By Umaru Fofana
Fatima Sesay is a middle-aged woman. Very active and very full of life. Highly opinionated and passionate about what she likes and dislikes. She likes the fact that she "cannot be compromised" she tells me smiling. And she detests that she lives "in squalor" because of what "should be a blessing" to her. She could be your mother or our sister and can pass for any woman in Rutile, Kono, Lunsar, Pujehun and of course Tonkolili.
I met Fatima over the weekend in her native Ferengbeya in the Tonkolili district where she is the women's leader. The place itself was eerily quiet. Even in the market where I met her, which should be bustling, was deafeningly quiet. Most of the stalls made of cement, were empty. And the market women told me that it was a goat pen.
Ferengbeya has nice-looking houses lined up in rows and built by a contractor whose brother is said to be the president of Sierra Leone. Beneath the veneer of those nice-looking houses numbering over 100, belies the acrid reality under which live Fatima and all those I spoke to - over a dozen.
They have been relocated from their ancestral home because the hills overlooking Ferengbeya, Wondugu and Foreya are blessed with tens of billions of tonnes of iron ore - believed to be among the largest deposits in the world.
"People have abandoned this place" she told me, "because there is acute poverty." She wnet on "We were brought here under false hopes of transforming our lives. We hope to God. But we blame our plight also on the same God, [because] he gave us these hills and iron ore which have turned us into slaves."
Fatima may have exaggerated the use of the word "slave", but you can understand her frustration. She told me that she looked on as her late father's bones were being excavated and loaded on to a truck and deposited somewhere else. And she was quick to lay the blame for her predicament squarely on the doorstep of the government. "I don't blame the company" she told me, "I blame the government. They sold us to these people. And the company shows off here every day that they have the government in their pocket".
You have to agree with her if you know anything about the way the country's mining sector operates. Yes I know that mining companies do not go to a country to do charity work. From Australia to Zimbabwe they go there to make a profit. It is up to a government that is worth its salt to rise up to the challenge and bury its selfish interests and quest for pocket money if only to turn things around in the interest of its people - those people that voted it to power.
Yesterday Human Rights Watch launched a scathing report on some of the activities that go on between the Sierra Leone Government and African Minerals on the one hand and the natives and employees on the other. The only qualms I may have with that report is that it is made up mostly of old truths. Truths we already know but are in denial about, again for some selfish reasons. Truths which our conscience will forever not rest if we deny they are true. And I believe the best response by the company and the government to feign support for their activities or try to vilify Human Rights Watch. It is for them to step up - however late in the day - to save the situation and the innocent people whose only crime is to have as their home an area rich with iron ore.
Suppressing the people, stamping on their rights, circumventing our laws, giving away phoney concessions, violating our labour laws, using the police heavy-handedly in the name of investment and development is disinvesting and under-developing.
For one, I think it is unreasonable for the people of the affected villages to expect that they should be eating sausages in the morning, chicken and plantains in the afternoon and goat meat for dinner followed by fruit salad. It would be inconceivable for them to expect that graduates from Harvard or Oxford should teach their kids in classrooms strewn with iPads with air-conditioned buses taking them to and from school. Or that they should have Grafton water supplied to them for everything including to bathe with.
And I bet that is not what they are asking for.
"We have nowhere to work - farm - and no freedom", Foray Kargbo, a native of Ferengbeya now resident in new Ferengbeya some 15 miles away, told me. He said he, like many others in the village, no longer had money to pay their children's school fees "and now they [the kids] have dropped out of school".
He complained about water, and I saw that hand pumps built for the community by African Minerals have dried up. But what I also saw was a bowser supplying them water. And everyone I spoke to in the village complained that the water supply is irregular. Water of all!
Some of the houses built just two years ago are damaged. An old blind man complained that parts of his roof had gone and that he had complained but no one had listened to his cry.
I saw some of the buildings, incomplete. The pipes connecting the toilets to the cesspit were hanging and even dangling. Was it because of the profile of the contractor that he was allowed to do such a shoddy job even while the people are suffering as a consequence? Never mind the procurement process for such. If this is not bad then murder is a law-abiding thing to do.
I visited the market and it was deserted. Less than six women sat there keeping company more than doing business. I stood there for over 30 minutes not a single transaction took place. People are streaming out of the village, willy-nilly. "Anywhere would do," the father of one of the deserted young men told me. "My son is tired of idling without something to eat," he said; adding "We have nowhere to farm and are surrounded by hostile neighbours who think we are being pampered".
It is just a couple of years ago when police opened fire on unarmed protesters in nearby Kemedugu sending them into the bush for days. Dozens were arrested and locked up for weeks without charge, without trial without compensation. How about even the police brutality that led to one death which the Human Rights Commission of Sierra Leone also exposed. Has anybody been indicted?
You have to believe Fatima when she said quoted some people as boasting that the government is in the hands of African Minerals. What more evidence does anyone need? Unless, of course, if their conscience is in their mouth or even inside your pocket.
(C) Politico 20/02/14
