By Umaru Fofana
The rain is back. For most of the last two weeks, it has been torrential – almost nonstop. It reached its crescendo on Friday 2 August. On that day alone, the downpour was 187mm, eclipsing the whole of July 2016 which witnessed 106.6 mm, according to the Freetown Meteorological department.
In a region where Senegal and The Gambia are praying for the skies to open their mouths, such should be good news for Sierra Leone and its agriculture drive. Not quite, if you are a resident of Freetown not least living in its mountainous and slum environs. It reminds of thus: when I was a kid I told my dad that I loved the pitter-patter of the rain at night as I slept. “I agree”, my dad retorted, adding: “that is if your home is not leaky”. How true!
These days not many people sleep enjoyably when it rains. A combination of the disasters – such as deaths and destruction – which recent downpours have left in their wake, and the accompanying trauma of those reminiscences. And, yes, more needless deaths are happening, even now. Because it is that time of year in Freetown when new statistics are added to the old, of those who die every year between July and September. Here when it rains, it pours; and it leaves the poor even poorer.
Freetown is an interesting place. A long strip of land, it is sandwiched by the Atlantic Ocean and the tall, long and unending mountains that seem to follow you as you drive along the peninsula, through the city and even as you leave the city by road to the countryside or by boat to the airport. What a beauty to behold!
But beneath that veneer belie death and destruction. For generations, government ambivalence or blatant incompetence has turned this lovely mountain city into a fertile ground for needless and avoidable deaths, of especially the poor; while the poor drainages have become a graveyard where the dead are sometimes pulled out from.
Land is scarce in Freetown. Town planning is a joke. Lawlessness is rife. Joblessness galore! For the few who have a job, wages are so low that rent is prohibitively high for many. Yet Freetown hosts about a quarter of the country’s seven million population. A toxic mix that has given birth to deforestation.
Shacks are dotted along the otherwise beautiful coastline. In many parts of this city land is grabbed at the slightest opportunity, lands officials bribed and houses built, illegally.
Trees are being cut down for construction work or to burn for charcoal. As one of Serra Leone’s illustrious sons, OB Sisay posted recently on Facebook as if to remind those Sierra Leoneans who care to listen, “Trees are more valuable than timber or charcoal”.
Freetown’s population has risen exponentially over the last 25 years, in part due to the civil war of the 1990s, but also because of the massive rural-urban migration with almost everything concentrated in the capital. The city’s forest cover has disappeared as fast as its population has expanded. Its residents have proved very stubborn with many resisting any form of regulation and compliance with the law. Add to that the fact that successive governments’ inaction and even inertia has meant that there has been no corresponding attention paid to these changing realities.
For more than 15 years I have found myself reporting on flooding as if reading from my old script: X number of people killed and X number of communities submerged after a heavy downpour. From Mountain Cut to Mount Sugar Loaf, from Kroo Bay to Grey Bush. The authorities forget, once the rainy season is gone.
In Freetown, people pray for the rain so their pipe-borne water woes will end, albeit temporarily. And when the sky opens its mouth, the prayers turn into curse. This is a catch 22 situation for residents of Freetown who have yet again been warned that the worst is not yet over.
Every year we wail when the rains wreak havoc. We move on when the dry season is here – as if nothing had happened. Last week, there were two mudslides around the area of the flash floods of 14 August 2017. Despite those devastating events, houses which had already started coming up were destroyed by last week’s events.
The Tejan Kabbah administration succeeded somewhat in removing people from Moh Wharf, a slum just behind the maternity hospital of Cottage. We all thought that was the first step in clearing the flood-prone areas of Freetown. But the mistake was that the structures were not demolished. So they somehow managed to return. Today they live in squalor and the floods almost always wreak havoc.
The best known is Kroo Bay, Freetown’s largest slum. In 2015, not for the first time, the area was submerged after a heavy downpour, leaving many dead. They were moved to the national stadium. Later some of them were taken to a community of deplorably constructed tin shacks at Six Mile, in the middle of nowhere, after Waterloo. Those shacks are unfit even for goats, let alone human beings. Yet the authorities unconscionably took their compatriots to go and live there. That’s worse than throwing them away to let them fend for themselves.
The fight against unregulated construction of houses in especially Freetown should be intensified. The opposition and the public should have the conscience not to politicise the move to evict people from flood-prone areas when or if it starts. The late Dr Bobson Sesay comes to mind. As lands and country planning minister, Dr Sesay dedicated so much time and energy to demolishing illegal structures. The opposition mostly capitalised on that and called him “Broke Os”, thereby taking steam out of the whole thing which served as a fertiliser for illegal structures to flourish.
But like the US civil rights campaigner Jesse Jackson said in Freetown at the height of the civil war here, “a good leader should not always follow public opinion, but rather should mould public opinion”. That time is now when the good of the general public will inform the action of government, rather than political considerations.
In all this unregulated construction of houses we ignore the town planners and building contractors. Many of them do as their clients instruct them, failing to insist that it behoves them to provide professional advice which if not respected they should not take up the contract.
What has happened in recent years should serve as a catalyst to force us al into action and save people from continue to die needlessly. Let us plant trees and not just cut them recklessly. Let there be legislation, if one does not already exist, that criminalises and bars from practice those who build houses for clients without the necessary procedures followed and advice proffered. We are tired of the needless deaths!
© 2019 Politico Online
