Cameron Duodu
Letter from the North
As the guns boom around Freetown and its starving citizens cower inside those of their walls that have not yet been burnt down, who would have thought that Sierra Leone was once one of the favoured spots in West Africa?
Its Fourah Bay College, founded in 1827, was once the Oxbridge of West Africa, where bright youngsters from the other British territories – the Gold Coast (Ghana), Nigeria and Gambia – were sent to hone their talents as the lawyers, educationists and other elite professionals of the future.
Many of the European trading outposts on the West African coast employed Sierra Leoneans as their clerks and managers, and there is hardly a West African city that has not got its Sierra Leonean community, made up of the descendants of these early pioneers.
But disaster had always been dogging this country because the history of its people stank to high heaven. Britain – whose touch was always a harbinger of
trouble for the African people – imposed an elite of freed slaves on the local African communities, sowing the seeds of future divisions.
By the time independence came in 1961, political parties had taken the edge off the ethnic divisions somewhat. But over the years, coups and attempted coups, a one-party state system and its attendant alienation, corruption and mis-government have all contributed to the gradual erosion of the national ethos which independence initially brought.
By the time President Tejan Kabbah, a former United Nations official, was elected in 1996 to head the government, various military governments and the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) had turned the country into one vast bandit territory.
Everyone wanted to get hold of the country’s diamonds, which include some of the very best gems produced anywhere in the world.
Kabbah indeed made a promising start by signing a peace agreement with RUF leader Foday Sankor in Abidjan in November 1996.
But he did not want to implement the agreement. The reason is that the RUF’s brand of terrorism – amputating the limbs of villagers to coerce them into supporting it – horrified a lot of the middle-class people on whom Kabbah depended for support.
One of the most powerful of these, James Jonah, Kabbah’s minister of finance, recently gave the game away in the following outburst on the BBC African Service: “How can we co-exist with the likes of Foday Sankor?”
Kabbah’s inability to “co-exist” with the RUF, however, was to cost him dearly, for it created the conditions under which Johnny Paul Koroma and his gang were able to stage a coup in May 1997 and send Kabbah into exile in Guinea.
Thanks to troops from the Economic Community of West Africa Monitoring Group (Ecomog) assisted clandestinely via the British company, Sandline, Koroma and company were defeated early last year and Kabbah was put back in power.
By now, Kabbah had, inevitably, become a prisoner to militarist thinking. It was armed might that had restored him to power, and he thought he should listen to what his military advisers said.
So in October last year, he lined up 24 supporters of the coup and shot them. And he got the Nigerians to send Sankor back to Sierra Leone from Nigeria, where Sankor had been imprisoned after naively going there to entreat the late General Sani Abacha to urge Kabbah to implement the peace agreement he had signed with Sankor. Back in Freetown, Sankor immediately bagged a death sentence.
But Kabbah had miscalculated Sankor’s strength. No sooner was the death sentence pronounced against him, when his followers, who had joined up with the remnants of Koroma’s troops, left the countryside, where they had been engaging in skirmishes with Ecomog troops, and made a surprise frontal attack on Freetown.
Ecomog couldn’t hold the city, and now we have a situation where, in the famous words of an American officer talking about My Lai in Vietnam, Ecomog will have to “destroy” Freetown “in order to save it”.
Is all the destruction necessary? Kabbah ought to be intelligent enough – as the only really educated person among the crop of people who are currently in power in West Africa – to realise that the macho military advice he is getting will get his country nowhere in the long run.
The Nigerian generals who are pursuing military objectives in West Africa won’t be in power for ever. And Kabbah had better weigh carefully the possibility of an elected civilian government in Nigeria continuing to pump money (when there has been such a drastic fall in the price of Nigeria’s principal export, oil) into a war to sustain Kabbah, while the Nigerian populace continues to cry for schools, hospitals and the other amenities that military rule has denied them for so long.
If I were Kabbah, I would end the war by inviting Sankor into the government. And I would make the rebel leader vice- president in charge of rehabilitation.
His primary task would be to rebuild the villages that have been destroyed in the countryside; to manufacture and fit artificial limbs for all those whose limbs have been amputated, and to ensure in general that no Sierra Leonean lives in poverty ever again.
In other words, give him an opportunity to practise the mishmash of socialistic rhetoric that pours out whenever he opens his mouth.