By Umaru Fofana
I wonder how closely Sierra Leoneans are following the latest twists and turns in the Ebola jigsaw in Guinea and Liberia. I bet not very much! Or how many are paying attention to their own very lifestyles as they did not very long ago. I bet very few. I wonder what lessons our politicians - not least those in power - have learned from the Ebola outbreak. I bet very little - if any.
It may be a vintage Sierra Leonean attitude: The trouble that made us shout ALLAHU AKBAR! or JESUS! has passed off, and towards Satan we have drifted. The disease - Ebola - that cowed us to subservience has passed off, and bullheadedness has eclipsed our understanding of its causes.
Back we have gone to the lack of those basic things that helped stem the spread of the deadly virus. Where is the hygiene compliance? But even where is the piped water we need to meet those hygiene targets even when we want to comply? Pipes are corroding due to unavailability of water in them. People, many of them children, are still fighting late at night for the precious liquid. The cluster clutters.
After the Ebola outbreak had been declared over in Guinea, the forest region was abandoned by the authorities and life continued as before. Then the virus reared its ugly head several months since it last did in the very deprived region that is the farthest from the capital, Conakry. Now several people have died in just a week or two.
Like it snaked its tail in 2014, to Liberia Ebola has travelled next. Latest report is that the flareup has affected two children of the mother who died of the virus in Monrovia’s Somalia suburb. The authorities in the country say it is linked to the recent outbreak in Guinea which they suspect happened before the border with that country was closed.
When Ebola ended in Guinea’s forest region the people never hesitated to return to eating bushmeat, nor did the authorities continue to do or urge due diligence. It may well be that the new flareups could be attributed to the eating of bat meat. And here in Sierra Leone, we are hallucinating.
The age-old deep-seated level of ignorance was continued to flourish. The old denial among the people resurfaced. The old neglect by the authorities persisted. It sounds, you may argue, like a mirror image of what obtains in Sierra Leone and especially its far-flung areas like Kailahun district. The eastern district is one of those places where bat meat was not only a delicacy but a main source of protein. No one seems to care now to follow up on whether the people there have returned to bat-eating. With the grinding poverty persisting there, they may well have done so without repeated warnings for them not to.
Going by the route of the last outbreak - from Guinea to Liberia and then Sierra Leone - the roots may still be well entrenched in Sierra Leone for a recurrence. Why not? When cholera wreaked havoc here a few years ago, everyone thought the sewers of human excreta would never return. It took just just a month or soon for the leaky pipes to start gushing the out on the streets of central Freetown. And cholera seems like a when and no an if. It took just a few months for attention to shift from Yeliboya in Kambia District, the harbinger of Sierra Leone’s cholera. Still the people on that island have no drinking water.
With Ebola, the rundown communities which bore the brunt of the outbreak are still in squalor. The same people who will come out again around election time and not only dance barefoot but also insult their political party opponents and go violent. Now they are forgotten. Things as basic as toilets are a luxury for many. Never mind water. Two areas that need to be addressed to keep Ebola at bay.
The authorities have taken certain measures - or at least they have said so - to stop corpses and sick people from coming into Sierra Leone from Guinea. But it goes way beyond that. Hygiene-teaching should be ingrained in schools and promoted in communities. For this, water should be right not a privilege.
Equally important is the issue of the broken promises for the Ebola survivors. Yesterday hundreds of them took to the streets of Freetown to state their case of neglect by the authorities. The audit report says some senior officials have questions to answer in the handling of funds. The misappropriated sums would have addressed the plight of a good number of Ebola orphans or widows or survivors. They are our compatriots.
Surviving the deadly disease is obviously worth celebrating. But for many of the Ebola survivors in our beloved country their ordeal is far from over. Like some of the survivors of the second world war who were envious of those who died during the war saying they were lucky, these survivors have been left to suffer a great deal that could sometimes make death look preferable. Some as the protesters were as young as four years old. And many of them face a blighted future because their plight is being ignored or profited from by some in authority.
At the protest I met a mother of two who survived Ebola but lost her husband to the virus. Mabinty Bangura grapples to look after her young kids and says they were rejected by the social welfare ministry because she was alive regardless of the fact that the breadwinner was died. When I called an official in the ministry they confirmed it, saying they were only caring for children who had lost both parents to the virus. That is a flawed position to apply especially when it is the breadwinner who died.
I also met18-year-old Karinatu Conteh who is the only one of a 22-member family at Sima Town. She has been evicted from her house with no one to help her. Government, she said, promised to pay her school fees but felt let down that that had not happened.
Daniel Turay is a teenager who lost 27 members of his family. All he now craves for is for the state to give him shelter and education. Let’s face it, that should be a given.
He wants to become a medical doctor and struggles to raise his fees to rewrite his university entrance WASSCE exams.
The same way we forgot about the victims of our atrocious rebel war is the same way we are ignoring the Ebola victims. The authorities call them “heroes” of our Ebola fight but lip service is all they pay to them. We call our health workers HEROES yet we ignore the bereaved families of those of them who died fighting the deadly virus. As I write, the $ 5,000 promised these families by the president is still a dream. Sometimes I wonder the kind of a society we live in where the real heroes are allowed to rot in squalid conditions while the thieves and villains are eulogised. Sometimes I wonder if we are a NATION os just a COUNTRY. Ebola may be closer to us than we imagine.
(C) Politico 05/04/16
