By Joseph Lamin Kamara in Pujehun
Today we introduce a new special reporting series, ‘From the Field’, an initiative exclusively of Politico newspaper, which will explore life in rural Sierra Leone.
Our sub-editor Joseph Lamin Kamara is traveling through Pujehun in the south of the country in the next few days and his reports will focus on a wide range of issues around livelihoods of the people. This first of about 10 articles explores how women, in a highly patriarchic society, have virtually replaced the men folks in their responsibilities.
In a steady composure the cutlass indiscriminately slashes thick tropical forest grasses on a way in an oil plantation. The tool is normal for the kind of task, but the drenched grasses are obstinate sometimes, slipping under the side of the tool whose cause is to clear the way to ease transportation. In a fit of agility the feet of the tool’s holder skip the slashed grasses to the right to enable the holder shove them away from the way.
There is nothing odd here, except the person behind the cutlass. Even when the grasses seem stubborn, it is because they are slippery, and so because the worker is resolute to perform the task in both rain and sun. It is the same with even the “right” person. Apart from sex there is no difference between this and the brushing by a man. This is the case when a woman bears fortitude. And when she has a clearly monitored target, she is determined to complete it.
And today – Saturday, August 15 – in Sahn Malen Chiefdom, in the southern district of Pujehun, Kadiatu Gaju is determined to finish her 60X60 meters plot in not more than seven hours. She is a wife, a mother of two and an employee in hard labour in this plantation of the French-owned Socfin Agricultural Company. She has to finish her task as quickly as possible to go home, prepare food, and take care of her two-and-seven-year-old children and her husband Mustapha Gaju.
“I have to manage my job with my duties as a wife and a mother,” she tells Politico.
But the 25-year-old is shy, and reticent, to say whether she has had problems with her husband for failing to perform her duties as wife and mother while working as labourer.
“We’ve never quarreled,” she smiles behind the cutlass, sinking into the grasses to rise presently. In her laughter and the way her eyes look, you can tell that many things are left undone back home: The children are not bathed regularly. She is not there to feed them even if she leaves food for them. The husband’s clothes are not washed regularly; he always eats late, and she is sometimes too tired to let him have her in bed. She is busy and has to work to earn Le400, 000 (about $80) a month, if she meets her targets.
Kadiatu`s husband is also a labourer and they both started the work when Socfin was hiring people to have its 12, 000 hectares of land ready for plantation and crude oil production.
The job is painful, but the money is sweet. And that’s exactly the case with this woman who sometimes regards her work as “difficult.”
And that is why she sometimes does not finish her task on time, necessitating low pay. But no matter how tedious the job is for her, Mrs Gaju cannot quit it. This is the job that pays her and her husband at the end of every month, and she is appreciative of having a regular source of income, though hers is not steady. Before she got married she received no pay working on farm for her parents, and now she can help address some of the parents’ needs.
Kadiatu cannot remember when she stopped attending school and she got married 10 years ago, at the age of 15.
The women employed by Socfin initially went to this kind of work at 3 or 4 O’clock in the morning, and they worked for eight hours per day.
They cried, and the civil society heard their cry. After Search for Common Ground (SFCG) and its partners like Rural Agency for Community Action Programme (RACAP) intervened, the work time has been brought to about 6:00 am and they now work for seven hours.
SFCG’s intervention has also seen the portions of land given to women and the aged reduced, from being equal to the strong and energetic men. And there have also been improvements in payments.
“We have been trying to protect the rights of the company and the workers,” says Sylvester Lagao, the focal person for SFCG in Pujehun District.
A recent government policy on wage places the minimum wage for any employee in a private sector job at Le500, 000 ($100). But many of these women and other people working for Socfin receive lower than that.
Abu Amara, Socfin’s Human Resource Manager, said their employments are based on how an employee does their work.
“Most of our workers are on tasks. We have different levels, from level one to level eight. And payment is based on a task completed for the day. All this is in the Memorandum of Understanding we signed with government,”Amara told Politico.
He said there had however been some improvements in payments. For instance, he said, the least employee who used to receive about Le19, 500 (just a little over $3) per day, “now receives Le22, 000 to Le23, 000” per day.
Although it has come with enormous controversy and its presence has created a lot of discontents between land owners and local political leaders, the arrival of Socfin in Sahn Malen Chiefdom has brought a transition in the lives of women, their statuses in their homes and their position in society. Where the major sources of income are rice and fish farming, where education is apparently neglected and there are not enough jobs and the few available can hardly maintain a person’s dignity and integrity, many women – some from even Freetown – have seen working for Socfin as a turning point in their lives and a blessing in disguise.
Princess Kanu is a 45-year-old widow, one of those who started working for Socfin in the earliest period of its establishment in the chiefdom. She was with her husband in Rutile, also in the south of the country, receiving Le250, 000 (about $50) per month in a primary school teaching job. She was not on payroll and the stipend she received did not come regularly.
As we stood in a wide field where the company is implementing an afforestation project, with an August rain beginning to pour, Mrs Kanu narrated her story.
Her husband died leaving her with seven children. The husband’s family would not help take care of the children so she came with her children home, Sahn Malen.
“For more than 10 years I lived with my husband, before he died. He was the head of his family. When he died the family asked me to take the children with me because they were going to school. I’m alone, no one is helping,” the woman narrates in a solemn voice, leaving me in a somber mood.
Tears welded up in my head. That was the same year – 2012 – Socfin started plantation.
“At first I was an ordinary labourer, and after three months I was made team captain. Now I’m a supercap – supercaptain,” she explains, smiling at that last pronouncement.
When she was labourer, the widow received something around the same teaching stipend that she used to wait for, sometimes for two or three months. And when she was captain she earned about Le 400, 000 and now she receives more than Le600, 000, (about $120) she says.
Three of Kanu’s children have died, and every month she sends Le400, 000 to Bo where two of her children, all boys, are in the first and second levels of senior secondary school.
Many women now in Sahn Malen have become breadwinners of their families with or without their husbands. While many husbands are now old and cannot do what they used to do, some who were employed by Socfin have reached the end of their contracts. The latter have therefore returned to their normal farm work that does not – as is the case here – offer a regular and steady income for months. Their wives now earn more than they do.
35-year-old Jenneh Juana used to cultivate rice, cassava and those sorts of crops, before Socfin came. Her husband Bockarie Juana is a fisherman and they have six children – three boys, three girls. Before she started work here one boy and two girls were attending school.
“After Socfin came we sent another boy to school,” she smiles, over her manual weeding.
“Education pays,” she says.
Jenneh says she did not realize Le100, 000 (about $20) together in even a whole year in her normal farming, but now she earns Le400, 000 a month.
“Initially my husband earned more than I did, but now I get more money. It is he who even urges me now to come to work,” she smiles again, as she says that last sentence.
While the pay gives a sense of gratification to the wives, the husbands remain in bed when their wives are going to work in very cold nights and later in the day [the husbands] sit in their homes depressed over the “loss” of their lands which have been “leased” to Socfin for 50 years.
(C) Politico 14/08/15
