Tag: Sierra Leone

Sierra Leone General Elections 2018 – A personal diary, by Diana Szanto

April 16, 2018 /

On the 4th of April, I was sitting on the veranda of a restaurant in Lungi and watched mesmerized the police officer next to me who, in his full gear, consumed bitter wine sold in small plastic packets. As he was finishing one packet after another, he was visibly getting drunker with each sip. The scene provided the context – both in historic and sociological terms – for what had been the most important public issue for Sierra Leone for the past few weeks:  the presidential elections.

With his drunkenness, the policeman’s voice grew louder. I could not miss it: he was boasting of his rebel past.  He was armed.  With this open and embodied reference to the RUF he reminded us all how the brutal memory of the civil war was still so near, constituting a permanently threatening background to national politics.  Sierra Leone got liberated from a deadly civil war just 16 years ago, too short time for a nation to forget the trauma but sufficiently long for the new generation to forget about the healthy fear of violence. In fact, the spectrum of violence seemed so real that the maintenance of peace and order was the number one stake in this election. A lot of people whom I asked about their hopes responded me spontaneously: “I just pray for peace”. Continue reading

Jostling for power: Sierra Leone’s election runoff, by Luisa Enria and Jamie Hitchen

March 15, 2018 /

After six days of patiently waiting, during which 25% increments of Sierra Leone’s 7 March presidential vote were gradually released, on the evening of 13 March, chair of Sierra Leone’s National Electoral Commission (NEC) Mohamed Conteh announced final results and in doing so confirmed a runoff would be needed to decide who will become the country’s next leader.

The first-round result gives a slender advantage to the Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) and its presidential aspirant Julius Maada Bio (43.3%) who will face off against Samura Kamara, the candidate of the incumbent All People’s Congress (APC), who trailed Maada Bio by just 0.6%. 14 other candidates shared the remaining 14% of the votes and these ballots will be up for grabs when the two leading candidates contest again on 27 March. Continue reading

Generation Terrorists: The Politics of Youth and the Gangs of Freetown, by Kieran Mitton

February 26, 2018 /

Youth at Risk – Youth as Risk

On the evening of the 15th February, six leading presidential candidates for the Sierra Leone presidential elections took to the stage. Over three hours of a live broadcasted debate, each answered questions about their plans for the country. Seen by some as a milestone in Sierra Leone’s post-war political development, the following morning the capital Freetown was abuzz with talk about who had acquitted themselves, who had failed to impress, and what – if anything – this might mean for the election result on the 7th March. In the offices of a youth development organisation, staff enthusiastically discussed the event.

In an adjoining room, I met with their colleague Mohamed*, a man with decades of experience working in the city’s poorest informal communities. What did you think of the debate? I asked. Was it a sign that Sierra Leone’s political scene is moving towards serious discussion of policies, or as one report put it, ‘growing up’?

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A poster in Susan’s Bay calls on Sierra Leone’s youth to be peaceful during elections. Photo by the author

Mohamed smiled. Pointing to his colleagues next door, he replied: ‘Each person there is arguing about why their preferred candidate won the debate. What the candidate actually said, how they performed – it doesn’t matter.’ He went on to make a familiar point; voters put party, tribe and personal loyalties ahead of policies. Whilst certainly not new or unique to Sierra Leone, this he contended, meant such debates had little bearing on the electoral outcome. The promise of some candidates to provide free education, surely a positive development for the country’s youth, was just rhetoric, he concluded. In fact, ‘politicians keep the youth uninformed and uneducated so they can use them to their own advantage.’ Continue reading

Ebola: why has the previous existence of Ebola in the Mano river region not been discussed?

December 8, 2016 /

 

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Empty Ebola Treatment Center at ELWA outside Monrovia. November 1, 2016

Passage from a medical journal from 1982: The results seem to indicate that at least Liberia and Guinea have been included in the Ebola and Marburg virus endemic zone. Therefore, the medical personnel in Liberian health centres should be aware of the possibility that they may come across active cases and thus be prepared to avoid nosocomial epidemics.

Signs here and there in the city remind us of the recent Ebola crisis. An empty bucket outside a shop, hand sanitizer in the fancier restaurants, but not much more. Monrovians do not mention it much, unless you ask. It is not like the previous civil wars which people still like to refer to. If Ebola in Liberia was like a silent war, it also appears to have a silent aftermath. Riding a shared taxi I ask my co-passengers about this. Why do you keep talking about the war, that took place so long ago but not the Ebola crisis? A woman answers: the Ebola epidemic was simply too fearful. In the war you would know where the enemy came from, Ebola on the other hand came from nowhere and everywhere; it was an invisible enemy. Which one would they prefer? The war, is the unison answer amongst fellow passengers. And when I did not stress it anymore we quickly moved into other less ‘fearful’ topics. Continue reading

Flavour was not supposed to die…, by Andrew Jefferson

August 22, 2016 /

flavourIt’s raining in Freetown and the traffic is, as usual, slow on the road through Congo Town towards Kroo Town Road. The radio announcer is going through the obituaries in a solemn, deliberate monotone, the names different, the pattern the same: Mr John Koroma of Kissy Town passed away on said date leaving said relatives in said location… repeat… repeat… repeat. Variations on the theme. After a few minutes of death reports the obituaries are rounded off with a few snatches of Abide With Me, by which time we have actually reached Kroo Town Road. We swing right on the now tarmacked road that runs parallel to Adelaide Street and pass what, ten years ago, was the Pentagon car wash, a hangout for ex-combatants and others struggling to make a living in a world of ‘no war no peace’ under conditions that one of them described as ‘exorbitant poverty’.

I’m heading for the office of Prison Watch (a local human rights NGO) on Gabriel Street at the other end of the road but it was Pentagon that was my first point of reference in Sierra Leone. It was there my encounters with marginal, hustling youth began (thanks to Mats Utas!). And it was not far from there that I first encountered Flavour. Continue reading

Closed fists of Ebola, by Diana Szántó

December 8, 2015 /

The arrival is always a shock. When the door of the aeroplane opens, there is a sudden rush of heat, of odours and colours. It does not take too long to get used to it. When I am outside of the airport, it is as if I had never been gone. The last time I was here was before the Ebola. I remember, one of my friends called me one week after my return, speaking of an Ebola case in Kailahun. Since then the country had had more than 12 000 cases and have counted more than 3000 deaths. These are the official numbers, although I have always found these statistics strange, knowing that Ebola kills with a 50% probability, as health experts affirm. The numbers suggest that or too many people got identified who finally were not sick, or Salone has a secret method of treating Ebola with a better success rate than all the others. Also, the epidemics drew a special curb here compared to the two other countries affected. While in the beginning Liberia seemed to be the most vulnerable of the three, Sierra Leone soon caught up and experienced a sharp increase of cases in the middle of the year, when elsewhere the disease seemed already to be withdrawing. It would be interesting to find out what factors shaped the statistical curbs in the three countries in this particular way and what accounts for the difference in the development and the soothing of the epidemics. Today Sierra Leone is Ebola-free, and the whole country is counting down to the 7th of November when the 2 times 21 days with no new case will be reached – as everybody hopes. Now new cases are reported only from neighbouring Guinea and people pray that the virus does not cross the border. Continue reading

“You think this is an Ebola Office?” Rebuilding trust in the aftermath of Sierra Leone’s outbreak, by Luisa Enria

October 13, 2015 /

We are sitting amongst the rubble of an unfinished building, a group of young men have stopped their construction work for a moment to take respite from the hot midday sun. A black jeep speeds past with its windows rolled down and one of the young workers shouts: “You think this is an Ebola office?” As the car continues on its way, the young men laugh and discuss how “those people”, meaning Ebola response workers, don’t want Ebola to end. The assumption is that response workers have “eaten” a lot of Ebola money, embodied by the large number of cars that have suddenly appeared in Kambia, Northern Sierra Leone, a town near the border to Guinea previously neglected by international development efforts. Kambia was the last hotspot of Ebola in the summer of 2015, and one of the target areas of a heavily militarised “Operation Northern Push”, which imposed a curfew between 6pm and 6am alongside strict restrictions on gatherings and movement. In late July the district discharged its last patients and released its last quarantined homes, beginning the 42-day count-down to becoming Ebola-free. As fate would have it, on the 41st day, a new case was recorded in one of Kambia’s chiefdoms, an old woman, rumoured to have caught it from her lover, an Ebola survivor. As soon as the news of the new rumour began spreading, discontent and plans to resist were palpable around town: “We will not accept it this time”. Motorbike riders were said to be planning a protest to reject that this was a real Ebola case, while others recounted having seen workers at the Ebola Treatment Centre (ETC) cheering as they received the news that Ebola was back in Kambia, and that they would therefore continue to be employed. In the end, the protest did not take place and the whole of the victim’s village, comprising over 900 people, was placed in quarantine without resistance. These episodes and the stories that they engender are, however, indicative of the prevailing sentiments amongst citizens at the tail-end of the Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone. Continue reading

Stereotyping Africa: an appeal for a normal people perspective, by Robert J. Pijpers

December 4, 2014 /

The recent Ebola crisis in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea has spurred a range of responses from all over the world. Some of these responses exemplify the ongoing stereotyping of Africa and Africans. Public discourse, unfortunately, still has the tendency of addressing Africa as a country, a war ridden space full of sadness and its inhabitants as savage and helpless. But stereotypes are not limited to these images of misery.

Other stereotypes romanticize Africa and Africans, they convey an image of the exotic and unspoiled continent. Moreover, various perspectives convey an image of poor people as a noble poor. These images may be highlighted in the context of Ebola, but they are always present. They are part of many people`s understanding of Africa, part of ignorant perspectives on the continent and the people. Continue reading

Ebola: the ripple effect, by Brian James

November 6, 2014 /

The 117 emergency call is placed to the Ebola response unit. Within the hour, a medical convoy descends on the community from which the call came, complete with a military escort. Normally, few would have expressed any concern or interest at rumours of Mammy Marah’s fever spike but these are not normal times. The outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus has left many on edge and highly suspicious of the manifestation of any physical symptoms in neighbours, colleagues and acquaintances. The intimidating presence of the Ebola response unit has been cited as one of the myriad reasons for the rising body count accrued by the disease, as the sight of armed men triggers the instinct of family members to “protect” their Ebola infected relatives. Other explanations go that the Ebola response unit’s armed escort is for their protection, as initial reactions to their presence often turned violent. This resistance to Ebola health workers has been as much an obstacle to the fight against the disease as false alarms raised by the overzealous or mean spirited.
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