My hope for this rich, but poor country
Dr Karamo Sonko, a scholar and businessma, is a Gambian who was raised
and educated in Sierra Leone. He recently returned to the country he loves
to assess for himself the impact of a 10 year civil war. Here he gives his
personal thoughts on how Sierra Leone can find lasting peace.
The name Sierra Leone used to be synonymous with peace and prosperity
in West Africa. the Sierra Leonean people were nice and simple, the educational
system impressive and the economy buoyant.
As a Gambian, I had personal experience of this. While going to high school,
I lived in Banjul with my great uncle, a building contractor. His best
clients were Gambian Sarahulis, most of whom were millionaires, who had
made their fortunes mining in the forest of Sierra Leone. I used to work
on week-ends as a labourer on Sarahuli high-rise buildings for 30c a day,
a healthy sum at the time for a school boy. At my school, some of my teachers
were either Sierra Leoneans or Sierra Leone-trained.
Fourah Bay, the first university college in West Africa was a regional
pride, whose graduates were prominent in post-colonial governments from
Banjul to Lagos.
That was during Sierra Leone’s stable decades of the 1960s, 70s and
early 1980s. Since then this country has gone through one of Africa’s
worst political and economic turmoil, characterised by a brutal civil
war from 1990-2001. This civil war had as one of its most distinct features
the horrific amputation of human limbs, including those of small and totally
innocent children as a means of punishing civilians.
The economy was flung into complete crisis, with real GDP declining by
5.2% from 1991-99, after modest growth of 1.2% from 1980-90. An already
bad situation became worse when rebels invaded Free Town in 1999, following
another coup in 1997.
Millions of Sierra Leoneans, including the entire government of President
Tejan Kabba, were forced to flee from their houses in and outside Free
Town. The atrocities committed during the brief occupation of parts of
the city by the rebels are too horrifying to narrate here.
Read the full
essay in the January 2002 edition of African Business Magazine
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