Sierra Leone – Cry the wounded country – Part Two

Syl Cheney-Coker: Sierra Leone Telegraph: 6 August 2025:

With the failure of so-called intellectualism in helping to shape Siera Leone’s public morality, there is no point dwelling on the remaining aspects of the disastrous Stevens’ years; except that, with the grandiloquent extravagance for the OAU convention, he ensured that this country’s currency would be rapidly de-valued, its coffers emptied, and the majority of its citizens beginning to live in abject poverty.

Handing the reins of the country over to Major-General Joseph Saidu Momoh was really a big slap to its face by Stevens. Because long before the General conceded that he had been a failure as president, anyone with a modicum of intelligence could see that he was a disaster.

In its most perverse manifestation of corruption, neglect and other vices, this period of political life in Sierra Leone can only be compared to the nausea of Sodom and Gomorrah!

Symbolically, the wanton miasma of amorality, drunkenness and filth that was so common in Freetown, and I would assume, in some other parts of the country, recalls the biblical tale.

Momoh’s tenure will be remembered not just as the Time of Debauchery, but also of the wanton neglect of the state. I recall, as I am sure many others will, that, in the first year or so of his presidency, there was an unbroken period of six months when there was not a flicker of light from any of the power stations in Freetown.

Pyramids of ugly, stinking, sordid garbage was the nouveau art that piled up on virtually every corner of the city.

Vagrants and beggars took to sleeping under the historic Cotton Tree. Some nights, they would light open fires that slowly began to weaken its trunk and break off some of its branches, until Mother Nature, finally tired of this insult to one of the seminal gifts that she had given to us, brought the tree down, with just a small gust of wind.

Likewise, when I would be driving into Freetown from my house in Juba, I would see the beggars and vagrants who lived inside the mechanical room of the waterfall in front of State House. I would see them bathing and then washing the tatters of their clothes, before hanging them out to dry on the waterfall that had been turned off. How was this horror possible?

I couldn’t imagine this desecration taking place in front of The Museum of African Civilization, in Dakar; I couldn’t imagine it happening in front of parliament or the Kwame Nkrumah mausoleum in Accra.

Yet, seemingly unaffected by this icon of shame and filth, our cabinet ministers (of many intellectuals) would drive past it on their way to consider laws on the nation’s behalf. How could you legislate about a nation, if you have no sense of aesthetic; no awareness of public morality and decency; no respect for/ or idea about how to maintain the few statutes left behind by the colonial government? It was mind-boggling.

But I am sure that most people would agree with me when I say that, perhaps, the two things that the Momoh regime will be remembered for, above all else, was: one, when State House became a virtual transit point for young women hoping to get on The Gravy Train of the nation; the second reminder is that it was during this regime’s life that , in an attempt to curb what was regarded as a counterpoint to the Central Government’s tolerance of street trading, by the then Freetown City Council’s Committee of Management, headed by the controversial politician Alfred Akibo-Betts, the Momoh government, which had many legal luminaries and intellectuals (sic) rushed a City Council Act through parliament that virtually stripped the Mayoralty of all powers to regulate street trading; after which, the mayor was put under the purview of the legislation.

I had served as an adviser to Akibo-Betts, during the Bicentenary of the city, and I clearly remember the then very powerful Inspector-General of Police, Bambay Kamara, in a myopic tribal twist, saying to the executives of the Street Traders Association, who were mostly northerners, ‘ Una go trading nar treet; nar we get we kontri!

Frankly, I don’t think there is another capital city on the continent, whose elected mayor has to take orders from the Minister of the Interior, whose business is, strictly speaking, maintaining law and order.

So that what we have today is this mess of a city overrun by street trading, because, as the current mayor said in a documentary, she cannot do her job, because her hands are tied behind her back.

As for the debauchery at the State House during the Momoh regime, I had occasions to talk to three journalists covering that seat of power, who confessed to me that the Minister of State for Presidential Affairs, had given both a literal and official definition to his duties. It was, arguably, a bacchanalian time; a nose – turning play on the elementary principles of good decency.

How our governance sank so low is left to future historians to discuss.

I tend not to welcome a military putsch anywhere in the world, because of its sometimes-violent nature. However, when the non-violent overthrow of the Momoh regime happened, a majority of the general public welcomed the arrival of the men in Khaki, and their accomplices.

For most people, this was the end of a shameful period, when the creeping insurgency of a rebel war across our southern border was already a known factor. However, besides getting rid of the Momoh regime, I don’t find much to write about the military boys; especially as there was a palace coup soon after the initial takeover, and the now widely discredited killings of twenty-eight men and women, including Bambay Kamara and a friend of mine Salami Coker are, for most people, just part of the bitter deluge of blood carnage that was soon to drench this country.

But there is a piece of comic atonement, (if one could call it that) that came after this nausea, during the period when the historian Joseph Opala and I were teaching at James Madison University, in Virginia, USA.

One day, he received an email from his good old friend, the former Minister of State for Presidential Affairs, to which I was privy. In this email, our former academic-turn politician said, amongst other things: ‘ Like most foreigners, you were impressed with my diction and learning. But if you were my true friend, why didn’t you tell me I was so corrupt?!”

I couldn’t believe it! Yet I believed it! Because there are two old Sierra Leonean proverbs that say (1) know yusef notto cuss; nar good advice; the other being: ‘if people den whip you, e bad; but when you whip yusef , nayim tranger!’

Here was one of the most brilliant minds of my generation: a man who, like the rest of us, had known some hard times in his life; but when his good times came, and he had the opportunity, he could have helped to transform Fourah Bay College during his period in the Momoh government. Instead, he became one of the most despicably corrupt members of that government (his own admission), but needed a foreigner to validate his corrupt being.

I believe this is probably an example of The Theatre of The Absurd that masters of the genre like Wole Soyinka, Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco might approve of. Not being a playwright myself, may I suggest that this is something that Oumar Farouk Sesay, now a major poet and budding playwright, might consider writing for Julius Spencer to direct. The actors are there; they know the script.

The horrors of our so-called Sobel War are stains on this country’s conscience that I cannot bring myself to write about again, after I had already covered some of the details in my second novel Sacred River.

As I mentioned in the opening pages of this essay, the thought that we, as a country, would end up being an iconic symbol of savagery and bestiality is more than morally reprehensible and shameful.

To the dead I say, in the words of the great poet W.H. Auden ‘In the prison of your day, teach the free man how to pray.’ Similarly, as Leopold Sedar-Senghor wrote : ‘Oh dead ones; who have always known how to fight death; protect and guide us, as you have made us wanderers on delicate feet!’

Indeed, we need their forgiveness and protection so that never again will this land be soaked with the blood of a brutal war!

At the same time, we need the forgiveness of the maimed, the raped and other molested victims, for our diamond stones; about whom I had already written these words, in my fourth volume of poems – Stone Child and Other Poems:

‘ Stone child, I know where it hurts your mother raving about the stone on her breasts. The rain was her grief, our country’s destiny; the sun was not hot enough to dry her tears; the gemstone was not responsible for our endless rain.’

The best that can be said about the Ahmed Tejan-Kabba’s second government, after the first one was brutally overthrown, was that he kept the peace and that, except for the clearly vindictive case against the journalist Paul Kamara, no critic was thrown into Pademba Road prison.

There was relative peace and stability, the economy rebounded, as the president had a lot of goodwill during this second coming; not least because he was viewed as a technocrat who had worked at the UN and would cast a much wider net, when it came to selecting his cabinet.

However, I was deeply disappointed when the first cabinet list was announced, and I immediately wrote an article entitled Cabinet does not inspire confidence (which was published in the For De People newspaper), because it was packed heavy with old S.L.P.P. loyalists, and no new blood,

But later, I gathered from a very impeccable source that the president had initially approached the distinguished mathematician Professor Awadaje Williams to offer him the job of Economy Minister. However, the professor who was a very modest man always in shorts, and a close friend of Professor Eldred Jones’s, must have been petrified about giving up his somewhat bohemian academic life, for public service, and respectfully turned the president down.

If I have one criticism of that government, it was the fact that after the demobilisation of the thousands of sobels, they were not put in productive employment, such as farming. Rather, the vast majority of them were given Okada vehicles to ply our already congested roads.

Why couldn’t they have been taught the rudimentary skills of farming; about how to grow rice, so that our massive importation of the crop, produced by Asian peasant farmers, could be considerably reduced?

Sixty years after our independence, we are still relying on other countries, with similar climate, to feed us!

Another beef that I have with the Tejan-Kabba government is that it was under his purview that his minister of lands, Bobson Sesay – a man, if I recall, with a doctorate in education – supervised the cutting down of the huge forest cover in Regent, Hill Station and parts of Leicester, without any recourse to urban planning.

When we consider that this forest had been there for centuries, and that not even Pa Shaki had tampered with it, one wonders why a square peg in a round hole had to destroy it?

The result is that we now have this unplanned suburb-cum ghetto, called HI-MATT, where a million-dollar house stands next to a vacant lot selling timber or charcoal; where a Mammy-in-Time ( cookery shop) sells food next to another one-million-dollar home, where the road leading to the American embassy is a crowded market area.

Moreover, because of this massive destruction of the forest cover, we now have horrific floods in Freetown! How nice and beautiful this new hilltop of the city would have been, say like Cocody in Ivory Coast, if it had been planned, with tree-lined streets, a beautiful roundabout, green spaces and parks for mothers to take their children?

The disgusting thing is that, in destroying the forest, the Minister of Lands did not even reserve fifty acres for a park, now that the only ones that we had, Victoria Park and the Sewa Grounds, have been turned intoa market space.

As usual, Mother Nature was watching our relentless and savage attempts to destroy her beauty. In our greed and arrogance, we are fooled into believing that WE YONE NOR GO TAN SO!

And so, the land grabbers went deep into the forest – into the very bowel of the mountain, probably hacking away at stone carvings!

When a Ministry of Lands surveyor attempted to stop them, he was hacked to death! But as sometimes happens in Yoruba or Greek tragedy, Mother Nature unleashed her vengeance on the first anniversary of the surveyor’s ghastly death, with a massive mudslide that buried over a thousand people!

But have we learnt our lesson?

Look at what has happened to the Kabala Hill top; much of the forest preserve in the Northern Provinces, and even to the Southern ones; then come back to Freetown and see what they have done to the once beautiful and picturesque Peninsular Drive! All the trees are gone.

Without any planning, there is a random growth of houses and PAN BODIES, similar to the mess at HI-MATT. And now, we are threatening the GREEN BELT around the GUMA VALLEY WATER RESOVOIR, with rapid deforestation, and the building of illegal houses.

With one of the lowest water supply capacities in any capital city, but with one of the heaviest rainfall precipitations, we may soon run out of drinking water in the capital city!

Lord, why is it that whereas other capital cities in West Africa take five steps forward, we take ten steps backward?

As for the Ernest Koroma government – yes, the evidence is there that he built new roads, the economy grew a bit, a contract was signed with the Chinese for a new airport, which was immediately cancelled by his successor. I don’t recall anyone being locked up, for criticising his government; however, his first government was decidedly very sectarian – with mostly Makeni men and women.

Admittedly, he did rectify that imbalance in his second term and gave us a government that reflected a National Character.

Every government has its flaws, and perhaps, the main flaw of this one was to have allowed the market women to claim an even bigger supremacy over the Freetown City Council’s mandate, by allowing them to spread all over the place.

Look around the city. The entrance to our old suburbs of Wilberforce, Murray Town, Spur Loop, and Lumley are gone; replaced with the unchecked, rampant spread of street trading!

Another beef that I have with this government is that after a former Foreign Minister was charged with the disgraceful and shameless act of selling our passports to Chinese businessmen, he was for sectarian reasons, allowed to go free, after (if I recall, only paying a fine!!!)

To add insult to injury, this same scoundrel was later imposed on the people of this country by another government, as the presiding officer of our legislative chamber, after one of the most brazen acts of political skullduggery!

A CAUTIONARY REMINDER

Given the sectarian nature of our politics, and the unknown hand of fate, the Office of The Presidency has not been kind to its occupants after they left it. There are those who died a miserable death in exile, while others were reviled after they left office!

Perhaps, while they were in office, they should have found some leisurely time to read a bit of World Literature, in which they might have learnt something about Man’s fate, as beautifully written by the great Russian writer Ivan Turgenev: ‘ Sternly, remorselessly, fate guides each of us; only in the beginning, when we are absorbed in details, in all sorts of nonsense, in ourselves, are we unaware of its harsh hand.’

And finally, my Sierra Leone, I must end this very long letter to you, without any biased opinion or views. I am a Free Thinker and consider all men and women of whatever ethnicity, tribe, colour, nationality, religion, faith, or orientation, my brothers and sisters. Those who know me and have read my books will attest to my being a Universal Man.

So that no one should accuse me of any ethnic bias, let me say that I have known the generosity, love, but sometimes negativity of some members of the various, non-Krio groups in the country.

At the same time, I have experienced the backstabbing, but love and kindness of some members of my own ethnicity! Which is why I am, like many other Sierra Leoneans, deeply disturbed by the face of the current regime of President Julius Maada Bio!

In its actions and other manifestations, we find it nakedly very tribalistic; contrary to the tenets of the original founders of the S.L.P.P., such as Sir Milton Margai, H.E.B. John, Sanusie Mustapha, John Nelson-Williams, Maigore Kallon and others.

Look at the present cabinet of the current government, the top Brass at State House, people say; look at its diplomatic appointments, the top brass of the military and police; its para-statal appointments and others. They are more than seventy-five percent Mende-southerners!

Sometime ago, I read in the Cocorioko newspaper something to the effect that President Bio had said that ‘ the reason why he surrounds himself with his tribesmen and women is because it is only their professionalism that he knows!’

I hope this is not true; for if it was, may I then pose this question to him: What if you were involved in a car accident, a fall in your house, or on the mountain (and God knows I don’t wish that on anyone), and the first attending doctors were not members of your tribe, would you refuse their service? We can expand this hypothesis even further!

The world owes a debt of gratitude to Dr Africanus Horton and Dr Davidson Nicol: two doctors of Sierra Leonean Krio ancestry, for their pioneering work in Sickle Cell Anaemia, and Insulin as a treatment for diabetes.

About eighty percent of the tens of millions of people suffering from the Sickle Cell disease are of African descent, while diabetes is a world-wide scourge. Should any member of your tribe (a word that I actually detest) be suffering from these diseases, would you suggest to them that they refuse treatment, because you do not trust the professionalism of these non-Mende doctors?

Likewise, one of the young doctors currently making a name for herself in the United States is Dr Maseray Kamara, a first-generation Sierra Leonean-American. Born and raised in Virginia, she is one of the ‘few Black women in the field of colon and rectal surgery, specialising in robotic surgery and anorectal disease.’ Rather than celebrating the genius of this young woman, would you advice members of your ethnicity not to seek treatment from her, if they were suffering from colon and rectal cancer?

 I BELIEVE I HAVE MADE MY POINT!

With the latest disturbing news that we have become a Narco-State, we have more than enough problems in Sierra Leone to contend with, at the moment. The vast majority of the population is worried that the pillars of our democracy have been fractured; they are sullen, afraid, and bitter; especially as many of them live a threadbare existence.

Many go to bed hungry at night, and when they fall sick, the hospitals are ill-equipped to treat basic diseases. Electricity and water supplies are a major problem, which is why people find it very troubling that, rather than solving them, you are thinking of creating a second municipality in Lungi, because you believe that is the best way to solve the massive overcrowding of Freetown.

This is something that I believe Caligula would not have considered a wise move; especially as the majority of Freetownians do not want it!

Freetown is only about two million people – a tiny district in the city of Lagos, which, by most estimates, has about twenty-five million people! Yet, it only has one municipality; even after the huge slum of Maroko was bulldozed and turned into the glittering upscale district of Lekki!

Creating a twin – city would involve a massive debt to the Chinese, for the building of the Lungi Bridge; unlike the Tanzanians who recently completed the Magufuli bridge, mostly, and admirably, with Tanzanian money.

About the author

Syl Cheney-Coker (born 28 June 1945) is a poet, novelist, and journalist from Freetown, Sierra Leone. Educated in the United States, he has a global sense of literary history and has introduced styles and techniques from French and Latin American literatures to Sierra Leone. He has spent much of his life in exile from his native country, and has written extensively (in poetry, fiction, and non-fiction) about the condition of exile and the view of Africa from an African abroad.

You can search for his books by clicking this link:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Books-Syl-Cheney-Coker/s?rh=n%3A266239%2Cp_27%3ASyl%2BCheney-Coker