By Isaac Massaquoi
Please do this for me: next time you approach the Aberdeen Bridge from the Lumley beach end, look to your right just before you enter it, you will see a gated community – it’s fantastically well laid out. It’s the sort of place anybody would desire to live in. Now half way through the bridge, continue looking to your right across the bay and you will see hundreds of shacks protruding into the sea, made possible by the most rudimentary of land reclamation exercises and it’s basically a disaster waiting to happen.
I suspect that by now you get the idea of where I am taking you. Here are two groups of Sierra Leoneans living about three hundred yards apart, separated by a river, one group living like those big celebrities in Malibu while the others live in a place worse than Kroo Bay, the unbelievable slum to the north-west of Freetown where pigs feast on human faeces only hours before they are slaughtered for the market.
I know that for the foreseeable future we will never reach a state of social development and organisation in which every Sierra Leonean will live in gated heaven-on-earth communities but the disparity between the ordinary people and their compatriots is breathtakingly wide or growing daily and, let’s face it, the longer a situation like that persists, the more the safety of the people living behind those Walls of Jericho and indeed the rest of society is put in jeopardy.
The situation I have just described exists in many parts of the country and the only thing people like me can do, is ask the inevitable questions, why? But does anybody care?
I suspect that there are many Sierra Leoneans, including politicians who feel very bad about the fact that life is that difficult, even wretched for their compatriots but can’t do anything to help or they are denied any possibility of acting by the political system in which they find themselves.
It’s just unacceptable that society should pretend to be at peace with itself when only a handful of people are able to enjoy any measure of what I can call good living.
The odds are so piled up against the down trodden of our country that they only make it to the headlights of national publicity in the rainy season when their shacks are swept away with their few belongings and sometimes their children by torrential rains so common to this part of the world.
During elections like the one we recently held, politicians pour into those slum communities in droves to bring out the votes of the downtrodden masses which carry the same weight as their powerful cousins across the Aberdeen River. Suddenly, TV cameras reach those places and their deplorable living standards become headline news and newspapers run up several column inches bemoaning those conditions and for a few days at least the media get involving in what journalists call “comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable”.
In the last few days I have been reading dozens of carefully selected newspapers published during the recent campaign and also listening to materials I recorded from many radio stations to bring myself up to date with what all the politicians, particularly those in government now, had told the people. It’s very interesting.
The new government is being put together painfully slowly and from what I have seen so far, I am waiting to be surprised. The team is largely the same and president Koroma’s readiness to “part with friends and family” has not been demonstrated. The only real surprise so far is the sacking of IB Kargbo.
Many of what the politicians told our people will not be realised in ten years and even those that can be done will not be attended to because they are not on the government’s priority list put forward by the president in his speeches and the budget.
Our people were never told the truth. In the event they were swept away by the World Best euphoria and those of us in the media who ought to have injected some honesty and realism in a poisoned campaign atmosphere, wasted precious attacking each other over trivialities.
Things got so bad that at one point a Diaspora politician from the ruling party told his friend that the fratricidal media war created the “right atmosphere for Koroma to win because the people have been conditioned to believe that anything against the interest of Koroma was coming from the opposition and must be dismissed”.
In one of my articles last year, I described Sierra Leone as a “nation without conversation”. Many people are completely fed up with being told things that were either outright lies or the crude product of some cruel spin factory.
The Diaspora man was very embarrassed when he knew who I was and because he couldn’t withdraw his harsh comments about the media, he spent the next half an hour trying to convince me that he meant no harm. In fact I encouraged him to continue his criticism because I am not easily offended by such even when it becomes ad hominen. If one is going to be in the media pulling people up and blaming them for the failings of society, they should be prepared to take criticisms too. Peter Tosh says “if you can’t take blows brother, don’t throw none”.
The JAYCEE’s criticisms were confirmed by International Observers – particularly the European Union and it’s easy to discern how selectively the Sierra Leone media have used the report. The SLBC has trumpeted the portions that endorsed Koroma’s victory and attacked the other parts that contained scathing criticism of the corporation’s anti-opposition bias. Some media groups have simply ignored the media section of the EU report.
If you ask me, this is an opportunity for the so-called Board of Trustees of the national broadcaster in particular to stand up and address the concerns raised in that report. The SLBC has been seriously damaged by that report and our politicians will answer many questions about their treatment of opposition and other critical voices in society.
For private news organisations, it’s up to them to do some introspection and take the necessary remedial actions.
So back to the main issue of the marginalised of our society and how they have been made to legitimise one regime after another by means of elections since independence, only for those regimes to behave like the biblical Kings of Israel who always started well by agreeing to keep the covenant of Yahweh only to disobey the Lord. Then they were either killed in battle or by their own people.
In modern Sierra Leone, leaders are neither killed in battle nor by the people. They are voted out of office – that’s democracy. Once the election results are declared in their favour, the politicians return to fully air-conditioned offices, cruise around in expensive jeeps and travel abroad attending meaningless conferences simply to collect per-diem, all charged on the state.
Believe me, I want our politicians to look good in office, but with the huge and complex layer-after-layer of bureaucracy costing the taxpayer so much money, the people deserve more in terms of the quality of leadership and the lifestyle of those holding political positions. I have it on good authority that in 2012 alone, our wage bill alone was one trillion leones. Let’s start an austerity program to save money for other sectors otherwise governance will become an unbearable burden soon.
As for the media, the evidence is here already, journalists have pulled back from the frontlines of partisan sniping to the daily grind of reporting conferences and workshops, speeches in parliament, political gossip and celebrity news while waiting for another political visit or a serious natural disaster claiming lives in deprived communities.
Middle class Sierra Leoneans who are educated and have some disposable income to spend at Lumley Beach every weekend and can afford to send their children to one of the many private schools around and travel to Western capitals in their official capacity or personally, at least once a year are just content to stay in those comfort zones pretending life around them is normal.
Again, there’s nothing wrong with them having all the good things in life, they deserve all that but how about using their extensive contacts locally and internationally and all the sophistication at their disposal to help keep governments on their toes instead of pretending it’s none of their business.
The following lines describe how the elite of our society are behaving today and here I refer to the last days of the regime of the most corrupt dictator in Africa Mobutu Sese Seko of the former Zaire. Journalist Michaela Wrong captures that period and the conditions in Zaire in an interesting book titled “In the footsteps of Mr Kurtz”. She writes: “Road non-existent? Buy a four wheel drive. National Television on the blink? Install a satellite dish in your back garden and tune in to CNN. Phone out of order? Hire a Telcel. As Zaire crumbled, one community, at least, could afford to buy its way out of anarchy”.
The war in Sierra Leone ended more than 10 years ago and the country has made a lot of progress in its reconstruction efforts but the infrastructure is still very basic, which makes it impossible to deliver the Agenda for Prosperity. Our institutions are weak and compromised to the extent that strong men are still running the show. The elites are hanging in their snugly as long as they are “prospering”. The media like the Catholic Church in medieval Europe are allowing politicians to run riots while we continue getting our indulgences. How long will this last? Sani Abacha would probably still be in power today in Nigeria, had great men like Wole Soyinka not stood up to say “enough is enough”.
(C) Politico 10/01/13
