sure many others will, that, in the first year or so of his presidency, there was an unbroken period of six months when there was not a flicker of light from any of the power stations in Freetown. Pyramids of ugly, stinking, sordid garbage was the nouveau art that piled up on virtually every corner of the city. Vagrants and beggers took to sleeping under the historic Cotton Tree. Some nights, they would light open fires that slowly began to weaken its trunk and break off some of its branches, until Mother Nature, finally tired of this insult to one of the seminal gifts that she had given to us, brought the tree down, with just a small gust of wind.
Likewise, when I would be driving into Freetown from my house in Juba, I would see the beggers and vagrants who lived inside the mechanical room of the waterfall in front of the State House . I would see them bathing and then washing the tatters of their clothes, before hanging them out to dry on the waterfall that had been turned off. How was this horror possible ? I couldn’t imagine this desecration taking place in front of The Museum of African Civilization, in Dakar; I couldn’t imagine it happening in front of parliament or the Kwame Nkrumah museleum, in Accra.
Yet , seemingly unaffected by this icon of shame and filth, our cabinet ministers ( of many inlellectuals!!) would drive past it, on their way to consider laws on the nation’s behalf. How could you legislate about a nation, if you have no sense of aesthetic; no awareness of public morality and decency; no respect for/ or idea about how to maintain the few statutes left behind by the colonial government? It was mind-boggling!!
But I am sure that most people would agree with me when I say that, perhaps, the two things that this regime will be remembered for, above all else, was: one, when State House became a virtual transit point for young women hoping to get on The Gravy Train of the nation! The second reminder is that it was during this regime’s life that , in an attempt to curb what was regarded as a counterpoint to the Central Government’s tolerance of street trading, by the then Committee of Managrment, headed by the controversial politician Alfred Akibo-Betts, the Momoh government, which had many legal luminaries and intellectuals (sic) rushed a City Council Act through parliament that virtually stripped the Mayorality of all powers to regulate street trading; after which, the mayor was put under the purview of the legislation. I had served as an adviser to Akibo-Betts, during the Bicenteniary of the city, and I clearly remember the then very powerful Inspector-General of Police, Bambay Kamara, in a myopic tribal twist, saying to the executives of the Street Traders Association, who were mostly northerners, ‘ Una go trading nar treet; nar we get we kontri! Frankly, I don’t think there is another capital city on the continent, whose elected mayor has to take orders from the Minister of the Interior, whose business is, strictly speaking, maintaining law and order. So that what we have today is this mess of a city overrun by street trading, because, as the current mayor said in a documentary, she cannot do her job, because her hands are tied behind her back!
As for the debauchery at the State House during the Momoh regime, I had occasions to talk to three journalists covering that seat of power, who confessed to me that the Minister of State, for Presidential Affairs, had given both a literal and official definition to his duties! It was , arguably, a bacchanalian time; a nose- turning play on the elementary principles of good decency! How our governance sank so low is left to future historians to discuss
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I tend not to welcome a miltary putsch anywhere in the world, because of its sometimes violent nature. However, when the non-violent overthrow of the Momoh regime happened , a majority of the general public welcomed the arrival of the men in Khaki , and their accomplices! For most people, this was the end of a shameful period, when the creeping insurgency of a rebel war across our southern border was already a known factor. However, besides getting rid of the Momoh regime, I don’t find much to write about the military boys; especially as there was a palace coup soon after the initial takeover, and the now widely discredited killings of twenty-eight men and women, including Bambay Kamara and a friend of mine Salami Coker are, for most people, just part of the bitter deluge of blood carnage that was soon to drench this country!
But there is a piece of comic atonement, ( if one could call it that ) that came after this nausea, during the period when the historian Joseph Opala and I were teaching at James Madison University, in Virginia, USA. One day, he received an email from his good old friend, the former Minister of State, for Presidential Affairs, to which I was privy! In this email, our former academic-turn politician said, amongst other things: ‘ Like most foreigners, you were impressed with my diction and learning. But if you were my true friend, why didn’t you tell me I was so corrupt?!!!”
I couldn’t believe it! Yet I believed it! Because there are two old Sierra Leonean proverbs that say (1) know yusef notto cuss; nar good advice; the other being: ‘if people den whip you, e bad; but when you whip yusef , nayim tranger!’
Here was one of the most brilliant minds of my generation: a man who, like the rest of us, had known some Hard Times in his life; but when his Good Times came, and he had the opportunity, he could have helped to transform F.B.C., during his period in the Momoh government. Instead, he became one of the most despicably corrupt members of that government ( his own admission), but needed a foreigner to validate his corrupt being!!
I believe this is probably an example of The Theatre of The Absurd that masters of the genre like Wole Soyinka, Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco might approve of. Not being a playwright myself, may I suggest that this is something that Oumar Farouk Sesay, now a major poet and budding playwright, might consider writing for Julius Spencer to direct! The actors are there ; they know the script!
The horrors of our so-called Sobel War are stains on this country’s conscience that I cannot bring myself to write about again, after I had already covered some of the details in my second novel Sacred River! As I mentioned in the opening pages of this essay, the thought that we , as a country, would end up being an iconic symbol of savagery and bestiality is more than morally reprehensible and shameful.
To the dead I say, in the words of the great poet W.H. Auden ‘ In the prison of your day, teach the free man how to pray.’ Similarly, as Leopold Sedar-Senghor wrote : Oh dead ones; who have always known how to fight death; protect and guide us, as you have made us wanderers on delicate feet!’
Indeed, we need their forgiveness and protection so that never again will this land be soaked with the blood of a brutal war! At the same time, we need the forgiveness of the maimed, the raped and other molested victims, for our diamond stones; about whom I had already written these words, in my fourth volume of poems Stone Child and Other Poems:
‘ Stone child, I know where it hurts your mother raving about the stone on her breasts. The rain was her grief, our country’s destiny; the sun was not hot enough to dry her tears; the gemstone was not responsible for our endless rain.’
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The best that can be said about the Ahmed Tejan-Kabba’s second government , after the first one was brutally overthrown, was that he kept the peace and that, except for the clearly vindictive case against the journalist Paul Kamara, no critic was thrown into Padamba Road prison. There was relative peace and stability, the economy rebounded, as the president had a lot of goodwill during this second coming; not least because he was viewed as a technocrat who had worked at the UN and would cast a much wider net, when it came to selecting his cabinet. However, I was deeply disappointed when the first cabinet list was announced, and I immediately wrote an article entitled Cabinet does not inspire confidence ( which was published in the For De People newspaper), because it was packed heavy with old S.L.P.P. loyalists, and no new blood,
But later, I gathered from a very impeccable source that the president had initially approached the distinguished mathematician Professsor Awadaje Williams, to offer him the job of Economics Minister. However , the professor, who was a very modest man always in shorts, and a close friend of Professor Eldred Jones’s, must have been petrified about giving up his somwhat bohemian academic life, for public service, and respectfully turned the president down.
If I have one criticism of that government, it was the fact that, after the demobilisaton of the thousands of sobels, they were not put in productive employment, such as farming. Rather, the vast majority of them were given Okada vehicles to ply our already congested roads! Why couldn’t they have been taught the rudimentary skills of farming; about how to grow rice, so that our massive importation of the crop, produced by Asian peasant farmers, could be considerably reduced? Sixty years after our independence, we are still relying on other countries, with similar climate, to feed us!
Another beef that I have with the Tejan-Kabba government is that it was under his purview that his minister of lands, Bobson Sesay- a man, if I recall, with a doctorate in education- supervised the cutting down of the huge forest cover in Regent, Hill Station and parts of Leicester, without any recourse to urban planning! When we consider that this forest had been there for centuries, and that not even Pa Shaki had tampered with it, one wonders why a square peg in a round hole had to destroy it? The result is that we now have this unplanned suburb-cum ghetto, called HI-MATT, where a million dollar house stands next to a vacant lot selling timber or charcoal; where a Mammy-in-Time ( cookery shop) sells food next to another one million dollar home, where the road leading to the American embassy is a crowded market area! Moreover, because of this massive destruction of the forest cover, we now have horrific floods in Freetown! How nice and beautiful this new hilltop of the city would have been, say like Cocody in Ivory Coast, if it had been planned, with tree-lined streets, a beautiful roundabout, green spaces and parks for mothers to take their children?
The disgusting thing is that, in destroying the forest, the Minister of Lands did not even reserve fifty acres for a park, now that the only one that we HAD, Victoria Park, and the Sewa Grounds, have been turned into a market space! As usual, Mother Nature was watching our relentless and savage attempts to destroy her beauty. In our greed and arrogance, we are fooled into believing that WE YONE NOR GO TAN SO!
And so, the land grabbers went deep into the forest; into the very bowel of the mountain; probably hacking away at stone carvings! When a Ministry of Lands surveyor attempted to stop them, he was hacked to death! But, as sometimes happens in Yoruba or Greek tragedy, Mother Nature unleashed her vengeance, on the first anniversary of the surveyor’s ghastly death, with a massive mudslide that buried over a thousand people!
But have we learnt our lesson? Look at what has happened to the Kabala Hill top; to much of the forest preserve in the Northern Provinces, and even to the Southern ones; then come back to Freetown, and see what they have done to the once beautiful and picturesque Penninsula Drive! All the trees are gone; without any planning , there is a random growth of houses and PAN BODIES, similar to the mess at HI-MATT. And now, we are threatening the GREEN BELT round the GUMA VALLEY WATER RESOVOIR, with rapid deforestation, and the building of illegal houses. With one of the lowest water supply capacities in any capital city, but with one of the heaviest rainfall precipitation , WE MAY SOON RUN OUT OF DRINKING WATER in the capital city!!
Lord, why is it that , whereas other capital cities in West Africa take five steps forward, we take ten steps backward?
(6)
As for the Ernest Koroma government: yes, the evidence is there that he built new roads, the economy grew a bit, a contract was signed with the Chinese for a new airport, which was immediately cancelled by his successor! I don’t recall anyone being locked up, for criticising his government; however, his first government was decidely very sectarian-with mostly Makeni men and women! Admittedly, he did rectify that imbalance in his second term, and gave us a government that reflected a National Character! Every government has its flaws, and , perhaps, the main flaw of this one was to have allowed the market women to claim an even bigger supremacy over the Freetown City Council’s mandate, by allowing them to spread all over the place.
Look around the city. The entrance to our old suburbs of Wilberforce, Murray Town, Spur Loop, and Lumley are gone; replaced with the unchecked, rampant spread of street trading!
Another beef that I have with this government is that after a former Foreign Minister was charged, with the disgraceful and shameless act of selling our passports to Chinese businessmen, he was , for sectarian reasons, allowed to go free, after ( if I recall, only paying a fine!!!) To add insult to injury, this same scoundrel was later imposed on the people of this country, by another government, as the presiding officer of our legislative chamber, after one of the most brazen acts of political skullduggery!
A CAUTIONARY REMINDER
Given the sectarian nature of our politics, and the unknown hand of fate, the Office of The Presidency has not been kind to its occupants after they left it! There are those who died a miserable death in exile, while others were reviled after they left office! Perhaps, while they were in office, they should have found some leisurely time to read a bit of World Literature, in which they might have learnt something about Man’s fate, as beautifully written by the great Russian writer Ivan Turgenev: ‘ Sternly, remorselessly, fate guides each of us; only in the beginning, when we are absorbed in details, in all sorts of nonsense, in ourselves, are we unaware of its harsh hand.’
And finally, my Sierra Leone, I must end this very long letter to you, without any biased opinion or views. I am a Free Thinker and consider all men and women of whatever ethnicity, tribe, colour, nationality, religion, faith, or orientation, my brothers and sisters. Those who know me and have read my books will attest to my being a Universal Man!
So that no one should accuse me of any ethnic bias, let me say that I have known the generosity, love, but sometimes negativity of some members of the various, non-Krio groups in the country. At the same time, I have experienced the back-stabbing, but love and kindness of some members of my own ethnicity! Which is why I am, like many other Sierra Leoneans, deeply disturbed by the face of the current regime of President Julius Maada Bio! In its actions and other manifestations, we find it nakedly very tribalistic; contrary to the tenets of the original founders of the S.L.P.P. , such as Sir Milton Margai, H.E.B. John, Sanusie Moustapha, John Nelson- William, Maigore Kallon and others!
Look at the present cabinet of the current government, the top Brass at State House, people say; look at its diplomatic appointments, the top brass of the military and police; its para-statal appointments and others- they are more than seventy-five percent Mende-southerners!
Sometime ago, I read in the Cocorioko newspaper something to the effect that President Bio had said that ‘ the reason why he surrounds himself with his tribesmen and women is because it is only their professionalism that he knows!’
I hope this is not true; for if it was, may I then pose this question to him: What if you were involved in a car accident, a fall in your house, or on the mountain ( and God knows I don’t wish that on anyone), and the first attending doctors were not members of your tribe, would you refuse their service? We can expand this hypothesis even further!
The world owes a debt of gratitude to Dr Africanus Horton and Dr Davidson Nicol: two doctors of Sierra Leonean Krio ancestry, for their pioneering work in Sickle Cell Anemia, and Insulin as a treatment for diabetes. About eighty percent of the tens of millions of people suffering from the Sickle Cell disease are of African descent, while diabetes is a world-wide scourge. Should any member of your tribe ( a word that I actually detest) be suffering from these diseases, would you suggest to them that they refuse treatment, because you do not trust the professionalism of these non-Mende doctors? Likewise, one of the young doctors currently making a name for herself in the United States is Dr Maseray Kamara, a first generation Sierra Leonean-American. Born and raised in Virginia, she is one of the ‘few Black women in the field of colon and rectal surgery, specialising in robotic surgery and anorectal disease.’ Rather than celebrating the genius of this young woman, would you advice members of your ethnicity not to seek treatment from her, if they were suffering from colon and rectal cancer?
I BELIEVE I HAVE MADE MY POINT!
With the latest disturbing news that we have become a Narco-State, we have more than enough problems in Sierra Leone to contend with, at the moment. The vast majority of the population is worried that the pillars of our democracy have been fractured; they are sullen, afraid, and bitter; especially as many of them live a threadbare existence. Many go to bed hungry at night, and when they fall sick, the hospitals are ill-equipped to treat basic diseases. Electricity and water supplies are a major problem; which is why people find it very troubling that, rather than solving them, you are thinking of creating a second municipality in Lungi, because you believe that is the best way to solve the massive overcrowding of Freetown. This is something that I believe Caligula would not have considered a wise move; especially as the majority of Freetownians do not want it!
Freetown is only about two million people- a tiny district in the city of LAGOS, which, by most estimates, has about twenty-five million people! Yet, it only has one municipality; even after the huge slum of Maroko was bulldozed and turned into the glittering upscale district of Lekki!
Creating a twin- city would involve a massive debt to the Chinese, for the building of the Lungi Bridge; unlike the Tanzanians who recently completed the Margafoli bridge, mostly, and admirably, with Tanzanian money.
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