By Mohamed T. Massaquoi
Residents in the southern district of Pujehun, on the border with Liberia, have expressed worry about the impacts the closure of the border would have on them.
Residents in Sorogbeima and Makpele chiefdoms which are located along the Mano River border say they are worried that Liberia will consider closing its land border with Sierra Leone because the former has been declared free of Ebola. They fear that because the American-colonized country does not want to have the Ebola outbreak again and Sierra Leone is still grappling with the outbreak, it will consider closing its border.
Liberia was on Saturday declared by the World Health Organisation to have eradicated Ebola which has killed more than 11, 000 people in the two countries and Guinea.
Some communities in Sorogbeima and Makpele are just a few miles off communities in Liberia, and inter-trade activities have been very common there. Many people on the Sierra Leonean side have even considered themselves Liberians because there is no clear geographical distinction between the two communities, and the Sierra Leoneans there trade more with Liberia than their own countrymen.
The district chairman of the main opposition Sierra Leone People’s Party, Edie Mansallay, who is resident in Sorogbeima, told politico on Monday that “we are clearly foreseeing border closure between Liberia and Sierra Leone for the fact that they are Ebola-free and we are not.”
He said they thought Liberia would close its border not because the Liberian authorities were not happy about their usual relationship with them, but because they would be afraid of going back to the Ebola crisis.
The opposition chairman also said Pujehun District had gone above 150 days without recording any new Ebola case, “but because some districts in the northern region and western area are still recording new cases, we are all suffering.”
The incubation period of the Ebola virus is 21 days and for a community to be declared free of the disease, it has to double that, starting the day it discharges its last patients. Pujehun has won praise for going for a long period without recording a single new case.
In Sierra Leone, new Ebola cases are only now recorded in the west and northern areas, but the country has gone for about four days now without a new case, though there are still Ebola patients in hospitals.
Mansallay explained that their major source of survival depended on Liberia and because of that the government of Sierra Leone “must apply every strategy to see that Ebola is out of the country in other for us to continue with our relationship with Liberia.”
Councilor Francis Ngellay of Ward 325 in the Sorogbeima Chiefdom told politico that without the cross border relation, their means of survival would be greatly hindered.
He said it took them a whole day to travel to major cities like Bo or Kenema in Sierra Leone to purchase food items, but one had to travel for just an hour to the Liberian capital, Monrovia.
However, the councilor noted that Liberia’s win over Ebola can deceptively influence young men in their community into feeling that they also were free from Ebola.
He added that even when the border would have been closed there would be illegal crossing between the two countries, which would undermine efforts to eradicate Ebola in the Mano River Union countries.
© Politico 13/05/15
