By Sallieu Kamara
When God created man, He also created the abundance of nature to serve him as a source of comfort, protection and sustainable livelihood. Land, which is an embodiment of this, is richly endowed with natural assets such as water, marine life, soils, forests and mineral resources like diamonds, gold, iron ore, bauxite, coltan and cobalt.
Today, instead of harnessing these huge natural resources to lift their poor societies to prosperity, African leaders are making a mess of them. This rich natural endowment has dragged African societies down when it could have lifted up their economies and the living conditions of the people.
The food and fuel crisis that started in 2008, compounded by the growing global warming, has ignited a spectacular demand for bio-ethanol and bio-diesel by industrialized countries resulting in the new desperate scramble for the “virgin” lands of Africa.
The Canadian journalist, development researcher and science writer, Joan Baxter, wrote in the Pambazuka of 6 May 2010 that “the large-scale acquisition for industrial agriculture in Africa and other developing countries has been described as a global land grab, threatening food, seed and land sovereignty of farmers, social stability, environmental health and biodiversity around the world”. Whilst the United Nations Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Jean Ziegler, simply and provocatively condemned the use of farm lands in Africa to grow crops for the production of biofuels as a crime against humanity. Others described this as another form of neo-colonialism in which the rich buy up lands in poorer countries to secure access to food and fuel for their own consumption. In the process, they inflict serious destruction on African countries, and ultimately leave them in ruins.
The situation has become very serious today when, for the first time in human history, over a billion people go to bed hungry each night. Even more serious is that most of those that are entrusted with the responsibility to protect the rights of poor African farmers and their farmlands from exploitative foreign takeovers are the very ones championing the interests of foreign investors at the detriment of their people.
African leaders have demonstrated ample evidence in recent times of their eagerness to sell out their own farmers by giving their precious land to foreign investors. They are so busy protecting these foreign investors that they most times neglect to protect even themselves and their own people whose interest they purport to represent. This has become so alarming that many people are doubtful whether African leaders are not personally benefiting from these large-scale land deals. In fact, Joan Baxter opined that there are African leaders that apparently prostrate themselves at the feet of foreign investors to court them with generous tax holidays and other concessions that work against the interest of their own people.
African leaders always argue that large-scale bio-fuel cultivation could provide employment, skills-development and facilitate the flourishing of secondary industries in developing countries. This is true. But this can only happen where there is security of land tenure and where the appropriate conditions are in place. Otherwise, biofuels production may result in poorer landowners and land users losing access to the land on which they solely depend for their livelihoods.
Back home in Sierra Leone, where over 80 percent of the country’s population live in rural areas where they mostly engage in subsistence farming and food production, the recent spate of foreign investment in industrial agriculture is seriously threatening the country’s food security drive, which is a priority on the Government’s development agenda, as well as a source of conflict in affected local communities. Foreign investors of all shades and characters are today daily descending on the country like holocausts to divest, under the cloak of invest, in large-scale industrial agriculture to grow crops such as oil palm and sugar cane to produce biofuels for export to Europe.
On his election in 2007, President Ernest Bai Koroma said he would run Sierra Leone “like a business” using his corporate experience as an insurance broker. In order to ensure that this happened, his government embarked on wide ranging economic and political reforms that significantly improved Sierra Leone’s position in the World Bank’s Annual Doing Business Rankings. Sierra Leone moved 20 places upward to become one of the top five countries in Sub-Saharan Africa for investor protection and ease of starting business.
In their vaulting ambition to woo investors, no matter the consequences on the vast majority of the citizens, the government and its agencies seized every opportunity to advertise the country’s potentials for the production of biofuels and organic foods. The Sierra Leone Investment and Export Promotion Agency (SLIEPA), which was established with the guidance of the International Finance Corporation, an arm of the World Bank, in 2007, highlights agriculture as one of its most promising sectors for foreign investment as evidenced by the advertisement below that was mounted on their official website:
“Sierra Leone is ideal for agriculture. It has over 4.3 million hectares of cultivable land available, plentiful aquatic resources, a tropical climate, rich soil, and lowland and highland areas. A current base of production in staple foods (rice, cassava, vegetables), cash crops (sugar, cocoa, coffee, ginger and cashew), and tree crops (oil palm, coconut), has potential for significant expansion. A communal/chiefdom land tenure system and strong government facilitation makes land easy to obtain in most agricultural areas through secure, long-term leases”.
This ultimately set the machinery in motion for all sorts of investors to come into the country to do business. The government of President Ernest Bai Koroma and its agencies here in Sierra Leone and abroad use every available opportunity to eloquently wax lyrical about this as one of the regime’s great successes in four years. Accepted that this is true, but at what price? Are the people, particularly affected local communities, better off today, or worse off? What does the future hold for the hundreds of thousands of land owners and land users who are daily dispossessed of their land and their traditional settlements where they have strong emotional attachments?
I attended meetings of land owners, land users and other stakeholders in Bo, Kono, Port Loko and Waterloo in the last two weeks. Participants at these meetings were drawn from local communities that had already lost some of their land to foreign investors, as well as those that could lose theirs. I was terribly horrified and shaken by the unspeakable stories of neglect and human suffering that residents of local communities affected by large-scale land investments or land sales across the country are enduring on an hourly basis. From Tankoro and Gbense in Kono, Tongo Fields in Kenema, Gbanti-Kamaranka in Bombali, Sahn Malem in Pujehun, Bureh Kasseh Makonteh and Lunsar in Port Loko, the stories of human sufferings are the same, and they seem to be endless.
“Rutile mining has expanded their operations to Bumpe Ngao and my village is one of the several villages that are affected. All of us in the village were forcefully relocated to a new settlement far away from what we used to call our home without proper preparations. The company has gone ahead again and dredged the entire surroundings of our new settlement. Today, we are living on an island that is surrounded by big water bodies that limit our movements and exacerbate our already terrible living conditions. Pneumonia has now become the common illness in the community; our domestic animals are dying in droves because of lack of green fields to graze on. Perhaps, our fear now is, if this expansion is allowed to continue in the way and manner it is being carried out, we will one day have no place to bury the dead,” an old woman in her 60s emotionally explained their plight.
In Yainkassa, in the Gbanti-Kamaranka chiefdom where Addax Bioenergy is planting sugar cane for the production of ethanol, the residents are treated like ordinary slaves in complicity with the local authorities and state security apparatuses. Their land was taken away from them and leased out to Addax Bioenergy without their involvement in the negotiation process, nor was their prior informed consent sought.
“Police officers recently raided Yainkassa village and arrested some residents who they locked up in stinky police cells in Makeni for several days before they were released with no charges preferred, and no apologies made. The only crime these people had committed was that they entered into what used to be their land and collected sticks to repair their fences. Addax has not yet planted anything on this land. Police raids on residents have become a permanent feature in the communities where Addax Bioenergy operates,” residents of Yainkassa that attended the meeting in Port Loko said.
In Sahn Malen chiefdom, Pujehun district, the land owners said they did not know how much Socfin (the company that is planting oil palm for the production of biofuels for the European market) paid for their land since they were not involved in the negotiations. The Paramount Chief only invited them to the chiefdom headquarter town one morning and doled out monies to them ranging from Le 500,000 (US$120) to Le5,000,000 (US$1,200) as lease payments for their land. The disbursement was done in the presence of a truck-load of heavily-armed state security personnel. The presence of the state security was deliberate; it was meant to intimidate and coerce landowners and cow them into submission.
In Bureh Kasseh Makonteh chiefdom in Port Loko district, the people expressed disappointment over the way and manner in which their land was “deceitfully” taken away from them and that all the promises, which their chiefs made to them on behalf of the Indian-owned Sierra Leone Agriculture (the company operating in the chiefdom), are yet to be fulfilled. They said they had never sat together with the investors as land owners to discuss the terms and conditions under which they were giving away their land.
“We have no knowledge of what is going on. We are totally excluded from the negotiations to take away our land. Everything is centred on the Paramount Chief and the Member of Parliament. We do not even know how they came to the agreement that the company should pay us a paltry Le101,000 (one hundred and one thousand Leones) as annual surface rent for each bush they take away from us, no matter the size and usefulness of the bush to us,” affected land owners in the BKM chiefdoms said.
At Mayoisor in the Bureh section, the community people complained that they had been working for periods ranging from 18 to 20 months without appointment letters from their employers, the Sierra Leone Agriculture. They saw this as a deliberate ploy by the company to deny them the full enjoyment of their labour rights.
In Kono, the Koidu Holdings Limited (KHL) has expanded its lease concessions in Tankoro chiefdom to the extent of engulfing important state institutions such as the police station and the Native Administration building. The company is now in the process of building a huge towering fence right at the heart of Koidu town aimed at denying the real land owners access to the concession area.
“The fact that the police station has been sold out to Koidu Holdings shows that our governments cannot stop at anything in protecting the interests of foreign investors. The police station is supposed to serve as one of the state institutions that the citizens will use to seek redress from the excesses of foreign investors. But now that it too has fallen prey to these heartless investors and their cohorts in the governance of the state, then, all hope is gone,” affected property owners in Kono said.
In all of this, nobody takes responsibility for the unfortunate situations of the people; the chiefs blame the Members of Parliament for undue interference and for “usurping” their powers in the negotiations and disposal of lands to foreign investors. The Members of Parliament, in return, blame the chiefs for all the suffering that land owners and land users are going through at the hands of foreign investors. It is an endless thing.
The government, which has the responsibility to protect and promote the interests of land owners and local communities in all of this, is doing pretty little to curb the excesses of foreign investors. This has created the situation in which the affected communities are subjected to awful human rights abuses, whilst a few people, mainly the local and political leadership, are reaping the full benefits. But believe it or leave it, all of what we are witnessing today would not have happened without the expressed approval and illicit support that these companies are receiving from the government and its agencies.
Like the Minister of Investment of Egypt, Mahmoud Mohieddin, said: “if foreign investors exploit an African country, it's the fault of the country itself because individual countries have the obligation to protect themselves. If your country doesn't provide this kind of policy priority in its investment policy, don't blame those who are coming to exploit and extract. The issue of responsible investment lies with the government”. How apt this statement is to Sierra Leone’s current approach to land investment!
When will our governments start to promote responsible investments and reduce the suffering of their people? The people are furious and temperatures are rising high. The government must listen to their plight and act now. Or else, they will start to use their rights to resist, in their own way, the ongoing robbery of their precious lands. And once we reach that stage, the cost to quell the emerging storms will be enormous in terms of life and property.
