By Isaac Massaquoi
Sierra Leone is in for the wettest rainy season in many years, this year. This statement is not based on any sound meteorological study. Well you may want to ask me how I came to that conclusion. It is informed by the curtain-raiser to this year's rainy season as I have experienced in Bo and Freetown over the last three weeks. In both cities, it poured down like it was late July. Just in case my prediction falls through please understand that I only took a lay man’s approach to weather forecasting.
My real concern for writing this piece is that once again Sierra Leone is going into the rainy season without any convincing preparation to fight off the usual difficulties we all face when the rains take hold in July and August in particular. When it rained in Freetown recently, the whole city was covered in filth of mostly water plastic sachets that are swept into the many gutters and other drainages around the city daily.
There will be more of that throughout May and June. Garbage sites are overflowing and all the rubbish will surely end up on our streets. It is also at the beginning of the rainy season that cholera breaks out. Last year, more than two hundred Sierra Leoneans were killed by cholera before president Koroma declared a national emergency. Yes, international aid money came flooding in and it made an immediate impact in the nation’s struggle against a disease that is easily preventable but also easily kills people in Sierra Leone.
Some of us did ask the question why it took the lives of two hundred Sierra Leoneans before president Koroma cried for international help. Many other lives were saved when the president officially informed the world of our problems with cholera. I wonder what kind of information he was getting from the Ministry of Health that caused him to delay that announcement.
The trouble is when countries call for international help against a disease like cholera, they tell visitors to stay away. Those reports creep into world news because NGOs will get it there for fundraising purposes. In truth, Sierra Leone put itself in front of the world as a nation that was completely unable to deal with sanitation.
The last thing this country wants this year is another cry for help to clear the land of cholera.
Things are not looking good though. Kroo bay, Susan’s bay and all the other slums are still very much the same. NGOs may have done a few things to make life a little easier for those who choose to go and live in slums or are forced by circumstances to do so but life is still difficult. There are only a few toilets for thousands of people. Many defecate in the open, pigs roam free, gutters are packed with rubbish and stagnant pools of water are found everywhere. The picture is bleak.
More than two years ago, president Koroma was led up the hill by the then deputy minister of health, the late Mohamed Daudis Koroma to see for himself the devastation caused by rains on shanty dwellings squeezed precariously between huge boulders on the hills overlooking Freetown. Properties were destroyed, lives were lost and dreams were shattered when many homes were swept away. The president promised help and the disaster management people at the Office of National Security suddenly appeared on radio to talk about how to avoid such disasters and all that. Nothing significant, if anything, happened. I am very sorry to say this but we should expect some more of such scenes this year too.
Many Sierra Leoneans were looking forward to the government acting really tough against all those illegal constructions by people who basically grab land anywhere and build homes that just can’t stand the force of the elements. If anything such constructions have intensified between the president’s visit to that disaster hill and now.
The new minister of lands has been running around making speeches, pulling down some walls and promising to bring sanity to the blood sport called land-grabbing. I dare say Tarawally is completely overwhelmed by the sheer scale and complexity of the problem and he has now pulled back to the comfort and perhaps safety of Youyi Building. The dangers are still very much with us.
The bottom line is that this country should never allow itself to be caught off guard once again by something that happens annually. I have been watching to see if the Ministry of Health will begin training and putting blue flag volunteers in place in communities that are normally worst affected by cholera. They should have intensified public education campaigns in the same places on basic prevention methods and even on TV.
As part of its national service portfolio, the SLBC ought to have taken the lead but like they did the last time, they are waiting for the president to declare a national emergency before they hypocritically announce their own war against cholera.
During the dry season a lot of human excreta were poured in bushes and drainages and naturally our water system will be contaminated once the whole mess is washed down with the early rains. How much effort have we made to stop people relieving themselves in bushes and drainages all around Freetown?
There are hundreds of houses in this city without a toilet. The greedy house owners pack a lot of people in there and provide no toilets for them. They relieve themselves either in the bush or in black plastic bags that end up in Freetown's drainage system. All the City Council is concerned about is collecting city rates from the landlords and local tax from individual residents of the city.
Mayor Bode Gibson has presented no plan to even suggest he knows where he is taking Freetown particularly in the area of sanitation. The Mayor's failure to deal with raw sewerage flowing freely on the streets in the heart of the city is simply breathtaking. I want to call his attention again to the following areas, Belgium Market, the area close to the ministerial building on Lightfoot Boston street, near the SLENA Building on Wallace Johnson Street, a few yards from his office and on main Siaka Stevens Street near Charlotte Street junction. This country is sending a very bad message about itself because raw sewerage has been flowing for far too long now in these places.
Back to the Minister of Lands and his fight against land grabbing and illegal constructions. We lost that fight the day the All People’s Congress party, then in opposition, decided to make political capital out of former lands minister Bobson Sesay's fight against the same scourge. I am not even sure we have learnt the lesson of standing together as one on issues as important as land grabbing and reckless street trading. Both parties have always tried to score political points from such issues depending on which side of the political situation they find themselves – government or opposition.
So I admire Tarawally's zeal to save land grabbers from themselves but I am afraid this battle cannot be won from one side. We need a bi-partisan approach to the fight against land grabbing and illegal constructions particularly in the dangerous hills overlooking Freetown.
The ONS is the agency in charge of disaster management and I make no claim to knowing in detail how they carry out that particular responsibility. But the fact that the same disasters occur daily and the ONS is only left to do radio programs bemoaning the situation, tells me a lot more needs to be done. How about pressing the ministries concerned to be extremely cautions with granting building permits to people erecting structures on those hills of death, or standing solidly behind officials empowered to forcibly pull down illegal structure? The chill sent down the spines of those workers following the brutal killing of their colleague Ken Moore is still there. Till this day, Moore's killers have not been brought to justice.
I like the rains. At a time when water is scare, we scoop a lot of it with little difficulty, there is a general freshness around as the trees blossom and one gets a nice sleep most evenings. So let it rain. But all the troubles the rain brings such as I have mentioned above, there is the overriding question of people's security against armed robbers who are most active at times like this. I will return to that in another edition.
