By Umaru Fofana
All across the country you find them: bauxite, diamonds, gold, iron ore, Rutile. Throughout the motherland you see them: poverty, deprivation, depravity, abandonment, neglect. The more these resources are, it seems, the less the people get to know about them let alone have anything to show for them. Our mineral resources. Transparency suffocated. Secrecy enhanced. Mining contracts shady. Best practice shoddy.
In his book, The Wealth of Nations (1776) Adam Smith writes: “The business of mining is perhaps the most disadvantageous lottery in the world, or the one in which the gain of those who draw the prizes bears the least proportion to the loss of those who bear the blanks”. We are not even there yet. Never mind those who peg the prices of our huge mineral resources. Mind those who grant access to extracting them – Government. Mind those who bribe almost everyone to get their way – mining companies.
Let’s face it right from here: Australia escaped the wrenching global economic crisis with no effect whatsoever. Oh sorry, there were some effects: Positive ones. No deficit. It was surplus all the way while the rest of its peers in the West were reeling. Yes the country had a mining boom. But so also did it have good and well thought-out policies in dealing with its resources amid the huge appetite for iron ore from China. In Sierra Leone we had to use ABIDEC to stimulate that appetite. If you believe the then Minister of Mineral Resources, Alpha Kanu who justified the retrograde step of anti-people mining contracts with iron ore miners, “the early bird catches the worm”. Therefore the laws should be torn into smithereens, our rules broken into pieces, compromise reached only where it benefits the mining company, and the people sent to damnation. All because those in authority want to please and appease mining companies. Even if some of those companies had a mercurial and murky history or no good track record at all.
But in the case of Australia, the judicious awarding of contracts to companies with sound track records, and the use of their mineral resources, meant that the state and the mining companies were honest and accountable with who paid for what, how much and to whom. And they did so without regard to the “early bird” or the “worm” it caught. Inevitably what belonged to the state of Australia went not to a few politicians paid out by corrupt mining companies who bribed almost everyone and became meddlesome in the country’s politics if only to sustain the orgy of pillaging what belonged to the state. It went to the state instead. The Australian people.
This is what the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative aims to achieve. Protect the state against powerful multinational companies in the extractives sector and protect genuine mining companies against corrupt government officials at both national and local levels. Ironically, Sierra Leone has failed to show genuine commitment towards ensuring that. Not once. But twice. And in two consecutive years.
The government failed to pass the EITI scrutiny test despite assurances from the current Minister of Finance and then State House Chief of Staff. Before he ascended to the latter position, the Minister of Presidential Affairs was the “Champion” of Sierra Leone’s EITI (SLEITI). When the Choef of Staff position was introduced, Dr Kelfalla Marrah became that Champion and he assured last year that the country would achieve the feat this time round. He even reportedly said that he would resign if the country did not. If the country had become EITI compliant, Dr Marrah would have taken credit for it and would have granted interviews all over the place praising his boss’s “commitment to transparency and accountability in the mining sector”. And of course beating his own chest. Having failed he should take the flak and admit that he failed. And we all know what civilised people would do in such situations. By the way he promised he would resign. I take that to mean as Chief of Staff. He has been since appointed finance minister. So what should he do? To take responsibility for the failure and apologise is the least the civilised public can accept from him.
In his foreword to a World Bank publication “Rents to Riches?” Otaviano Canuto writes that the “Paradox of plenty” exists in resource-rich poor countries, where recent history has demonstrated that extractive endowments, if not well managed can disappoint. Such a disappointment can only be averted with proper accountability to the people for these resources. Again this is what the EITI seeks to achieve. The common problems, Canuto argues, include “lopsided, poorly diversified economic structures, disruption to local economies and communities, environmental hazards, [and] weakened accountability of the state to society...”
No-one needs telling that extractive endowments, if not well managed, can disappoint. The solution lies in being accountable about the resources to the people. The lack of this only makes a country like Britain with virtually no mineral resources give money even for budgetary support to a country like Sierra Leone rich in minerals. In other words countries that are resource-poor grow more and faster than those that depend on natural resources so long weak accountability and institutions are not set up and allowed to work.
Mining companies are part of the Multi Stakeholders Group of the SLEITI. Some of them have been in clear breach of what this whole accountability process needs to be able to work. Their dealings with some local authorities are contrary to best practice. They go into bad deals with self-centred traditional leaders and corrupt local and central government officials and pay them monies without the acquiescence of the people, and without receipts. Now you understand why these companies cannot care less when it comes to accountability. Some government officials, among them ministers, queue up on Fridays at the offices of these companies for weekend freebies. How does a company that is accountable to its Board and shareholders account for such freebies being doled out like ice cream? The gatekeeper is compromised!
So can anyone blame the companies when they behave murkily? After all they are let off the hook, if on the hook at all, when some of the magnates enter our country with cash in briefcase circumventing the banking system. They have the backing of some in high places.
Solomon asks in the Bible thus: “Can a man take fire in his bosom and his clothes not be burned? Can one go upon hot coals and his feet not be burned?” The answer is obvious. When government officials and other politicians and some media people who should be gatekeepers romance with mining companies the result is the lack of transparency by the companies and lack of accountability by the government. The suspension of Sierra Leone by the Board of EITI came not much as a surprise to anyone who has been watching. What Government has been doing with our extractive sector in relation to accountability and transparency is paying lip service only. The Online Repository and Cadestre initiative, again in the extractive sector, funded by the German Government, with all the good intentions if only to ensure transparency, hardly has any significant success to attribute to it. In digital broadcasting they call it GI-GO (garbage in-garbage out).
The resource governance system is far from being transparent. Cover-ups and wheeler-dealings have entrenched a shadowy state of affairs under our watch or with our tacit connivance. The EITI suspension of Sierra Leone is testament to that. Only a foolish government official will not see between the lines as to why we have to be EITI-compliant. We cannot have what we have and be fed by those who can only dream of what we have.
This is nothing short of plucking off the eyes of the EITI so it does not see the shenanigans that go on in our extractive sector. Ironically, the EITI is perhaps the only means through which our diamonds, gold, bauxite and iron ore, at al, can keep at bay the appalling conditions and reduced circumstances under which the vast majority of Sierra Leoneans live – from east to north, south to west. Less credibility and weaker enforcement in the extractive sector can only lead to one thing: More Poverty for the most and more riches for the very few.
