By Joseph Lamin Kamara
Last week we published a story about a fight between the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Food Security (MAFFS) and the Sierra Leone Chamber of Agribusiness Development (SLeCAD), which had already gone public. As we indicated in that story, we have been investigating the issue because Politico understands it has the potential to undermine the Sierra Leone`s economic recovery. At a time like this, when the country prepares to recover from the impact of the most ravaging outbreak of the Ebola disease, collaboration between MAFFS, representing the public sector, and SLeCAD which represents the private sector, is quite essential.
SLeCAD, with a mandate to coordinate the activities of private companies, came into existence in 2009 as a limited liability company after an African Union (AU) summit in Maputo, Mozambique in 2003 made the first declaration on the Comprehensive African Agricultural Development Programme (CAADP). The declaration mandated member states to adopt “defined strategies to help countries critically review their own situations and identify investment opportunities with optimal impact and returns.” One of the principles and values integral to CAADP is private sector development which the Ernest Bai Koroma-led government has prioritized since 2008.
Success of the agricultural sector
Agriculture has been a major player in the economic life of the country and it contributes the highest to the economy among all other sectors. In 2013 an estimate from the group War on Hunger Sierra Leone showed the sector had, for the previous years, accounted for 45% to the national Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and created employment for 66% of the country’s population. By August in the following year, according to the CIA`s World Factbook, the GDP composition by the sector had risen by more than 2%.
No matter how the commercial landscape in the country may have crippled, the agricultural sector has always taken the lead supporting the economy, even when if it wavers in doing so. The agriculture ministry says presently 46% of the country’s economy is from the sector. Still, it says, 66% of the country’s population is being employed by the sector, meaning “we have 4.6 million workforce of the total population of the country” which stands around 6 million.
A 2014-Wikipedia data even states agriculture accounted for 58% GDP in 2007, having grown by 14% in that year and by five percent in 2008.
Although Sierra Leone remains hugely dependent on imports for survival, the agriculture ministry says that has reduced and export rate has increased over the years.
“Importation of food has dropped by about $100 million,” said the ministry’s spokesperson, Abubakarr Sidique Daramy.
“Domestic production of food crops, especially rice, the staple food, has increased in recent years,” President Ernest Bai Koroma said at the State Opening of Parliament in 2014.
“Cocoa and coffee exports increased between 2007 and 2011 by 105% and 220% respectively.”
The private sector
In all these successes, the private sector`s contribution has been invaluable. And even Agriculture Minister Dr Joseph Sam Sesay, alluded to this in the 2014 edition of the AgriNews, the ministry`s annual publication.
“Private sector investment in agriculture has more than quadrupled since 2007,” he is quoted saying. “This has attracted huge investments (capital flows) to the sector, and given a tremendous lift to our GDP, created tens of thousands of jobs, assisted in no mean measure to launder the image of the country abroad.”
The government’s second poverty reduction strategy paper - ‘the Agenda for Change’ - stressed the significance of the private sector in commercial agriculture. In the second pillar of the paper, which specifically addressed agriculture, it speaks of “promoting commercial agriculture through private sector participation.”
It stated: “Commercial agriculture will be promoted by creating an enabling environment that is attractive for the private sector to invest. Post harvest storage facilities will be provided in the form of storage, drying floors, rice mills, threshers, animal feed mills and abattoirs. Access to rural credit will be improved through establishment of community banks and financial services associations. Feeder roads and community markets will be rehabilitated and or constructed to facilitate movement of goods to market places.”
With that policy paper – government’s efforts in attracting investors generally – in recent years there have been many private groups investing in the agricultural sector. Among the giant companies is ADDAX Bioenergy which is reported to have invested about $300 million in producing sugarcane bioethanol and renewable electricity in the northern district of Bombali. The investment is considered as one of the largest agricultural investments in the country.
According to the AgriNews, ADDAX is set to produce 85, 000 m3 of bioethanol per year by the end of 2016 and the sugarcane plantation covers about 10,000 hectares of area.
The construction of a bioethanol refinery and a biomass-fuelled co-generation plant is also expected to produce green power and will contribute about 20% of the country`s national electricity requirements, the bulletin revealed.
By May, 2014, the project had employed 2, 750 people, figures from ADDAX indicate on its website.
Many other such investment groups, like the Socfin Agricultural Company investing in rubber and oil palm in Pujehun District in the south of the country, have also employed vast numbers of the population.
A broken economy
Incontrovertible it is now that agriculture is indispensable to the general development of Sierra Leone. And as well, the private sector has been hugely essential in all that enduring strides the whole sector has made even in the face of a ravaging epidemic. Ebola has claimed the lives of more than 3000 people and has posed a total setback to the country’s development strides. Investment in many other sectors has closed down. Jobs have dried up.
“Sierra Leone, once navigating toward Middle Income status at an 11.3% annual growth rate could see growth of only 8% in 2014 and zero in 2015,” a World Bank projection stated earlier. Sierra Leone, together with its two Ebola-affected neighbours, Liberia and Guinea, has pleaded with international donors to cancel all its debts and also throw in efforts to rebuild its economy.
In spite of all that, investment in the agricultural private sector has not really stagnated. SLeCAD says though Ebola has seriously affected many investment groups in other sectors, their members have been operating. Therefore, it is enormously relevant that the agriculture ministry collaborates with the private sector to help rebuild the country’s fallen economy. Yet the current snag, if not quickly addressed, can only worsen the situation rather than helping it.
The fight
Police are presently investigating an allegation by SLeCAD that ‘thugs’ from the ministry destroyed their signposts, beat and wounded their office assistant and welded their office doors to lock them out. According to SLeCAD, that came after the ministry gave them a 7-day notice last month, to quit the building which the ministry had given them to occupy as office in 2010. The building is situated at Lumley in the west of Freetown.
The members of the chamber say after that first notice, they went to State House and met with presidential advisers Ibrahim Ben Kargbo and doctors Monty Jones and Sheku Kamara.
“They told us to come and continue occupying the building. They told us not to leave,” Ahmed Komba Nanoh, SLeCAD’s executive secretary, told Politico. However, Nanoh said a second notice to quit was surprisingly delivered by Dr Sheku Kamara.
The chamber claims the bitter relationship between them and the ministry began after government offered them about Le300 million from the consolidated fund to build the private sector capacity. Nanoh said the ministry asked them to give them 40% of the funding, which SLeCAD members questioned, as “50% of the money was for the farmers.” Nanoh said he and the agriculture minister discussed after that and that the minister denied asking for any percentage of the money.
At that meeting, both Nanoh and the minister later confirmed to Politico, they agreed for SLeCAD to instead use the 40% to renovate their Lumley office. After the renovation however, SLeCAD members explain, the minister questioned the chamber’s choice of colour – green – used to paint the building.
“Are you supporting SLPP?” Nanoh said, explaining that those were the exact words of the minister.
But the SLeCAD members argue that green is normally the colour representing agriculture.
Nano said their choice of colour had no relation to the main opposition Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP), which the minister was allegedly alluding to.
SLeCAD members observed that a guest house belonging to the ministry, which is situated in the same compound as the contested building, had been painted green, yet the minister never raised any concern about that.
Nanoh also believed that they were a target because of his tribal affiliation with the sacked vice president Samuel Sam-Sumana. Nanoh said after police detained the ‘thugs’ that had destroyed their signposts, it was officials from the ministry that bailed them out.
According to SLeCAD members, the acrimony is also grounded on what they describe as the dissatisfaction international donors like the World Bank Group have with the ministry in relation to utilisation of donor funds. The members allege that officials from the World Bank Group, during a recent visit, lamented the huge amount of money they`d spent on agriculture through the ministry, but had realised no substantial gain. SLeCAD members said the Bank, in this regard, is thinking of channeling its funds through the private sector.
Meanwhile, the World Bank has refused to comment on the issue. The Bank`s communication officer in Freetown told Politico that they could not talk on an “internal issue.”
As we proved in our last week story about the issue, the minister and the permanent secretary do not agree on the reason for which the ministry is asking SLeCAD to vacate the office space. The permanent secretary Edward Kargbo claims the ministry does not have an office space in the Western Area district and it’s for that reason they are demanding the Lumley building; the minister, on the other hand, says they have an office in the Western Area district at Newton on the Freetown Peninsula. Rather, Dr Sesay says, they want to give the building to an agricultural women’s group.
Nanoh says SLeCAD has written many letters to the minister urging him to address issues affecting the private sector, such as the creation of a private sector desk at the ministry which they [Chamber] consider “as a conduit to divide the membership SLeCAD and cripple the agribusiness private sector.” The minister is yet to reply to any of their letters, Nano says.
The ministry denies all allegations, claiming Nanoh has been urging it to enable his institution assume roles that belong to the ministry. Dr Sam Sesay however confirms he questioned the painting of SLeCAD’s office, but he says that was because he did not want any political party colour on any building or property belonging to the ministry. The ministry spokesperson Daramy says the creation of a private sector desk at the ministry is for the ministry to relate with the sector with ease.
Regarding deploying ‘thugs’ to the building, the ministry again doesn’t appear to be speaking with one voice. Dr Sam Sesay denies the act and he says he has never been to a police station on the matter. But while the permanent secretary denies the ministry sent any ‘thugs’ to the office, the Director of Forestry, William Bangura, confirms security guards from the ministry performed the acts, but says the ministry did not send them. Bangura then agrees he signed at the Lumley Police station for the security guards to be released on bail, but he claims senior government officials like the Presidential Adviser Dr Sheku Kamara were with him and that it was they who urged him to do the signing. Efforts to get response from at least one of the presidential advisers proved fruitless.
It is sad that while the country is trying to consolidate its efforts to fix its broken economy, the Ministry of agriculture and the SLeCAD, two essential elements in the economic growth, are in combat instead of harmony.
The ministry said it had filed for an ejectment notice and it was waiting for a court order. SLeCAD is bracing up for the law suit, but wonders why MAFFS did not take the court action at the beginning.
“We expected them to have first gone to court before taking the law into their hands,” Nanoh said.
Although the ministry does not regard the issue as significant, SLeCAD says many of its members have become frustrated by the ministry’s activities and some of them have stopped attending chamber meetings. Nanoh says companies like Socfin, ADDAX and Mountain Agriculture, which deals in rice production in the north of the country, have complained many times to them. But he says the companies hardly let the ministry know they are complaining because they fear the ministry would make investment difficult for them.
When contacted, the acting general manager of Socfin, Gordon Paterson, said they had had no problem with the ministry.
However, at a press conference held by SLeCAD earlier this month, Donald Olla Smart, the head of Mountain Agriculture and a board member of SLeCAD, who represented the board chairman at that conference, described the attack on the Lumley office as “a barbaric act” and “a personal attack on our executive secretary.” Smart said they as farmers were prepared to move forward, but noted that with such acts MAFFS was frustrating them.
“We have told World Bank and other donors that if they want to help us they should go through the private sector, not the ministry again,” Smart said. He added that they were tired of seeing the minister because he was not helping the private sector. “We want the president [Ernest Bai Koroma] to know that the private sector is suffering, almost at the point of extinction.”
Despite all that, MAFFS says no investment group has ever complained about anything to it. Its spokesperson Daramy says the ministry has no problem with them and that they have been going to the ministry to run their affairs because “SLeCAD is not doing its job.”
Dr Sam Sesay says the creation of SLeCAD was his initiative so he would not aim at destroying it, yet the permanent secretary says he is “tired with SLeCAD” and that they are waiting to evict the chamber out of the building.
© Politico 16/04/15
