Den Dae Pan Check

Waiting at a joint military-police checkpoint at Bottom Mango on a rainy October night – consequence of a new (and apparently successful) government of Sierra Leone initiative to stamp out a spike in armed robberies.

When good news isn’t

On my flight back to Freetown on Tuesday night, I sat next to a group of drunk rough-and-tumble middle-aged guys, many of them Scottish. A friend and I sized them up and figured they must be miners. Or mercenaries, but there aren’t as many of those running around Freetown these days.

In fact, as we discovered later in the flight when a particularly drunk and offensive member of the group tried to chat us up – “You actually live in this godforsaken country?” he slurred, throwing back yet another gin and lemonade – they were members of an oil drilling team working for a large petroleum company. According to him, they’d just struck oil off the coast of Sierra Leone.

After another offshore find last year in Ghana, this wasn’t particularly surprising, but I still put even odds on the fact that he was full of it. But sure enough, Wednesday morning brought headlines on the BBC, Financial Times, and others, that the US Anadarko Petroleum Corporation and its partners had found oil off the coast of Sierra Leone.

This should be good news for Sierra Leone, I suppose. A new and lucrative industry to create jobs, generate tax revenue, and bring foreign currency into the country is surely welcome. Images of tiny Gulf states made impossibly rich by oil revenue, or a childish cartoon with an oil geyser bursting from a backyard, come to mind. “We’re rich, Ma, we’re rich!”

Sadly, among the world’s poorest countries, the presence of valuable natural resources has tended to lead not to the reduction of poverty, but to the creation of rent-seeking, kleptocratic elites growing richer while the vast majority of the population continues to live in gripping poverty. Take the Niger River Delta in Nigeria, where abundant oil resources have failed to benefit the local population and instead have fuelled terrorism and popular unrest, while causing tremendous damage to the natural environment. Or the many poor economies in which, as Paul Collier argues in his book the Bottom Billion, “resource rents … make democracy malfunction.”

So I want to celebrate Sierra Leone’s latest opportunity for economic growth, but I worry that oil – like diamonds in the 1990s – could prove more of a curse than a blessing. Two members of the Visit Sierra Leone online forum express these duelling reactions: saint_dracula says “Genuinely horrifying, depressing news...Yet another curse... Don't expect much,” while SaloneBoy celebrates, in Krio “Betteh don kam oh, betteh don kam!!”

I hope you're right, SaloneBoy. I hope good things have come.

Making the Video

I love this BBC audio slideshow by Glenna Gordon. It shows all the sass and energy of the Sierra Leone pop music scene. It also demonstrates why, after three years in Sierra Leone, I sometimes feel compelled to defy my age and buy teeny-tiny clothes made of shiny synthetic fabrics from stores like Forever 21.

I also love Glenna's blog, the Scarlett Lion. Her photos are nothing short of breathtaking, and her commentary is incisive and true. She's based in Monrovia but has written about Sierra Leone -- apparently I just missed meeting her on a recent visit, when I opted not to attend a mass disaster drill by the country's emergency services. (But that's a story for another day.)

Here is one of my favorite photos from Glenna's recent trip to Freetown. If it were my photo, I would title it: In Which A Man Has An Idea.

Enforcement

A policeman in a riot helmet, carrying a wooden bat. With him, a man in a DayGlo vest talking on his cell phone, and another man, in a white T-shirt, walking a few paces behind.

Emblazoned across the back of the T-shirt: “Attitudinal and Behavioral Change Secretariat Enforcement Squad.” On closer inspection, Mr. DayGlo Vest had the same shirt. I suddenly had visions of Orwell.

The men walked unhurried along Jomo Kenyatta Road . Thanks to the traffic, we kept pace – I’d drive slowly ahead of them for a moment, then wait for them to catch up. As we performed this slow dance , I stared at them surreptitiously, wondering what they were up to.

A few meters on, I got my answer. A larger group of vested  and T-shirted Enforcement Squad members, most armed with crude tools, clustered by the roadside. One reached up and began to tear off the locked shutter from a small makeshift kiosk, painted in the neon colors of Zain. The owner probably sold cell phone credit and simple provisions – candles, soft drinks, cigarettes – for a meager living. Until now.

When President Koroma introduced the concept of Attitudinal Change, everyone had a different idea of what he meant – and without fail, it involved a change in someone else’s attitude rather than your own. To  the poor, it meant that wealthy elites should stop pursuing their own interests to the detriment of the masses. To the rich, it meant the poor should stop demanding handouts. To commercial drivers, it meant the police should stop harassing them. To all other drivers, it meant the commercial drivers should start driving more responsibly. To more than one of my friends, it meant that the staff of restaurants, bars, shops, banks, and offices of all sort should start serving customers with a smile, rather than treating them like an unwelcome disruption.

Attitudinal Change became a buzz word for everything – and, as far as I could tell, it struggled to move from the realm of rhetoric to the arena of actual change.

But now it seems the Freetown City Council had its own definition, and is ready to put it into action. Attitudinal Change Enforcement means clearing the sidewalks of small-scale vendors who are trying to make a living a few thousand leones at a time. Never mind that the City Council hasn’t yet managed to build a single new market to provide an alternative space for the displaced sellers.

At least the Enforcers have riot helmets and batons. We wouldn’t want any trouble.

Glimpses of Paradise – and Paradox

I love this collection of photos by filmmaker and photographer Chuck Moss. They capture some of the heartbreaking contradictions of Sierra Leone: beauty and devastation, joy and melancholy, vibrant motion and frustrating stagnation.

From afar, great beauty…

… and also beauty up close…

…but then a touch of devastation: what a million new inhabitants do to a mountainous, coastal city.

A few shots of what it takes to make a living…

… and a few more on how to live it up with style.

A sense of the color of commerce…

… of the looks of joy….

… and then, in the quieter moments, of a touch of sadness.

For more of Chuck’s stunning photos, see the full collection here.

Progress?

For better or worse, Freetown is now developing an upper crust scene typical of what you find in most African capital cities.

This occurred to me last night, as I sipped passable white wine and ate an artfully arranged plate of barracuda and mashed potato on the balcony of the Country Lodge, while a live jazz band played in the background. The tinkle of glasses and silverware mixed with the muted strains of Ella Fitzgerald, heat lightening brightened the sky over the coastal city far below, and a well-dressed crowd of the well-to-do – European, Lebanese, and African alike – chatted away.

This is not Freetown, I thought. This is Abidjan before the war. Or Dakar. Or Durban, for that matter.

But it is Freetown. It is now. It is again, because certainly Freetown had these kinds of places before the war.

Maybe tonight I’ll flash back to 2006 and seek out one of my old haunts, like PB’s restaurant on the side of Spur Road, separated from the traffic by a woven thatch screen. Burgers and pumping hip-hop. Pools of florescent light and vast stretches of darkness. The occasional smell of garbage or sewage. Raw and real.

Or maybe not. The jazz band is playing again tonight, at the Aqua Club, a members-only boating and sports club.  Sunset cocktails by the sea.

Hierarchy of Professions

A police officer smiled through my passenger-side window as I crawled through traffic at the Eastern Police clock tower yesterday.

“Don’t you want to hire me to be your driver?” he said. He wasn’t kidding.

I looked at his name tag.

Sergeant.