By Sallieu T. Kamara
President Ernest Bai Koroma and his All People’s Congress government are in the process of developing the Agenda for Prosperity. When completed, the Agenda for Prosperity will become Sierra Leone’s third generation Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP). Like all other development initiatives before it, the overarching objective of the Agenda for Prosperity will be to improve the social and economic conditions of Sierra Leoneans, particularly the poor and vulnerable.
Already, the Agenda has received unprecedented publicity that is mainly driven by functionaries of government, even though it has not yet seen the light of day. For these government functionaries, the Agenda for Prosperity will seek to spur growth, reduce economic insecurity and provide shared prosperity for especially the poor.
Successive governments in Sierra Leone have formulated several development initiatives since the turn of the century: The Sierra Leone People’s Party-led government finalized the Interim Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper in June 2001. Its main focus was on addressing the numerous challenges of the country’s transition from war to peace through the restoration of national security and good governance, re-launching of the country’s battered economy and the provision of basic services to the poor and extremely vulnerable.
This was followed by the Sierra Leone Vision 2025 in 2003, which is the long-term development agenda of the country. It is driven by the desire to create a better future for Sierra Leone – a future that is characterized by peace, stability and wealth creation.
Sierra Leone developed its first full-blown Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper in 2005 (2005-2007) within the framework of Vision 2025. This was constructed around good governance, peace and security, food security, job creation and human development with the aim of achieving high and broad-based economic growth and providing essential and economic services to the poor. Despite all of this, there was still a growing decline in living standards of the vast majority of Sierra Leoneans with poor social and economic indicators, which stood in stark contrast to the country’s rich natural endowments.
Then entered Ernest Bai Koroma and his All People’s Congress party in 2007. One of their immediate tasks was to review and to evaluate the SL-PRSP 1, and then develop the second generation SL-PRSP. This came in the name of the Agenda for Change (2008-2012) and it focuses on energy, agriculture, transportation including good road network and sustainable human development through improved social services.
One thing that all of these initiatives have in common is that the poor people are put first. At least, on paper. Notwithstanding some resounding successes of the Agenda for Change in the areas of energy and good road network, the vast majority of Sierra Leoneans, particularly those in rural communities, continue to wallow in abject poverty.
Can the advent of the Agenda for Prosperity address the growing gap between the poor and the rich in the country? Can it help the vast majority of Sierra Leoneans who daily endure the brunt of poverty, achieve a better life for themselves and their children? Or can it continue to make the rich richer, the powerful more powerful, the weak weaker and the poor poorer? These and many more related questions should exercise the minds of our policy makers and other duty bearers at all times.
Even before the Agenda for Prosperity comes into operation, Sierra Leone is now a lucrative destination for all sorts of foreign investors. Some of them enter the country illicitly and straight away engage in illegal business transactions with the full complicity of some state and government functionaries. The main purpose of this collusion on both parties is to enrich themselves at the expense of the poor people. There are many cases of such business transactions before our courts today for hearing. There is very little monitoring of the activities of these investors once they have entered the country because the regulatory mechanisms of the state are weak and susceptible to manipulations. But for the government, the influx of investors into the country is an indication of progress towards the promise land – a land where everybody will live in dignity and in human security.
I spent last weekend in my village at Kagbantama in the Port Loko district. Saturday 1 September was Pay Day for workers of the Sierra Leone Agriculture, an Indian-owned company engaged in large-scale oil palm plantation in the Bureh Kasseh Makonteh chiefdom. The exercise ended in absolute chaos, as thousands of irate workers stoutly protested the unexplained deductions of their salaries, which has become a routine.
The workers used to receive sums ranging from Le300,000 to Le350,000 as monthly salary depending on how much deduction their pay masters made. For the month of August, these meagre sums were further slashed significantly, leaving some workers with less than Le250,000 to take home. This infuriated the workers who then accused the company of “naked thieving”. This is not an isolated incident. It is happening all over the country where these so-called investors are operating. Is this the ideal road to the land of prosperity?
If our governments are really serious and have good intentions about addressing the root causes of poverty in the country, they have not yet demonstrated it sufficiently enough. This is partly because all of these development initiatives are externally-driven with little inputs from Sierra Leoneans who know better what they want. There is a template for all of this: read through the PRSPs of Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Zambia, and others. They are almost the same. This one-size-fits-all approach cannot work any longer. The contexts are different, so also are the needs. Do our governments take this into consideration in formulating national development initiatives? Or are they mere zombies that are always ready to swallow hook, line and sinker anything that drops into their mouths?
Sierra Leone used to have viable factories before the war, which employed hundreds of thousands of Sierra Leoneans. Go to the industrial estate at Wellington in the eastern part of the city during week days and see economic activity taking place there as a result of the availability of job opportunities. Apart from reducing the unemployment rate, these factories and their workers contributed immensely towards the national economy by way of taxes. Today, these factories are no more. The country depends on foreign countries for every little thing we need; even little things like mint. What have our governments done since the war ended to resuscitate these factories, and even bring in new ones?
I am quite aware that the factories were not owned by the government. But a government that cares so much about alleviating the suffering of its people can do something to have these factories up and running. We have made lots of provision for foreign companies that are interested in mining and large-scale agriculture, why not do a similar thing for owners of these factories, particularly when we know that they do not only provide employment opportunities for our youth, but also for middle-level skills development?
Also, Sierra Leone is known the world over for its good quality Gara garment. The northern headquarters of Makeni is the seat of its production. Some of our leaders today got their education through proceeds from the Gara trade. Today, this trade is diminishing steadily, putting hundreds of people that are involved in the production chain out of employment. What have our governments done to save this once viable trade from extinction? Why do we continue to import garments or school uniforms from mainly China, whilst our local garment industry is crumbling? For every yard of poplin that we import from China or other countries, we are building the economies of those countries and undermining ours. Is that the way we want to bring prosperity to Sierra Leone?
We have close to 5,000 public primary schools and about 500 public secondary schools with an enrolment that exceeds one million pupils. Can you imagine how many jobs will be created if the government of Sierra Leone makes it a policy that all public schools in the country must use Gara for their unions? The government should not only make the policy, but must take necessary actions to organize and support the local producers to produce enough garments that will meet this demand. It will then be left with the individual schools to determine the designs and colours that they will want for their pupils. To me, this is real wealth creation.
We can also take advantage of our experience in the gari production. Gari is produced in large quantity and in good quality in the southern region, Bo to be specific. Every Sierra Leonean who has heard about this world-renowned Bo gari is yearning to have a taste of it. Again, the government can come up with a policy, making it compulsory for all public places such as hospitals, boarding homes, orphanages, tertiary institutions and forces training schools to eat gari or other cassava products at least twice a week, unless where there is a medical advice to the contrary. The hundreds of thousands of farmers that are engaged in cassava production across the country will benefit directly from such a scheme, which will also provide employment for many others that are not farmers. This is far much better than the present spate of giving away our land to foreign companies in the name of investment.
I am not oblivious of the demands of globalization, though, but if we are to bail ourselves out of extreme poverty, then we need to take firm action to protect and promote local areas in which we have comparative advantage. Even the proponents of globalization take measures to protect their local industries. With time and with reasonable investment and planning, these areas can break into the export markets.
I believe if we approach poverty reduction this way, we can bring prosperity to the doorsteps of our rural people. Development initiatives should not be in sharp contrast to the country context. What we are seeing in these PRSPs is not development, rather a clever way of the northern countries to create uncontested markets for their home companies and to swindle our natural resources to strengthen their own economies. And in the process, the few that are rich and powerful continue to become richer and more powerful, whilst the poor who are in the majority, lose out. This is part of the international conspiracy against poor countries like Sierra Leone.
