By Isaac Massaquoi
Barring any spectacular positive development in Sierra Leone's war against the Ebola Virus Disease by next week, the country will close 2014 with tears and trauma over the huge number of deaths and infections, probably not on the scale predicted by some institutions but nonetheless extremely worrying. From the look of things, Sierra Leone is well on its way to becoming the country most affected by Ebola ever. November is the month to forget. But could December be worse?
It's inevitable that at this time every year, people look back at the year that's rolling out to take stock of their lives and reposition themselves for the coming year. It's just natural. I have tried to do that for this year but here's the issue: all I can think about is Ebola. Ebola attacked us from just across the border in Guinea towards the end of the first quarter of 2014 - forget about those initial official denials and political speech-making. Since then, the dreaded disease has simply consumed this country - learning institutions are closed, sports and recreation banned, the country effectively quarantined as international airlines withdrew from our airspace one after the other and the nation put under emergency rule with all what that means for civil liberties.
And from what experts are saying, we are in this until about the second quarter of 2015 - not with the same intensity I pray, but they say we need all that time for the World Health Organisation which had an absolutely disastrous opening round in the fight against Ebola, to declare Sierra Leone well again. So what else is there to talk about in 2014 as a Sierra Leonean?
Let me try and distract myself from the gory pictures of Sierra Leoneans dying all over the place; burial teams disposing of corpses and sometimes going on strike and ambulances blaring sirens even in wide open spaces. These are the pictures that have come to symbolise this country particularly in powerful Western capitals - Brand Sierra Leone is in deep trouble.
Forgive me, but I think there is a kind of voyeuristic approach to covering events like this in Africa by some Western news organisations and some African documentary producers who fly into such situations in Africa to do very predictable journalism using the kind of pictures that could cause the collapse of TV companies if they dared behave that way in their own countries.
Ethical standards are so high in those places that a single false move could have very serious consequences with both regulators and the markets. Sheffield United Football Club, for example, were heading for the rocks recently until it decided it wouldn't allow convicted rapist Ched Evans to train with them; Tiger Woods will never be the same man again after his spectacular fall from grace because of infidelity. The point I am making is that, Western media organisations can come here and do what they like. Their own standards are set abroad and in dealing with foreign situations, they have a lot of room to manoeuvre.
But if our own SLBC is going to do worse than that with their gratuitous use of TV pictures then I might as well stop pretending to be angry at foreign news organisations. SLBC has no sense of ethics and it's not so because people haven't complained. They have also contributed to the problems of Brand Sierra Leone.
Arriving at Belgrade airport with a colleague journalist years after the war in Sierra Leone, we were detained for questioning, our bags searched like drug traffickers and our passports were taken from us at the reception of the Majestic Hotel in Belgrade. They were only returned to us when we checked out three days later, after abruptly ending our participation in a weeklong media conference organised by the broadcaster B92 to spend the next two days in London. It's only a two-hour flight away but it was as if we had just been released from a five-year jail term in Putin's Russia.
They called the hotel Majestic but there was hardly anything majestic about the place - the bed, the linen, the phones, the TV set and all that felt as if we were the main characters in some horror movie. So our Sierra Leone passport having invoked the image of amputation in the minds of even immigration officials in a war-torn country like Serbia – the home of butchers like Slobodan Milosevic and Radovan Karadzic – triggered off all the nastiness, apart from the obvious racism on the streets and restaurants. Try imagining how much further damage Ebola has done to Brand Sierra Leone and how long it would take for the world to accept that Sierra Leonean is clean again.
Meanwhile let me look for something else to talk about in 2014. When all is said and done, very few Sierra Leoneans gave our national football team any chance of getting out of our group in the AFCON qualifiers. Even CAF cannot imagine an AFCON tournament without Cameroon and Ivory Coast. In public, our notoriously nationalistic, even jingoistic football writers and commentators sang the praises of our team and encouraged us to believe we would be part of the football festival. They knew deep down that we had no chance upsetting the big boys. After six matches, Leone Stars could only get one point from a lifeless match against Cameroon.
There's really no shame taking part in a tournament and losing, especially if you lost to the best team. The real shame is the shambolic way in which the SLFA and the Ministry of Sports handled our team. They publically quarrelled over issues like appointing a coach and even selecting players. At the height of their struggle, they deployed two sets of rival coaches to Cameroon for the same match and failed to attend to basic administrative procedures, causing three journalists and two ministry officials to be thrown out of Cameroon.
2014 will end with Isha Johansen and his team clinging on in the hope that Primo Covaro would bail them out again at the last minute. The so-called football stakeholders have Johansen and team in a constitutional headlock from which only a serious compromise can free them. I see no compromise in the horizon, so this is a fight to the finish.
The stakeholders appear to have made up with Minister Paul Kamara but he does not trust them. It is unbelievable that all the acrimony and bad blood that preceded Johansen's coronation as head of the SLFA is gone. In fact some of the key players in the anti-Johansen alliance are still banned from football activities – thanks to the minister. The stakeholders are going into this with their eyes wide open. They should never allow people like me to tell them in a year or so that "I told you so."
The minister has fallen out with Johansen and now wants to dethrone her. He needs the legitimacy that the clubs bring to his cause. How dare Johansen publicly assert her right to run the national team with Kamara at Bishop's House?
A place in AFCON 2015 would have sufficiently distracted us from the Ebola figures. At least we would have benefited something from the disgrace of our players being called “Ebola!” during the qualifying series, let's not talk about the billions we spent to field in a team.
In the political arena, but for the Ebola outbreak, both main parties would have given people like us a lot to write about throughout 2014. I have it on good authority that on the APC side, Jon Sisay of Sierra Rutile is definitely in the race for the party's ticket. There are a host of others, some of whom are misfiring ministers who are already doing clandestine campaigning.
Just a few months after President Koroma was re-elected, I met one of the ministers I am talking about at Mena Hills Hotel in Makeni. We occupied the same block so it was easy to see his string of visitors late into the night and in the morning. One of those visitors, a good contact in Makeni, told me as he left the hotel that he was part of the planning committee of the minister's APC leadership bid. I found the whole incident bizarre to the extreme. Instead of putting food on the people's table the minister was busy doing clandestine campaigning so early in his president's new five-year mandate. I think he will make a very bad candidate.
We may not have 19 party leadership hopefuls in the SLPP this time round but the candidature fee could be significantly increased and whoever comes through the race should be ready financially, morally and physically for a tough fight. Alpha Timbo, the man least talked about, is the person I believe all contenders must watch. There is the feel of an impending civil war in both parties.
If Koroma doesn't manage the transition of power within the APC fairly, he will be the biggest loser. He has learnt a lot since taking over power and I believe his fingers are on the pulse of his party. We shall see.
© Politico 02/12/14
