In recent weeks and months the economic situation has become dire for many Sierra Leoneans. Much of it has been blamed on the Covid19 pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine crisis. But it is safe to say that the economy has been stubborn since President Julius Maada Bio assumed office in 2018. Dr Samura Kamara was Governor of the Bank of Sierra Leone and later became Minister of Finance and then Minister of Foreign Affairs. He was the candidate of the then-ruling APC party in the 2018 presidential election which he lost to Julius Maada Bio. He has been talking to Umaru Fofana in this exclusive interview.
Politico: Dr Samura Kamara what is your general assessment of the current economic situation in Sierra Leone?
Dr Samura: It is very difficult at the moment. I don’t think the present government was expecting this type of difficulties in the economy. But also it’s because probably they never actually appreciated the start-off point which was the end of 2017. Because if you start a government by blaming your predecessors, by accusing them of all other things you could not prove, you are confusing the general public, you’re confusing the businesses. And once you confuse the business sector, you don’t have any alternative to come up with and you cannot prove your accusations. Once you confuse everybody, nobody will invest. People will run away, confidence level in the political system will drop, which is the most difficult thing.
Politico: But do you not appreciate the fact that shortly before they came to power in 2018 there had been austerity measures under your administration. So clearly they didn’t get a very good start. Did they?
Dr Samura Kamara: No, I think the people misuse the concept of austerity. Austerity does not mean the country is falling apart. No! All it means is that, you reach a certain point where you need to re-rationalize the balance between your expenditure and your revenues. If you reach a point where you have mounting expenditure obligations, vis-à-vis a non-growing revenue base, automatically you need to rationalize your expenditure so that you will not fall into high economic deficits, whether it’s the recurrent deficit, budget deficit or fiscal deficit. So it is not like the worst that has happened to a country to declare austerity, no! It is just a wakeup call for you.
Politico: But it also means that something right is not happening with the economy, doesn’t it?
Dr Samura Kamara: Well that’s what I am saying. Where your expenditure budget is much higher than your revenue stream, you need to be careful; you need to slow down considerably. Mind you, we are coming from Ebola and then the mudslide. And know what happened in EBOLA, when the economy grew up at about 20 - 21% between 2012 and 2013, automatically Ebola came in 2014 and it ate up all that growth. So we deteriorated again by the same margin. So it’s like when you have a 21-storey building, you have built it and automatically it collapses, you are on ground zero. And you go beyond ground zero to minus 21-storey. So it was very difficult at the time. Given time we are all ready to pick up, because we left the economy at something like 3.5 to 3.9%. Mind you, having gone down to minus 21%, if you grew at 3.5, 3.9% if you add that to 21%, it means you have a growth of 24 to 25%. So what they could have done is to stabilize themselves within this period, look at what the other government had done, what was wrong, why they could strengthen the base and then you move forward. But you spend all your time in a blame game, blaming people, opening commissions of Inquiry. It is a very bad policy. It’s the worst start of any government to start with commissions of Inquiry. It’s a military instrument. They use it to gain civil confidence.
Politico: You don’t appreciate the fact that many things came out, many things came to the fore in terms of how much money was said to have been pilfered. And that is not the people’s right to know?
Dr Samura Kamara: It has never been proven. These are all fixed numbers – it’s the figment of the imagination. It has never been proven, it has not been proven beyond reasonable doubt because there have been a lot of appeals in the Court of Appeal against that. And I think what happened to the government is that they used it to buy in the minds of the people, to buy in votes. But ehhh ehhh within the shortest possible time, the people found them out that “no no what we’re doing was not right, and in fact you are doing worse things than what we are preaching against”.
Politico: In terms of the current economic situation, the government argues that there are external circumstances namely Covid and the situation in Ukraine. Do you not appreciate the fact that these are things that are beyond/outside their control?
Dr Samura Kamara: I do. And [in] national management, or even at home, you must always realise that there are two sets of factors: those factors that are within your ambit, those that are within your control – domestic factors – and then those that are outside, they are pounced upon you. So a good manager should be able to manage a situation accordingly without losing the ehh ehh it’s like you don’t want to throw away the baby with the bathwater. I do agree, during our own time Ebola came but we managed. Ebola was an external factor. The economy went down, but the spirit of the people did not go down. So we managed, we floated above water again and then we continued. Covid, especially in Sierra Leone, is not as lethal as Ebola was. Even the mudslide, the number of people that were killed. So really it’s something that could have been managed. And above all, Covid had a lot of international assistance also.
Politico: Some may disagree with you that Ebola was confined to only three countries so the world could come and help. Covid affected each and every country on the face of the earth. So everybody minded their own business.
Dr Samura Kamara: Yes but we still had a lot of international assistance from the international financial institutions [like] the IMF, the World Bank, African Development Bank, they all came in to support [with] COVID. But what I am saying is that the impact on the economy of COVID is not as lethal as EBOLA was.
Politico: What would you have done differently? If you’d won the election in 2018 and you were faced now with this twin disaster of Covid and the impact of the Ukraine situation, what would you have done as president of Sierra Leone?
Dr Samura Kamara: Well we should have learnt lessons from EBOLA – what we did in Ebola. Ebola had very good lessons for interventions. What EBOLA did was to invite our attention to the best way to deliver for the people. Don’t forget because we were managing EBOLA, we had a special delivery unit in the Office of the President which actually helped, you know, to deal with the emergency situation, how to deal with safety net programme for those who actually suffered EBOLA. To the extent that even today we have post EBOLA victims who are still complaining. Yes, it is true that COVID – and that’s why it is called a pandemic – because it affects the rest of the world, but other countries have moved on.
Politico: So specifically what would you have done to stem the tide of the economy challenges the country is currently faced with?
Dr Samura Kamara: (A long pause and a laugh) It’s the starting point. I think why they missed it is the interface. The interface between the Koroma regime and the Bio regime. That transition was not a seamless transition. If you have a very shaky, a rocky transition that affects the confidence level of the people, you’ve missed it. You’ve missed it. And no doubt, they have brains. I maena you go to the Ministry of Finance; the guys I was with are still there. The Alimamy Banguras, the Dingies, the Jusus, they are still there. The Alpha Banguras are in development, all of these guys are still there. So they have very good brains. But if you use political exigencies above economic priorities, that’s the problem. And that’s why I said even with this current redenomination, I don’t know what is driving it. I think it’s party political ideology to say “look these APC people are hoarding lots of Leones, so let’s change the currency and then they will come out with these leones”. That’s the wrong policy start. So it’s not being driven by economic exigencies. And that’s why they missed out. So my own feeling in all of this is that you should approach government management with an open mind, embrace everybody, invite people, discuss. Not all of us that have experience in public policy management. We may be the best professors at University, but public policy management is very, very different. So you need a very good blend.
Politico: Back to the issue of what needs to be done to correct the current trend, again I ask you as President Dr Samura Kamara what would you have done differently right now to deal with the current economic situation – in view of the Covid and Ukraine situations?
Dr Samura Kamara: You don’t want me to reserve that when I become president? (Smiles) I want to reserve my opinion because the time is gone. Ehhh
Politico: Well it’s a serious situation the country finds itself in.
Dr Samura Kamara: We have a number of emergencies we need to address. Food insecurity, we still have problem with food security, you know that. Ehhh prices of commodities have risen sharply, fuel price for instance which fuels hardship more than anything else, because there is a knock-on effect on other aspects of life. And the fact that you also have not given any true directive, a good posture on what the government should rely on in terms of sector management. Somebody was talking to me about Tormabom, I don’t think we’ve had a cup of rice from the Tormabom.
Politico: Is that the rice farm?:
Dr Samura Kamara: That’s right – the Tormabom rice farm, again it was trumpeted. We’ve talked about infrastructure, we have not seen that much trumpeted infrastructure programme. All of this, it’s like what Tony Blair described as “broken vows” in government. We have to guard against that. If people do not have trust in you, they don’t have trust in your statement, they will not do anything to move the economy. All they have is try to keep themselves afloat. Well that’s very, very difficult.
Politico: Do you blame the government for the increase in the price of fuel, for example?
Dr Samura Kamara: Yes and No. We had a policy of liberalizing the pump price of fuel simply because government wanted to move away from price control measures and then from high subsidies. Because once you begin to fix prices, it’s very difficult. So once you liberalize the exchange rate, you also wanted to liberalize key prices like the pump price of the petroleum products. That is why together with the World Bank we introduced a formula to help us determine the pump price of fuel. In this formula we had something like six variables if I can remember. Therefore the price of the oil, the Custom and Freights (C&F), excise duties, markets operators’ margin and an equalization margin to make sure that a pump price of fuel per litre is the same all over the country. In those days the price of fuel in Freetown would be different from the price in Kono. Then we had road fund to help us with infrastructural development. That was the contribution of transporters or travelers. Today, when I last saw the formula, it has over 20 variables and I don’t know all of those variables what they are there for. So if you add all of those, it’s a huge chunk on the pump price of fuel. So what you don’t want to do is to have a sharp imbalance between pursuing economic liberalization policies and providing safety net for the people which government is for. Government has a responsibility for its people. To be in policy management, to be a President is a privilege for you to make the lives of other people better. It’s not an opportunity for you to make the people poorer. No! Just because you want to enrich other people this sort of thing. You must engage the people. So I think, yes the international price of fuel has gone up, the exchange rate has deteriorated which is a very key factor – it’s a very, very sharp factor. So, therefore, you must try to stabilize your exchange rate. But above all even the marketers are struggling to have foreign exchange. And there is no foreign exchange in the official sector. They have to revert to the informal sector, the parallel economy. And that is not good enough. Therefore as a government, you need to engage your international development partners to address these issues. Petroleum is critical, we do not produce, we do not refine, so they should be able to help you. But of course the government also has the responsibility to convince the international community that I have done serious due diligence on my own expenditure programme. They will have to look at your budget, how have you have been spending all your monies, these sorts of thing.
Politico: Well they seem to be getting a clean bill of health from the World Bank and the IMF.
Dr Samura Kamara: I don’t think so. When you are managing the lives of people, move away from figures…I can come here I can tell you my economy has grown 50%, the GDP has grown up by 50%, somebody asks me but I’m not seeing it on my plate, on my table. So that’s why you have to be careful about numbers. And that’s the thing about this government. They look more about these international ratings. These are done by people, you can convince them. I can take you out for lunch, for dinner and I just convince you and you give me a good figures. At the end of the day your responsibility is the people – what comes from the people. What are their perceptions of the people. That’s what you should be guarding against. Tahts what you should be looking at.
Politico: And how would you rate the Bio government in terms of its economic performance – over 10.
Dr Samura Kamara: No, again it’s figures, I don’t want to go into numbers. All I can say is that there is hardship. Life is hard for many people in the country and you go around you will see it. You will feel the hardship of the people. So I don’t want to give figures.
Politico: Thank you very much.
Dr Samura Kamara: Thank you.
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