by Mark Weston | Mar 8, 2010 | Africa, Conflict and security
“You wouldn’t understand this country if you stayed here for five years. I don’t understand it,” says Nestor Cummings-John, the head of the Sierra Leone Women’s Movement (“faute de mieux,” he replies when I ask why the group is run by a man).
I take his point. After six weeks in Guinea-Bissau (plus a lot of background research), I felt I had a fairly good grasp of how the society worked, why things are as they are, and what the prospects are going forward. But after six weeks in Sierra Leone, my mind is full of confusion, as chaotic as Freetown’s deranged street markets. I can only hope that a few weeks of quiet reflection somewhere sane like Burkina Faso will help me sort through the jumble of impressions, fears, questions and competing explanations that are clattering around my head.
One of the questions I’m grappling with is whether Sierra Leone is knitting itself together after Siaka Stevens’ ruinous dictatorship and the even more damaging civil war, or if in fact the country is in danger of slipping back into conflict.
Tony Blair, who visited Freetown last year, believes Sierra Leone is “thriving.” The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, on the other hand, which was set up to investigate the causes of the war, argues that the same levels of poverty, corruption and youth alienation pertain today as prevailed twenty years ago, before the war started. As Paul Collier showed in The Bottom Billion, moreover, most countries that go through one civil war endure another within a decade or two.
Blair’s view is buttressed by the fact that the country has been at peace for nine years, that it held uneventful elections in 2007 which were widely judged to be fair, and that dangerous neighbours like the Liberian thug Charles Taylor are off the scene. Exiles are returning, drawn by peace and the still-tantalising prospect of mineral riches. And many Sierra Leoneans have told me their compatriots have learned their lesson from the war and are extremely reluctant to go down that road again.
Not everyone is so sanguine, however. While the wealthy are generally quite optimistic about the future, the poor remain disgruntled, railing against the corruption of the rich and the ineffectiveness of government. “The poor don’t love their country,” says Joseph, a young Freetonian working with Amnesty International. Edward, an old man in a Freetown slum, says the poor have no reason to be patriotic. Most young people I’ve met have asked me to help them acquire visas for Britain. (more…)
by Mark Weston | Feb 15, 2010 | Africa, Economics and development
The leone, Sierra Leone’s currency, is not highly prized abroad. Nor is it especially strong compared to more established currencies: in 1978 when it broke from its sterling peg, the leone was worth 50p; buying 50p today would set you back 3,000 leones.
Sierra Leoneans with cash, therefore, along with importers of goods and those travelling overseas, are eager to get their hands on dollars, pounds or euros. Foreign diamond dealers, the legions of UN and NGO workers, local people who receive remittances from abroad, and the country’s dribble of masochistic travellers need leones in cash because there are no ATMs and nobody accepts credit cards.
If you don’t mind the 250-leone to the dollar spread, you can change money at foreign exchange bureaus or banks. But whereas the latter buy dollars for 3850 leones and sell them for 4100, the spread with Freetown’s Dollar Boys is a much more generous 4000-4050.
You can’t move more than a few yards in downtown Freetown without hearing the words, “Hello sir, change?” as a Dollar Boy accosts you, brandishing a large wad of leones or dollars. Dollar Boys are illegal, but their clients include government officials and ministers, big businesses and even banks in need of a liquidity top-up. The governor of the Central Bank sends someone onto the streets every day to find out how much his currency is worth. When I mention to Ahmed, a Dollar Boy of my acquaintance, that I’ve been to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, he tells me he knows the building well as he provides a delivery service to ministry officials. “Even if they wanted to, the police couldn’t stop us,” he says. “We have too many customers.”
Ahmed makes around 20,000 leones (£3.30) a day – a decent sum by local standards. On his best day ever, someone (probably a diamond dealer but he doesn’t ask questions) changed $15,000 into leones – lacking that much cash himself, he had to bring in other Dollar Boys to make up the shortfall. He delivered the money in a huge box that he carried on his head through the streets of Freetown.
Although illegal, the Dollar Boys are well organised. Each one has his own patch, or “Base” – Ahmed loiters outside a bank – and each area has its own “committee,” with one central committee overseeing all the others.
The committees, which were set up on police advice after a Dollar Boy was murdered by Nigerians a few years ago, protect their members against violence and fraud (according to Ahmed, most of those who try to exchange counterfeit money are women). They also run an insurance pool, into which all members make regular payments so that if one is cheated for a large sum or suffers a family disaster, he has a cushion against bankruptcy.
The committees have two other important roles. The first is to protect the industry’s image, by investigating customer complaints, punishing bad behaviour and weeding out bad apples. The second is to vet new entrants to the market. As in the formal sector in Sierra Leone, you can only become a Dollar Boy if you have the right connections. Incumbents collude to keep out potential competitors (too many Dollar Boys, of course, would reduce each individual’s profits). Unwanted newbies – and Ahmed reports that competition to enter the fray is fierce – are told to keep away. If they refuse, the committees take them to the police and report them for acting illegally (yes, really). The police respect the committees – many of them use Dollar Boys’ services themselves – so they are usually sympathetic.
by Mark Weston | Feb 8, 2010 | Africa, Economics and development
This morning, presumably because of a burst pipe, a trickle of water was bubbling up through a hole in the surface of a busy Freetown street. Next to the hole, a man in rags was on his hands and knees, lapping at the water like a dog.
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.
