By Umaru Fofana
On a bed inside the Port Loko Government Hospital he sits. All he now knows is a toy given to him by someone he does not know but assumes is his mother. As he cuddles the teddy bear, it is obvious Ibrahim Sankoh misses a hug he has apparently not had for a while. Both his parents got snatched away by Ebola. So did his siblings. The four-year-old boy got infected by the virus and recovered through the intervention of some Danish health workers at the GOAL-run facility in northern Sierra Leone.
A few weeks after recovery, Ibrahim lost his sight. Medics say that was as a direct result of the Ebola virus. As he stretches himself on the hospital bed to catch a nap, he smiles broadly before blinking fast and furiously. And you realise he misses his parents. Naturally! I don’t know whether or how he has assimilated the news of his parents’ passing but you can tell he misses that warm embrace from mama.
What has befallen our children is the biggest tragedy unleashed by Ebola – despite all other horrible stories that have accompanied the outbreak. And we seem nowhere yet appreciative of the extent of its devastation on our society. As the virus completes its circle, and apparently disappears, the real ramifications of the inept reaction to it by our leaders will soon start manifesting themselves.
Thousands of our compatriots have died. Our health sector which at best was under-resourced has caved in. Our economy which looked promising with new natural resources has collapsed and further jobs lost in an already largely jobless market. Despite all of that massive impact, the biggest tragedy for me is the impact on children so much so that I wish the Ebola virus did not infect anyone 18 years and younger!
And as the dust seems to be settling on the outbreak so do hopes keep rising that Ebola is now on the back foot. If that optimism is right – and it seems understandably engrained in the psyche of every Sierra Leonean you meet these days – then it is just the end of the beginning, or the beginning of the end if you are overly sanguine, of what has been a tragic chapter in our country’s history.
Thousands of children have been orphaned – kids, who, even in the best of times and with both parents alive, struggled and suffered to grow into adulthood. Schools have been closed for almost a whole academic year. And it pains me how the education sector is being handled. A warped radio teaching programme had absolutely no positive impact on the kids. It was not only badly handled but was enmeshed in allegations of corruption with attention paid more to moneymaking than rescuing our next generation.
Tens of thousands of children, including orphans, have been out of school virtually for a whole academic year. Getting parenting for those kids – like Ibrahim – will be a monumental challenge in a country where natural resources are as plentiful as corruption is colossal. And when schools reopen that will manifest itself a lot more including the many Ibrahims who dot the nook and cranny of Sierra Leone.
I have still not got my head around the announcement by President Ernest Bai Koroma that schools will reopen in late March – effectively in April. They were closed in July – in the case of Kailahun much earlier – and did not reopen as planned in a bid to halt the spread of the Ebola virus, we were told. That in itself was, to my mind, a big mistake as I will later explain in this piece.
The fact that no officials have since bothered to explain how the announced or intended reopening of schools will work – just three months before the academic year is supposed to end – has further complicated understanding and confused parents and the pupils themselves. This is so not least because the junior school-leaving examinations – or BECE – were never written last year and it is not clear whether examiners at WAEC will set a new round of exams for Sierra Leone and Liberia. An impossible ask perhaps.
Meanwhile the kids and their parents have been disingenuously left – perhaps lured – into still carrying the notion that the exams were only postponed, when in actual fact they have since been cancelled but not communicated even by some of the most garrulous spokespeople who keep emerging everyday dominating radio stations like people hiding something.
President Koroma’s announcement came, like with many responses to our Ebola crisis, after Liberia’s president had announced that she would return her country’s kids to school this month – February. And from all indications our neighbours have deferred their initial date perhaps after assessing the kneejerk announcement largely based on the fact that the virus seems to be being controlled. And we are busy navel-gazing with impressionism taking the best of us.
I believe – very strongly too – that schools ought not to have been closed in the first place. Because our leaders ignored warnings by serious-thinking Sierra Leoneans and chose to listen to sycophantic jibes from praise-singers paid to tell lies and attack those who wish to engender a healthy and proper national debate on issues, reasonable voices were ignored in dealing with the Ebola outbreak at the onset. But reopening in March is as impracticable as it is impressionistic.
Why were schools closed only for street-trading or hawking to replace the classrooms for the kids? Even at the height of the virus weren’t children of school-going age selling wares on the streets in all main towns and cities in the country? This renders meaningless the argument that the kids were “sent home to avoid ‘touching’” and keep Ebola at bay. Balderdash!
Reopening schools in late March instead of allowing the academic year to run itself out will be another mistake. I can imagine private schools itching to reopen just to close again two or three months later to end the academic year. Yet they will charge parents for the full academic year when they have not imparted anything meaningful to the pupils in such short space of time.
But so it will be even with public schools. A State House press release talks about paying fees for all kids – not just girls as was introduced by the former president Ahmad Tejan Kabbah. We all know tuition is what the state will pay for these kids. And we all know tuition is the smallest component of the composite fees charged by school authorities and they discount uniforms and reading materials and transport fare and lunch. So what are we talking about! And for many of these kids, they’ve lost either or both parents. Or the parents have been rendered further impoverished. A dead man killed again.
I have heard the suggestion that the school calendar will be stretched to August or September. Has anyone wondered why schools close traditionally in June/July? Kids and the rainy season cannot live together in the open. Otherwise a new disease will be invited upon our children after surviving Ebola – even if by the skin of their teeth. And how much time will be saved anyway before a new school calendar is set to start in September!
The same applies to managements of tertiary institutions. They are simply not interested in the teaching of the child or considerate of the financial situation of their parents. All they are concerned with right now is to reopen schools so as to rip off parents and force them to pay for a whole academic year when their children will be taught for only two months.
Methinks we have two ways around this: we promote all pupils to the next class and reopen in September instead, or we restart the academic year where we left off last year when the school year matures. The first option is problematic going by the events of 1997/98. In that academic year and with the overthrow of the Tejan Kabbah administration, the total and complete boycott that followed and the violence unleashed all around, academic institutions had to shut shop. When Kabbah was reinstated in March 1998, there was no way schools could be reopened so the whole year was cancelled out. However, all pupils were promoted to the following class. This posed two main challenges: there were two sets of candidates for the junior and senior school-leaving exams (BECE and WASSCE) because the new met up with the old candidates who couldn’t be promoted to tertiary institutions for obvious reasons. It could be argued that this mass promotion accounted for the mass failures in schools in subsequent years.
This leaves me with the only other option – starting the academic year in September 2015 as should have in 2014. But meanwhile special classes could be held to get the BECE candidates going so as to be able to catch up with this year’s exam since they missed out on last year’s.
But reopening schools for the sake of it without preparation and such intangibility and impracticability will only compound an already complicated situation. And I have not mentioned the fact that many schools throughout the country are still being used as Ebola care centres. They not only need repeated decontamination, but should not be used for several weeks to ensure their usability especially by kids – or we risk creating more Ibrahims and causing contours on the faces of children instead of smoothening them.
© Politico 03/02/15
