By Isaac Massaquoi
How come nobody is talking about the incident at King Jimmy anymore? If you are wondering what I am talking about, here it is: In the early hours of Thursday 8th August, a portion of Wallace Johnson Street close to a very popular market called King Jimmy in central Freetown, was washed away by heavy rain. The road collapsed killing at least six Sierra Leoneans who had built what they called home in very squalid conditions under the bridge.
By day break hundreds of people gathered at the scene to catch a glimpse of the destruction and the loss of innocent souls. The president and other senior ruling party officials with television camera in tow visited the scene and did the usual things politicians do when disasters strike.
Let me be clear here: I believe the president and other politicians and civic leaders who visited King Jimmy after the incident were genuinely sorry that Sierra Leoneans were killed in such brutal manner. But the journalist in me tells me that they somehow used it as another huge political football in the same way they used the mudslides in the hills above Mountain Cut not too long ago and the unnecessary killing by police of two neighbourhood watch boys in the Wellington area on the eve of the last elections.
On the day the president visited, I made a point of duty to watch SLBC news. I haven’t done that for a very long time for purely professional reasons. On this night the SLBC did not disappoint. Their coverage was all about the president and his ministers visiting the disaster scene and promising government help. There’s no doubt that when the president of Sierra Leone visits a place like that it makes headline news. But, believe it or not, the real story was the brutal death of those Sierra Leoneans and all the questions around how they came to live under a bridge where they met their death and how come none of our engineers in the Ministry of Works and the SLRA noticed that King Jimmy was a disaster waiting to happen.
Just before you accuse me of picking on SLBC, let me quickly say that the hysteria that swept through the private media in the immediate aftermath of the incident has gone off like a candle in the wind without the real questions about the King Jimmy road disaster being answered, without people stepping forward or being forced to step forward to admit responsibility for the disaster and suffering the consequences by either being sacked from office or prosecuted on behalf of the people of Sierra Leone for criminal neglect.
I put the emphasis on the SLBC because it belongs to the state. If private media bodies set their agenda around covering political figures like presidents, ministers, kings and queens even in times of such disasters, then we can talk about the political-economy of their operations. But I expect a state broadcaster (well a true state broadcaster, which the SLBC is not by any stretch) to widen its scope of coverage to include views of the families of the deceased and the lives and circumstances of thousands of people like those living in degrading, even disgraceful conditions in slums all around Freetown. In fact that incident could have opened up a whole national debate about the ever-deteriorating standard of living of the vast majority of the people of this country.
But in typical SLBC style, they moved on quickly after reporting about Ernest Koroma's visit to the place by calling in a Minister of Works on whose watch the incident happened for an interview session on their Lunch Time programme that left much to be desired. The minister basically spent all the generous time the station provided pontificating about this and that. I reviewed the interview before writing this piece and I can tell you that it left me very disappointed.
You know, in Sierra Leone, we tend to move on very quickly from one incident to the other like honeybees in their ceaseless search for nectar. Today everybody is talking about an army "mutiny" that even the authorities are refusing to explain to their own people. The newspapers and radio stations are doing running commentaries on one arrest after another in connection with the same Teko Barracks "mutiny" plan, speculating about who has been arrested so far and where they are being held in Sierra Leone. What about those who were killed at King Jimmy? Even if they committed suicide there ought to be an investigation to establish the reason, perhaps to stop others going down the same road. How did “the emergency services” perform on the day? What if there was a bigger disaster the next day, how prepared were we to handle that. These are the questions that I was hoping the state broadcaster would lead a debate on. They are scared to move in this direction because it will show the government in bad light. The truth is, their crass indifference has shown them in bad light as having conspired with political authorities against the people.
Turn next to what happened a few days later when high seas lashed the Freetown coastline washing away shanty dwellings over a wide area. The most deprived people in one of the poorest countries in the world have been thrown further into misery and all we hear is the Mayor of Freetown talking as if he was on a soap box fighting for his political life.
Sometimes I wonder why people like us living in countries afflicted by such cavalier approach to citizen's welfare by the state actually bother to vote. To me everything is about spin and political point-scoring and that explains why even liabilities like the SLBC are held on such choking political leash because even a modicum of true journalism in that place will ruffle many feathers.
The other day the parliamentary oversight committee on works invited the much-battered Director General of the Sierra Leone Roads Authority, Munda Rogers ostensibly to get an explanation as to what happened at King Jimmy. The whole exercise was skewed to make the man look bad. The MPs know the dynamics of how road construction is done – in terms of the power play and the political interest in determining which roads get constructed – but they chose to call in one man who has power over neither the purse nor the political issues of road construction in Sierra Leone.
I hold no brief for the director general of SLRA He has his own questions too to answer to. But those directed at him on that day were largely questions that should have been reserved for people like the minister of works and the director at the Road Fund Board. Our politicians are more concerned about the reaction to the way they are portrayed on TV than what happens afterwards to the victims of such disasters.
The British and American governments spent a lot of money through many years to get justice for their citizens that were killed in the Lockerbie air disaster; the British are still trying to arrest and prosecute the killers of WPC Yvonne Fletcher, the police officer shot and killed outside the Libyan embassy in London more than twenty years ago. In Sierra Leone, a police officer attached to a government minister was killed in Guinea last year while escorting some government official but the nation has still not been fully briefed about how he came to be there and whether his killers have been brought to book. The last time a colleague journalist spoke to a senior police officer on the issue, he told my friend to "allow the issue to die out". Why are we different from other countries when it comes to protecting the life and property of our citizens?
If both the media and civil society groups think that shouting for two days will get our governments to take their most important responsibility seriously, then we are in for a long ride. In a country where even those people who are supposed to be powerful moral voices prefer to stay behind their high walls at Hill Station, IMATT, Babadorie and the peninsular villages creating their own realities far away from the rest of society, things can only get worse for the ordinary man.
For such people when the SLBC misbehaves, they go for high quality programs on satellite TV. When the roads are as rotten as they are now, they buy four-wheel drive vehicles. When fixed telephone lines go down, they buy many expensive mobile phones. When there is no running water, they pay Guma to bring in a tank full of water. When there is no light, they buy a huge generator to supply electricity to their homes and businesses. There is no end to their retreat from their responsibility as citizens to tell the government it must keep its side of the social contract. Unless they start sharing their talent and riches with the poor soon the poor will be compelled to share they poverty with them.
(C) Politico 29/08/13
