By Joseph Lamin Kamara
I write this piece not heedless to the fact that parliament recently had a meeting with the media, in which the latter was cautioned about reporting on Ebola especially in a state of emergency. Well, Parliament did not tell us to stop edifying the public with what obtains exactly on the ground: truth. And that is just what I intend doing here, with no malice; but for the purpose of reformation. Yes, I need say this; our messages need no longer be implied.
I begin with what many treated as the eve of a honeymoon. As is an evil tradition in this country, prices of foodstuffs were spiked, incredibly so by some traders. Government couldn’t intervene. Even at that, people derived pleasure in stockpiling foodstuffs and other necessities as if we would be locked down for months.
For many, the whole lockdown was a mere pleasure or fun time. Ask how many married men were preparing to lock themselves down with women other than their wives. Depravity! Instead of reflecting and asking God for His mercies and help, those were how we entered the lockdown, turning it upside down.
Parliamentarians are supposed to be law makers. But when an MP breaks a government order carefully, it becomes something enigmatic. I say this because since that Le 63 million package was doled out to my MP, he has come around only twice. Can you guess what he did on his first visit? Apart from the fact that he defied government order by bringing youths together on the first lockdown day, he merely did publicity of himself by donating Le 100,000 to ghetto youths leaving them breaking their necks over it. I was told he did the same across the community. He came for the second time after he had been informed that a fire had almost razed a house on my street. He gave US $200 to the victims, US $50 to a house next that really was not affected by the fire.
Doling out the first money, the MP said “Let it be in the open”, adding “Let everybody see that I have given them money to courage them off their woes.” With Le 100,000???!!! The youths were not happy. They made him know he had disappointed them. “Was that anything serious?” A youth told me after I had asked about the Le 100,000. The MP was quick to give the disgruntled youths another US $50 leaving more than 10 desperate impoverished Sierra Leonean young men fighting for less than Le 300,000. As they fought over the money the MP vanished into thin air.
No community gathering on Ebola, no organised sensitisation and no protective equipment despite my MP having been given money for those. Yet, we did not run away at the sight of sensitisation teams like the people of Mayera in Tonkolili District. The running-away of those people into the bush, thinking that the sensitisation team had gone to infect them, simply meant that what I said about my own community could almost be the same in Yoni and many other communities across the country.
The fact that pre-lockdown statements by the presidential adviser and the information minister on one hand and the coordinator of the Emergency Operations Centre on the other stood at two very distant poles, proves how vacuously the three-day lockdown was planned. The former said the volunteers were going out to search for Ebola-infected people. Either they had been given that confidence of what was initially to be the target of the lockdown or they were heedless that you cannot send people out to fetch Ebola patients without first adequately protecting the volunteers from the contagious disease.
Either way there was a problem. Was searching for Ebola victims - dead or alive - the original intention of the 3-day lockdown? The government realised they could not afford to equip all volunteers but never came out to say it for the nation and the world to know. Did they not say it because they thought the nation would question them about all monies they had received since we had the outbreak? I have no answers to these questions that is why I’m posing them. The situation was very esoteric to many. More arcane it was when the coordinator of the EOC said the lockdown was never intended to take patients out, negating what the minister and the adviser had said earlier.
Even the presidential address on the lockdown eve corroborated the coordinator’s statement. As the name “lockdown” was changed to “stay at home Ose to Ose Ebola Tok" in that presidential address, we knew no Ebola patients would be taken out of their houses. But again when BBC announced for most of Friday, the first day of the “three-day stay at home,” that the government of Sierra Leone had locked the country down to search for Ebola infected people, the confusion was reawakened. So we kept getting it from the World Service even when their Sierra Leonean reporter Umaru Fofana said the purpose and name of the shutdown had been changed. That was a change too late to make, especially after the government spokesman and his predecessor had said something else.
The fact that many patients came out has been lauded as a sign of success for the lockdown. Yes, it is a good thing that patients came out. And if we have to celebrate that we should because those Ebola victims were taken from our midst, not because we feel Ebola is being eradicated. But if the government has to celebrate it as their own success as they have started telling the world that they are satisfied with it, let them not forget that no campaign team asked the patients out - let alone forced them.
Before the lockdown, the Emergency Operation Centre was being inundated with calls to go for Ebola victims. The lockdown brought only an upsurge in the sense that patients now voluntarily gave themselves up and people gave their Ebola sick people up. My expectation during the lockdown was that teams were to go around with police personnel to force patients out of their houses. Yes, that is the fight we have now at hand: people concealing Ebola victims. The situation is made topsy-turvy when you recall that the government had announced a 2-year jail term for those caught knowingly harbouring Ebola patients. But we realise that nobody has been punished for the devilish act. So let’s ask the government this humble question: has anybody been jailed for keeping those Ebola patients as the lockdown teams would have probably discovered?
The lockdown was further turned higgledy-piggledy when volunteers asked people to come from their houses to the streets to hear sensitisation messages. Absolute madness! For most people, particularly in Freetown, sensitisation was not new. Just as ‘Focus 1000’ had said over 90% of us had gotten the awareness of the existence of Ebola. Even the President had supported this before the lockdown. Hear him: “people are now aware of what to do and what not to do.” So why was the country locked down for 72 hours if only for sensitisation purposes? And questioning whether the volunteers were adequately trained is something I will not dare to do because I am sure many people learnt nothing new from them.
At one point it was hot salt water bath! Now it’s "Jesus, Ebola don don!" How could Jesus or God hear us when many people had so been locked down in sin that they really had forgotten Friday and Sunday existed.
The lockdown was going to be an appropriate thing altogether if it was not turned upside down albeit the organisers expressed feeling of success.
(C) Politico 25/09/14
