By Isaac Massaquoi
Towards the end of last year I accompanied my cousin to the main government road transport bus terminal in Freetown. She was returning to Monrovia after three weeks and I had told her on the eve of her departure that she would be on the Express Service, meaning that she could get to Kenema in good time to be able to connect with vehicles plying the Kenema-Gendema road. It’s a journey that even the drivers who undertake it almost every day absolutely dread.
The road is less than 80 miles long but it’s worse than the roads between Makeni and Kamakwei; between Bo and Mattru and the Kono road at the height of the rainy season.
It’s normally a two-day journey for passengers from Freetown who sleep over in either Bo or Kenema to prepare for the five hour bumpy ride on Peugeot 504 cars that have no business being on the road but the Road Transport Authority license them anyway despite the obvious fact of them being coffins on wheels. With all the changes and improvements people are saying about at the SLRTC, I wanted to spring a surprise on my cousin who left this country in the middle of the war in the mid 1990s.
I had a week earlier taken her for a drive along Wilkinson Road on to the beach through Lumley, carefully avoiding Aberdeen Road and its potholes which should more appropriately be called mining pits. On the way home, I drove through the “works yard” that is Spur Road and through Hill Cot road. She was very impressed. But the next day I was absolutely put to real shame at the Wallace Johnson Street bus terminal by naked corruption and complete lack of organisation and respect.
Let me make this point before I proceed. I have a lot of respect for the work the new manager of Road Transport Corporation is doing. The institution was on its knees before Bockarie Lewis Kamara took over. In fact Abess had virtually defeated the corporation with about four buses. The Corporation was just an object of ridicule. They had few buses that broke down all the time. They were late or not on the roads for many schedules. So the new man has done relatively well.
But imagine this: On this morning, I was the eighth person in the queue; confident that my cousin would never miss the Express Service. Believe it or not only five tickets were sold. By the time I approached the ticket seller with questions about why only five tickets were sold when in fact the practice of selling tickets a day before travel was no more, the young man looked at me in the most disapproving way and put the shutters down. He just didn’t want to be bothered by a citizen “pretending” he didn’t know what the game was.
I was devastated. All around me were ticket touts who offered to help me get a space on the bus for a little fee. I had no idea when the next bus was due to leave Freetown and my cousin was surely now going to miss her connecting vehicle. The touts were busy doing brisk business.
My mind raced back to the late 70s when, as a boy, I travelled a lot on those buses for holidays from the same hub. The bus station has not changed – same size and facilities. It’s as if the RTC is saying to us that they are serving the same number of people on the same routes that existed in the late 70s. There’s no proper information on the movement of the buses; whatever you gather from disobliging RTC workers is unreliable, ticket touts are daily ripping off people and the buses are overloaded along the way under the noses of compromised inspectors. I don’t like too much privatisation but a situation like this leaves one with no option but to wonder how private people would perform in this sector.
RTC has many buses now and have opened up new routes. The public has a little more respect for them now, but what exists at the main terminal is pathetic.
My next experience happened at a satellite clinic in Freetown. I was called to the place by a colleague journalist, whose 4-year-old son was seriously sick and needed urgent medical attention. I arrived at the hospital in the company of another journalist colleague, forced to abandon a fantastic football match at the stadium. We arrived at the hospital eager to help the lady who normally resides in the east of the country but was visiting friends in Freetown at the time.
We found the child in a small, hot, mosquito-infested, dirty room with about six other children in small beds covered with dirty white linens. Rats were busy doing something like 4X100-meter relays across the room. Even at that moment, we counted at least three other children whose parents were waiting for beds.
Meanwhile, the only nurse attending to all the children was getting impatient and threatening to leave because her colleague who should take over from her one hour earlier was still not in and her phone was switched off.
We had to put a lot of pressure on the doctor to pay a bit more attention to our friend’s son. By the time we left the hospital about two hours later, the child looked stable and the night nurse was still not on duty. An angry and disoriented nurse, still on duty about three hours past her scheduled time was in a corner watching a Nollywood movie being screened on SLBC.
The Free Health Care project has indeed brought a lot of mothers who before now never went to public hospitals because of user fees and unsympathetic nurses and doctors. But seeing a doctor is only the beginning of the process.
This particular satellite clinic serves a huge community and from what we saw that evening, the facilities can’t cope and people risk getting diseases in hospitals where they go to be treated for other conditions.
Next, while we are talking about the rising levels of lawlessness plaguing this nation, look at what happened at the Central One Football Association (COFA) League final in central Freetown. The COFA league is very popular and they boast of a vastly experienced organising committee led by a widely respected people’s man, Sama Sesay. But I don’t think there’s any way they can explain what actually happened at this season’s final game.
Supporters of the losing team disagreed with the referee’s decision to disallow what they thought was a goal in their favour and attacked the referee. The match was disrupted in the presence of senior government officers including at least two ministers whose presence COFA wanted to take advantage of. The violence was appalling - a real disgrace unknown in football circles anywhere in the world.
COFA and the security forces will have to take a good look at this very important league and others around and take really tough decisions including what type of security measures to put in place for such leagues to go on without anarchists going on the rampage and destroying things and ordinary people’s desires to have a day out and enjoy youth football.
We should never think of closing the leagues down for two reasons: the core players of our Premier League Clubs and the national football team come from such mini-leagues so we have to keep that channel open. The other reason is that by closing the league because of the work of crude anarchists who should actually be in jail, we will all look like cowards and encourage them to do worse.
Parade Grounds, where the COFA league is played, is a free-for-all zone for marijuana-smoking and unnecessary rudeness. The organisers will have to think seriously about moving the quarter final stage to the secure ground of the national stadium where it’s almost impossible for matches to be disrupted or referees being attacked in the most primitive of ways. Even the SLFA should think seriously about withdrawing Premier League matches from certain venues across the country. They are just like Parade Grounds. There’s no point creating the impression of a nationwide league when we all know how visiting teams are treated in Kono, Kenema, Bo and Magburaka.
I was very disappointed by the punishment COFA announced as a consequence of the total disregard for law and order and the culture of the universal game.
The bottom line is that we have made some progress in Sierra Leone but some of the very basic things the people in other countries take for granted such as transport, health care and entertainment, are serious challenges and they hurt the ordinary people more.
Those who can afford, and they include our politicians, travel in fully air-conditioned cars, they are treated at either Choithram’s or abroad, they go to football matches only when the national team is playing and they are heavily guarded in the presidential pavilion. I know we all can’t be the same but why are we so different?
(C) Politico 29/01/13
