by Mark Weston | Feb 8, 2010 | Africa, Economics and development
Mobile phones are spreading through Sierra Leone like a cholera epidemic. Everyone either has one or aspires to one. Phone theft is common (my own lasted a week). People will sacrifice meals or school fees to buy credits (everyone is on pay-as-you-go, and stalls selling top-up scratch cards are ubiquitous, as are recharging shops, since few have electricity at home).
There is keen competition among the major mobile networks – Zain, Africell and Comium adverts adorn billboards, bars and houses, whose owners charge a monthly rent for you to daub your logo over their walls. They sponsor pop concerts, sports events and even Freetown’s venerable cotton tree, under which the first freed slaves congregated to plan their new lives.
As in Europe, the operators do not shirk from sharp practice. Calls to someone else on your network are cheap, but if you call a Zain phone from an Africell sim your costs soar. To combat this, Sierra Leoneans buy a sim card for each network and give out three numbers to contacts – a sim costs a dollar, and phones are sold unlocked. Some have handsets that can carry two cards at once, and you press a button to choose which to use for a particular call. Others have three phones with a different sim in each. The less affluent have to open up their phone to change the card each time they call another network (this of course means that you often have to dial three different numbers before you can get through to someone).
The mobile exerts a dictatorial hold on social intercourse. Nothing is more important than an incoming call. Businesspeople interrupt meetings to take calls from friends, family and colleagues; the judge in a court case we observed last week kept halting proceedings whenever his phone rang; a beer with a Sierra Leonean friend is a series of stops and starts as he or she fields calls or replies to texts. (more…)
by Mark Weston | Feb 5, 2010 | Africa, Economics and development
Had a surprisingly interesting tour of Freetown’s port yesterday. It’s the world’s third largest natural harbour.
Seventy years ago, the ship carrying my grandfather to the Far East during the war anchored briefly off Freetown. He remembered the oppressive heat and humidity, and the hawkers who rowed out to the ship in dugout canoes to sell their wares to British soldiers (plus ça change). The soldiers would lower buckets down to the canoes and haul up fresh fruit and snacks. For entertainment, some would drop coins into the sea, which intrepid young boys would dive down to retrieve from the seabed.
The port is a pretty modern affair these days. A couple of hours there gives you some insight into the workings of the country. A huge Norwegian vessel was unloading limestone to make cement (the post-war rebuilding of Freetown continues); another ship was being emptied of flour; dockers employed by the day were asleep in the shade of Maersk containers. Rice, bizarrely in such a hot and wet country, is the main import commodity, followed by wheat and iron rods for construction. Iron ore (processed elsewhere – Sierra Leone lacks the industrial capacity to process anything), timber, bauxite and rutile are the main exports (diamonds and gold are exported by other means). The World Food Programme has its own depot there, half-full of sacks of corn and flour.
We were shown round by a security guard, Alex, who has worked at the port for twenty years, including during the war when RUF rebels took it over and looted all the containers. His main duties include checking departing ships for drugs and stowaways. He says about half of the ships bound for Europe contain four or five stowaways. They row in in the dead of night, climb into the rudder hole, and sit tight – for weeks.
Sitting forlornly at the far end of the dock is a medium-sized Chinese fishing vessel. On it are a couple of Chinese men and a Sierra Leonean soldier. The boat was caught and impounded last autumn for fishing in Sierra Leone’s waters without a license (a common problem in West Africa). Seven Chinese fishermen have languished in a Freetown prison ever since – those who remain on board take them food every day but are not allowed to leave the country. To obtain his and the boat’s liberty, each prisoner must pay a $25,000 fine, but the shipping agent has failed to cough up. The vessel, guarded round the clock, is quietly rusting.
by Mark Weston | Feb 5, 2010 | Africa, Economics and development
I’ve been in Freetown for a couple of weeks now and am starting to get my head around the place. Sierra Leone has only recently climbed off the foot of the UN Human Development Index, but signs of poverty, which people in the West – where its most abject form is mostly confined to society’s margins – can go long periods without glimpsing, are everywhere.
Among the most arresting are the crowds gazing at DVDs playing in shops; the emptiness of markets after festivals; the accused dressing up for court in clean T-shirt and flip flops; young African girls on the beach with old white men; the hordes of disabled people – not just amputees from the war but also victims of polio, leprosy and unhealed fractures; beggars of all ages on every street corner; the ubiquity of slums, which as well as having whole districts to themselves also fill in the gaps in more affluent areas; billboards telling people to beware of counterfeit medicines; people collecting used plastic water bottles; the popularity of lottery outlets; car engines being switched off going downhill; children outside a bar at night using the electric light from inside to see their homework; stalls selling individual cigarrettes, pills and teabags; incessant and insistent requests for money or help with getting to the UK, even by people who work; the huge number of working children; and, of course, the proliferation of NGOs.
And finally an audible indicator of poverty, in the shape of a complaint made to me last weekend by an old man in a slum: “We should be shitting four or five times a week,” he said, “but people here only shit twice a week.”
by Mark Weston | Oct 12, 2009 | Africa, Conflict and security, Economics and development
While researching my upcoming book on the world’s poorest countries last week, I came across David Keen’s ‘Conflict and Collusion in Sierra Leone,’ an analysis of the causes of the world’s poorest country’s vicious 1990s civil war. What struck me most was the similarity between what I read of the conditions in Sierra Leone before war erupted and what I heard on a recent trip to Nigeria of the conditions prevailing there.
The parallels are remarkable. Burgeoning youth population? Check. Intense competition for services and economic opportunities? Check. Collapsed education system that fails the young? Check. Dependence on a single valuable natural resource? Check (diamonds in Sierra Leone, oil in Nigeria). Neglect of other economic activities like agriculture? Check. Catastrophic lack of jobs? Check.
The result of all these fundamental problems in Nigeria, as in Sierra Leone, is a youth population that cannot establish itself. Denied employment, young people cannot leave their parents’ homes, marry, or start families. Their reliance on the older generation deprives them of the latter’s respect. Their resentment of their elders, who benefited from a better education, faced weaker competition for jobs, and have control over the country’s economy, is acute. The corruption and decadence of those in power and their lack of interest in young people’s demands further fan the flames (both David Keen writing on Sierra Leone and several Nigerians I spoke to said that wealth, no matter how dishonestly acquired, had become society’s’ overriding goal – as a young woman in Lagos lamented, “nobody asks how you got rich”).
In Sierra Leone, young people eventually took out their frustrations with extreme violence. Among their main targets were village chiefs and other figures of authority. When the Revolutionary United Front invaded Freetown in January 1999, its young rebel soldiers sought out and dealt out horrific punishments to journalists and writers who had criticised them and shown them disrespect. Many young Nigerians also bemoan the lack of respect they receive from the older generation, who dominate the country’s institutions.
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