By Isaac Massaquoi
I served for just over three months as media officer from the state broadcaster then called SLBS at the presidential lodge at Hill Station. That was where the business of state was being carried out since Alhaji Tejan Kabbah returned from Guinea almost a year after being forced out by Johnny Paul Koroma and his criminal elements.
I suppose it was mainly for security reasons but I also once heard Alhaji Kabbah telling his head of security that he didn’t like the police diverting traffic for a long time while waiting for him to drive through on his way to and from work or to some public event.
A vacancy had occurred in the media office because a colleague had fled the country as the rebels advanced ever closer towards Freetown. The city was on edge, constantly covered by a cloud of uncertainty with an increasingly nervous population. There were times when market women in particular would suddenly start running helter-skelter, destroying their wares and creating a field day for thieves. Things would quickly return to the normalcy of that time within half an hour or so without anybody knowing what the running around was about.
PEACE TALKS WITH CHARLES TAYLOR IN GUINEA
As I left for the office at SLBS one evening about a month into my time at the lodge, the State Chief of Protocol, a man called Abdul Rahman Wurie – a very quiet, unassuming and professional civil servant who treated all the staff with a lot of respect – called me to his office to say he was including me and my cameraman in the delegation travelling to neighboring Guinea the next day, to cover the peace talks between Alhaji Tejan Kabbah and president Charles Taylor of Liberia.
This was completely unexpected. I knew the president was traveling somewhere during that week but as always with President Kabbah he was focused on cutting costs to the barest all the time and the press corps was the first casualty of his presidential austerity. Besides, I had actually heard staff from other sections trying to lobby their way into the final list which Mr. Wurie would eventually present to the president for approval. In the end only eight or so people made the trip. Onboard the Paramount helicopter with the president was the Foreign Minister Dr. Sama Banya, National Security Adviser Sheka Mansaray, the ADC Fanday Turay, and a few others for the forty-minute flight to Conakry.
While we were being received by Guinea’s Prime Minister at the time, Sidiya Toure we noticed scuffles between Guinean soldiers and about a dozen fierce-looking men in suit. It turned out that an advanced team of Charles Taylor’s huge entourage including security men and protocol officers that had arrived on a Waesua fixed wing aircraft parked to the north side of the airport was attempting to dominate the place ahead of the arrival of their president in another man’s country.
The talks were mediated by American civil rights leader, the Rev. Jesse Jackson. He made at least two trips between our section of Bellevue Lodge where the meeting took place and Charles Taylor’s flat about one hundred yards away. In between time President Kabbah would come outside the building and chat with a few Sierra Leoneans who had gathered around to see him. There was no strong security presence around our flat. A far cry from what was happening with our neighbors.
The talks came to an end at about 4pm with the signing of a communiqué. It was really one of many that Taylor signed but failed to honour. For him peace talks were either an opportunity to buy time for him to prepare further military action or to get the international community off his back over a particular issue. So while Jesse Jackson sounded positive, the host, Lansana Conte, looked totally unimpressed and wanted the meeting to end quickly so he could go about his business.
Some of us in Alhaji Kabbah’s delegation began talking in low tones among ourselves about the possibility of spending the night in Guinea and that would bring us some cash as per diem and opportunity to relax a bit from the sounds of daily bombardment from the direction of Okra Hills. At 4:30 we saw President Kabbah having a whisper with Dr. Banya and Sheka Mansaray. Then the bad news came. Mr. Wurie announced that we would be returning home that evening. Nothing came into our pockets while the president looked like somebody who would rather he was home doing serious work than taking part in that meeting with Taylor.
A DAY OF MIRACLE AT STATE LODGE
The only time I saw President Kabbah pass money from his pocket over to anybody was Christmas Eve 1998. To be fair, I spent only a few hours at the lodge during the week and could not have witnessed other occasions when he might have done so. However stories abound of how much he believed that people must earn every cent they got.
On this day, my consummate professional cameraman, Albert Momoh, and I had gone to the lodge to record President Kabbah’s traditional Christmas message. He was already in his little bare office when we arrived. He had only a small laptop on his table, a few newspapers and four flat paper files. To his left was a trophy won by the national cricket team. There was no carpet on the floor. President Kabbah didn’t care about material things.
As soon as we completed the first take one of his ministers walked in. We played it back for the president to see and comment, but before he could speak the minister cut in and took issues with our camera positioning, framing and lighting. He asked for a second take. This time the president didn’t like it and he said so quietly and asked the minister to allow Albert to do his job. We all agreed that the third take was fantastic. At this point Alhaji Kabbah put his hand in his shirt pocket, brought out two hundred US dollars, handed one over to Albert and wished us a merry Christmas. He returned the other $ 100 to his pocket.
A friendly Nigerian soldier who was with us in the room and had helped us set up the equipment, chased us into our vehicle telling his colleagues the “good news”. We changed the money at Sackville Street and the soldier collected his share while describing us as the luckiest people in the world to get money from President Kabbah.
TEJAN KABBAH AND HIS MINISTER OF HEALTH
At the launch of the Ahmad Tejan Kabbah Foundation last Sunday evening, Haja Alari Cole described the late president as a disciplinarian, as a man who came down hard on his ministers when he needed to. I was with him one morning when he went to formally reopen the children’s hospital at Fourah Bay Road which had undergone substantial rehabilitation by a German medical charity Cap Anamur.
In his handing-over speech, the young German project coordinator wearing jeans, a T-shirt and a baseball cap called on the president to ensure that doctors and nurses were always on duty to serve the people otherwise their efforts would be in vain. He mentioned at least three occasions during the period of the rehabilitation when he visited the hospital at night to find no doctor or senior nurse around. Alhaji Kabbah’s broad smiles and joy at the improvements done to the hospital were gone by the time the man ended his speech.
When it was his turn to speak the president put his prepared speech aside and spoke from the heart about how lives would have been lost because of negligence and promised to take immediate action to make sure workers were adequately supervised. In all of this the minister was visibly embarrassed and probably returned to his office that afternoon expecting to be sacked before close of business as part of the action the president had promised to take to ensure a complete change of attitude at the hospital.
When I prepared the news for TV that night, I concentrated on the good news story of a refurbished maternity hospital and how that would help cut the high rate of maternal mortality for which Sierra Leone at the time beat only Niger on the league table of countries with such bleak statistics. The next day I was called to the minister’s office at Youyi Building to be praised for doing a “very professional job” by cutting out the devastating complaint of the NGO worker. The minister told me that after the item had run on the main evening news, President Kabbah called and congratulated him for a good job.
Indeed, I cut out that segment so as not to obscure the positives of that story that evening. I think President Kabbah either forgave the minister or completely forgot that such an incident had taken place at all.
And contrary to the minister’s belief that the storm was over, my editorial decision was to keep in the archives the side of the video he so much dreaded, for future use. It is with those kinds of materials that we do speculative journalism. So for example, if that minister was sacked a month or two later with no reasons, as is normally the case here, that incident would be good starting point from which to speculate about the reasons for the dismissal.
President Kabbah never sacked ministers in response to public outcry. He once told a colleague journalist who asked him why he was still holding on to some under-performing ministers, that sacking people would result in them losing their livelihood and their families suffering.
After Freetown was attacked in 1999, I left the lodge and returned to the newsroom at New England to pick up the pieces of what was left as many more colleagues fled the country. My colleague Fatmata Kamara replaced me and worked with President Kabbah until he retired.
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