The Sierra Leone Association of Journalists (SLAJ) on September 24, 2008 lifted the news blackout it imposed on the activities of the country’s police over attacks on some of its members by police personnel.
 
The Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA)’s correspondent reported that the lifting of the ban followed the intervention of  Sam Sumana, the country’s Vice President, and Ibrahim Ben Kargbo, the Communication’s Minister.

The correspondent said Sumana who is the Chairman of the Police Council, assumed responsibility for the attack and promised to refund the monies and equipment the journalists lost.

After some feet dragging, SLAJ imposed the blackout on September 22, six weeks after the police authorities had refused to implement a recommendation by a committee to compensate the affected journalists.  Eight journalists were violently attacked by policemen at the State House in Freetown on August 13, while on assignment.

The Media Foundation for West Africa

The Sierra Leone Association of Journalists (SLAJ) on September 22, 2008 imposed a news blackout on police activities as part of a campaign to demand justice for journalists who were violently assaulted by personnel of the Sierra Leone Police Force in August.

On August 13 police personnel deployed at the country’s State House in Freetown, the capital, assaulted eight journalists covering a meeting between the two major political parties: the ruling All Peoples Congress Party (APC) and the main opposition Sierra Leone Peoples Party (SLPP).The journalists in the process lost equipment, including cameras, cellular phones and audio recorders.

The Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA)’s correspondent reported that at a meeting on September 20, SLAJ members unanimously resolved that the blackout should remain in force, until the police provide adequate compensation to all the affected journalists.

The SLAJ said the police have failed to comply with recommendations of a committee that was set up to investigate the incident.

SLAJ said should the police fail to act on the request, it will further extend its action to the government, since some supporters of the ruling party also assaulted the journalists on the same day at the ruling party’s headquarters.

The Media Foundation for West Africa

More than 10,000 slum dwellers have been affected by an 11 September storm that tore down dozens of makeshift homes in Kroo Bay, one of the city’s largest slums, according to a government evaluation completed on 15 September.

Saidu Alieu Turay, Chairman of the Kroo Bay health committee, said it was the worst flooding he had seen in the 20 years he has lived in the community. “Eighty percent of the community could not sleep in their homes that night.”

He called on the government to help them relocate.

Refusing to flee danger

The government’s national director of disaster management, Mary Mye-Kamara, told IRIN the government has tried to relocate residents from flood-prone slums in recent years, but they either refused or simply returned when water levels receded.

“They demand to move, but this is just lip service. ‘We can no longer live here’ they say, but guess who is back the next day? They blame flooding on people living at the top of the hill for dumping trash in the drainage, but that is not the problem. They simply live in dangerous flood-prone areas.”

Flooding occurs almost every year for people who live near sea level in hilly Freetown.

Sprawling communities filled with aluminium-sided hastily-constructed homes are clustered near the mouth of the Rokel river, which flows into the Atlantic Ocean.

Mye-Kamara says massive rural to urban migration in recent years, deforestation and poor drainage makes the city’s coastal communities the most vulnerable.

“Freetown used to have more trees, but people have cut them down for money. Trees no longer hold the soil in place, so everything washes downhill and clogs drains. A few years ago, the government offered to help move residents [in flood-prone zones] to areas further from the city centre, offering agricultural tools and seeds to support new livelihoods for them. They were not interested.”

She says her office can only coordinate assistance; it cannot force people to evacuate if there is no government law requiring people to leave areas that are potentially unsafe, or even deadly.

She says 2007 flooding in the slum area of Falcon Bridge led to at least one death when a resident was caught for hours under a boulder. “You would never imagine people lived in this slum. It was completely inaccessible. There were people living under a cliff. The constant rains had eroded the rocks, some of which finally tumbled onto their homes.”
She says the rescue took hours. “But if you were to go back today, I bet the number of people living there has doubled. People will not leave.”

Mye-Kamara says people tell her they do not have money to relocate, and do not know how they will make money outside the city centre.

Disaster policy in pipeline

The disaster management director told IRIN that her office has drafted a national disaster policy, completed near the time of presidential elections in September 2007. She explained the presidential elections set back discussions until now. “The government was not focused on disaster at the time, so the draft was placed aside for reconsideration.” said Mye-Kamara.

“We expect the new government [of President Ernest Bai Koroma] to review it soon. It is in the pipeline to be endorsed.”

When asked how government endorsement will help prevent future flood crises, Mye-Kamara responded, “This forces the government to deal with flooding. All we [Office of Disaster Management] can do is raise awareness, and coordinate donor assistance and response. We have no power to carry out forced evacuations. But if we have the blessing of the government, we can move people.”

Mye-Kamara says flood prevention will cost less than flood response. “Coming out of a civil war [1991-2002], the government has limited resources. It has so many competing concerns and it cannot afford to keep helping people rebuild their homes.”

She added the Office of National Security has convened a meeting for international and local partners working in disaster relief, which is scheduled to take place on 18 September, to discuss solutions to the perennial problem of flooding.

Weak early warning system

One element of the national disaster policy draft is the creation of an early warning system.

Currently, the National Meteorological Department is responsible for national weather monitoring, but its director, Sombi Lansana, said his department is overstretched and focused on aviation weather forecasting.

“We have only two forecasters and both of them are at the Freetown International Airport at Lungi. Aviation weather forecast is round the clock; even when we are not expecting flights we need to have one forecaster on site who will be communicating with the control tower in case there is a need to divert flights here if a neighbouring country is experiencing bad weather,” he explained to IRIN.

Lansana said the weather department’s rain gauge is not working, so he could not give measurements for rainfall on 11 September, other than to say, “It was the heaviest daily rainfall we’ve experienced this year.”

IRIN 

Theresa, a vivacious 16-year-old girl, last saw her parents when they were dragged away from her in a crush of people fleeing into neighbouring Guinea after a rebel attack on their town during the civil war (1991-2000).

She never found them again, and lived out the war and its aftermath in refugee camps, begging and selling her body to soldiers and men for scraps of food and money.

Today Sierra Leone is at peace and Theresa is living with an aunt in Koindu, a town in southeastern Sierra Leone that was a major rebel stronghold during the civil war.

She has a two year-old child, but does not know who the father is, because she has had many sexual partners since returning home.

She said her life has rarely felt like it was worth living. “I feel like I have no purpose, like there is no meaning to it,” she said. “I have no idea who the child’s father is. I have to struggle just to get clothes for us. I beg to eat.”

Alice Behrendt, who has studied the suicide risk of children in Togo, Burkina Faso, Liberia and Sierra Leone for the non-governmental organisation Plan International, said Theresa’s sense of hopelessness is common among war orphans, and even children who did not lose their parents during the war.

CLICK to read the story of other Sierra Leonean war orphans, brothers John and Mustapha and Joshua

High suicide risk

“Of all the countries I have studied, by far the most dramatic suicide rate was in Sierra Leone,” she said.
In Koindu, of the 180 children surveyed by Behrendt - 90 orphans and 90 other children - 59 percent had witnessed a suicide, and 70 percent had considered or attempted suicide themselves.

Among the orphans, only eight (out of 90) were not deemed a suicide risk.

“It’s not just the orphans who are at risk, because many children who did not lose their parents are living in environments where they are abused or which are violent in some way,” Behrendt said.

“The main difference for the orphans is that they generally have less self-esteem, lower social skills and more depression. There are more signs of post-traumatic stress disorder, more bedwetting and conduct problems.”

Female orphans were also likely to be involved in transactional sex she said. Fifty percent of the teenage girls interviewed by Plan International had got pregnant at some point and many had sexually transmitted diseases. “The girls prostitute themselves to survive. Some do it to pay their school fees.”

Communities are well aware of the problem, Behrendt says. However, local solutions have little in common with Western-style counselling and support mechanisms. Anyone found attempting suicide is punished either with a beating, or even by being taken to the police.

Lawrence James trained as a counsellor with a different NGO that used to work in Koindu; currently he receives funding from Plan International to visit suicidal orphans.

Breakdown of social relations

He blames the breakdown of social relations during the war for the total lack of support for the orphans. “People have lost their cultural values and their sense of community,” he said.
In a town where most people still live in burned out shells of ruined buildings with torn plastic and dry leaves as roofing, there is not enough to go around families, let alone to share with orphans.

“Poverty is the order of the day here,” he said. “Families just can’t cope with taking in another child - they want to focus on their own and themselves.”

James and two colleagues, Fatmata Bah and Mustapha Abdulai, work at improving relationships between orphans and their carers when they have them, and Plan International sometimes subsidises school fees so children can go to school.

Probing how children feel

The three counsellors also focus on helping the children build up the mental toughness to put their violent pasts behind them. Some of the children not only lost their parents in the war, but saw them killed, or were even forced to kill them themselves.

Often the counsellors are the first to probe how the children feel about what happened to them and those around them during the war. For the first week of treatment, the children usually just cry without talking.
Just getting them to speak about what happened to them is therefore seen as a victory.

But while family mediation and support can help, James says the good the counsellors can do is limited by the lack of economic opportunities or hope of a better life for the children.

Behrendt, the project manager, said as far as Plan International was concerned Koindu was just the beginning. The next step was to widen the catchment area to include children in more parts of Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea.

“There really is a story on every corner here,” she said. “Sometimes it feels like the towns are full of children that need help.”

IRIN 

The Executive Board of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has completed the second review of Sierra Leone's performance under a Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility (PRGF) arrangement. The Executive Board also approved a one-year extension of the PRGF arrangement to 2010.The completion of this review allows for the disbursement of SDR 4.4 million (about US$7.2 million), which would bring total disbursements under the arrangement to SDR 13.5 million (about US$22.1 million).

The Executive Board also granted waivers for the non-observance of three quantitative performance criteria on the basis of corrective measures taken and the temporary nature of the deviations from the quantitative targets.

The PRGF arrangement for Sierra Leone was approved on May 10, 2006 in an amount equivalent to SDR 31.1 million (about US$50.9 million), to support the government's 2006-08 economic program. The extension of the program from three years to four years should provide sufficient time to achieve the program objectives (see Press Release No. 06/94).

Following the Executive Board's discussion, Mr. Murilo Portugal, Deputy Managing Director and Acting Chair, said:
"Economic growth in Sierra Leone remained robust in 2007 and early 2008, led by solid agriculture and mining production and buoyant activity in the construction and service sectors. Inflation, though rising, was relatively contained in the face of surging global food and energy prices. Performance under the PRGF-supported program was mixed in the second half of 2006 through much of 2007. Significant revenue shortfalls, exacerbated by delayed external budgetary assistance, had complicated budget execution. These developments contributed to a severe compression of priority spending and the accumulation of domestic arrears. The strong commitment of the authorities to address the sources of these setbacks and move forward with key structural reforms in the period ahead is welcome, and the recent improvement in program implementation is encouraging."

"The proposed fiscal stance for 2008 seeks to recapture the momentum lost in mobilizing domestic revenue, and strikes a good balance between expanding poverty-reducing and infrastructure spending and preventing the accumulation of public debt. The authorities are committed to staying the course, with wide-ranging measures to make the National Revenue Authority more efficient and broaden the tax base. Firm control over expenditure commitments by ministries, departments, and agencies will provide critical support to the objective of domestic arrears clearance while creating fiscal space to address essential social needs."

"The Bank of Sierra Leone will focus on strengthening its management of liquidity and monitoring closely developments in the monetary aggregates, given the need to contain the second-round effects of rising import prices for food and fuel."
"First steps have been taken to advance structural reforms, in particular in public financial management and the financial sector. The authorities will work to ensure transparency in all public procurement contracts, strengthen the Anti-Corruption Commission, and improve the financial viability of public utilities in order to promote good governance, accountability, and sustained high growth," Mr. Portugal said.

The PRGF is the IMF's concessional facility for low-income countries. PRGF loans carry an annual interest rate of 0.5 percent and are repayable over 10 years with a 5½-year grace period on principal payments.

The International Monetary Fund 

Unity Radio, a station run by the Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP), was on May 8, 2008 shut down on the orders of the Minister of Information and Communication, Alhaji Ibrahim Ben Kargbo.
Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA)’s correspondent reported that the closure according to Kargbo, was due to the installation of an illegal antenna which disturbed the transmission of other radio stations, and the fact that SLPP did not go through the right procedures to register Unity Radio.

The statement by Kargbo followed a release by the Secretary General of the SLPP, Jacob Jusu Saffa, which alleged that the party had done nothing wrong, and that the Ministry of Information and Communication did not have the authority to shut down Unity.

Saffa claimed that any interference with frequencies should be reported to the Independent Media Commission (IMC), which has the authority to notify the station. The Ministry, however, had no business interfering, Saffa asserted.

According to Saffa, the shut-down was a deliberate attempt by the government to silence the opposition of Sierra Leone. This was denied by Kargbo, who claimed that the closure was instigated by other radio stations which had lodged official complaints on frequency interference by Unity to the ministry.

According to the correspondent, the Chairperson of the IMC, Bernadette Cole, said that the Ministry’s decision to shut down Unity Radio was flawed and that the complaints from the affected radio stations should have been processed by either the IMC or the National Telecommunication Commission (NATCOM) which is responsible for issuing out frequencies.

In the statement by Kargbo, the Minister made it clear that if the SLPP radio goes through the proper channels and remedies the frequency interference, the government would have no reason to uphold the shut-down.

Media Foundation for West Africa 

The Press Secretary to State House, Sheka Tarawally, on May 6, 2008, threatened New Vision, an independent Freetown-based newspaper, with legal action if the paper failed to retract three articles it published accusing President Ernest Bai Koroma of being wasteful.

Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA)'s correspondent reported that Tarawally lodged a formal complaint to the Independent Media Commission (IMC), Sierra Leone's media regulatory body, calling on it to urge New Vision to retract the articles within three days or face legal action.

The first article, published on May 2 accused President Koroma of spending US$102m on unnecessary travelling. On May 5 and 6 the newspaper again published articles repeating the allegations and stating that New Vision stood by the reports.

In the complaint, the Press Secretary claimed that there had been no attempts by New Vision to cross check the information, and the story should therefore be regarded as "malicious and calculated to damage the image of the President".

Tarawally also stated that "all the insinuations in the offending articles are false" and concluded that New Vision had violated sections of the 1965 Public Order Act.

The IMC is a media regulatory body, which has no judicial powers, but provides a platform for negotiations between aggrieved persons and media houses to reduce using law courts to settle media related cases.

MFWA regrets that such threats come at a time when the new government of Sierra Leone has expressed its intention to repeal sections of the obnoxious and archaic Public Order Act, which authorise jail terms of up to seven years for those who criticise government officials.

Media Foundation for West Africa 

Two babies and several gaunt women are the only patients in the gloomy wards of the Princess Christian Maternity Hospital in Freetown.

The hospital is supposed to be the main training and referrals unit for obstetrics in the country but its handful of staff were mostly found in backrooms, drinking tea with their feet resting on the surgical tables as they wile away their days in the eerily slow-moving wards.

“This hospital is a place of last resort for patients and staff,” said Sister Kanu, a nurse, who reckons conditions for mothers and hospital staff have “barely improved” since the end of Sierra Leone’s 11 year long civil war which devastated government and social infrastructure.

“By the time women get here it’s too late and the most we can do is to save the mother,” she said. “That’s why you see so few babies.”

Collapse

Medical officials in Sierra Leone estimate 80 percent of women give birth at home without ever consulting a medical official or midwife.

The majority of births in Sierra Leone are supervised by untrained “traditional birthing attendants”, miles away from even the most basic medical facilities that can intervene in case of complications, according to the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) in Sierra Leone.

The biggest cause of death is women simply bleeding to death after giving birth. Others suffer hours or days of obstructed labour.

Those who survive will join what UNFPA said is a growing number of women in Sierra Leone living with fistulas – a tearing of the tissue that develops when blood supply to the tissues of the vagina and bladder and/or rectum is cut off during prolonged obstructed labour. When the tissue dies a hole forms through which urine and faeces pass uncontrollably.

“When the formal [health] system collapsed during the war, people turned to the informal system of using traditional birthing assistants and they have not yet come back to the formal system,” said Dr Jarrie Kabba, a programme officer at UNFPA in Freetown.

Even when women do make it to the country’s rudimentary health facilities they must pay for and provide all their own drugs and even blood before they will be treated.

Sister Rugiatu Kanu, a midwife in Freetown, said just giving birth costs 50,000 leones (US$17) in a country where the minimum wage is US$14 a month and many of the 8 million population live on considerably less.

Sierra Leone now has one of the highest rates of maternal mortality in the world, perhaps losing more mothers in child birth than anywhere else in the world, according to the UN children’s fund (UNICEF).

Big push

Sierra Leone’s government says improving conditions for pregnant women and infants is a priority. On 29 February it launched a long-awaited maternal mortality “strategic plan” which focused mostly on eradicating overlaps and redundancies from the various government agencies involved in reproductive and child health, while promoting preventative activities like immunisation and women’s rights generally.

The strategy has the backing of the UK Department for International Development (DfID) which is the country’s main foreign donor.

International aid agency UNICEF has also promised to help improve care for pregnant women and infants, although the organisation has identified cultural factors such as early marriage, female genital mutilation, poor nutrition and lack of breastfeeding as the main obstacles to reducing the number of deaths among mothers and children.

Health official Dr Ibrahim Thorlie, Chief of Obstetrics at the Princess Christian Maternal Health hospital in Freetown, said he is sceptical about about the government’s new strategy as well as UNICEF’s emphasis on cultural factors.

“We need a new health system not a new strategy,” Thorlie said. “Only education combined with a health system that actually provides results can change things,” he said.

Trained staff

The main problem Sierra Leone’s mothers face is not awareness about what they should do but trained staff to give them the assistance they need, Thorlie said.
“What use is having more drugs and equipment if we don’t have people to administer them?” he asked. “Should patients start treating themselves?”

UNFPA agrees, having calculated that there are just six obstetricians for country of 5 million people: Five in Freetown and the sixth in the town of Bo, 200 km east of the capital.
“At the end of the day it’s about human resources,” said Bobo Yabi, head of the UNFPA in Sierra Leone, the UN agency supporting the government in its reforms.
“The strategy can be there, but if there is no-one to implement it, it will be just hanging in the air.”