In a country that has been through it all, the south-eastern district of Kailahun exudes fame and infamy aplenty. The district where business flourished before civility was hijacked in this once nation of meek people. The district where blood followed blood, as madness became the magnet that turned us into morons.
Kailahun, according to one of its most illustrious sons Dr Sama Banya was named after the famous warrior Kailondo. It borders the two countries Sierra Leone is neighbours with. Because of the goodies that good neighbourliness brings, the district boasted of perhaps the country’s only international market when Koindu played host to Guinean and Liberian businesspeople who streamed across the border in their Chinese numbers up to the 1980s. And the local economy boomed. Because of the inconvenience of geography, the same district, willy-nilly, was the venue of the first shots that were the onset of the RUF rebel war that laid waste to this country for a decade. And because it all started there, Sierra Leone’s brutal war ended in Kailahun where the final disarmament of combatants took place in 2001 leading to the official declaration in January 2002 of the end of the war, thereby completing its cycle of a haven and ravine.
In 2003 I visited Kailahun. Not too far from the town’s centre stood the Slaughter House. So-named because hundreds of innocent civilians were said to have been butchered there by the RUF rebels at the height of the war. Even though that allegedly happened several years prior, bloodstains still bedaubed the white walls. There, where mostly men shouted for help in vain. Where women were raped and screamed hoarse for justice and succour in shame and pain. The innocent-looking nearby swamp, scene of mass graves I was told, only spoke of guilt in the vein.
Today, the scars of that brutality have vanished from the town. But the scabs still remain refusing to drown. Former combatants roam the streets either as motorcycle taxi riders or as layabouts who are frustrated that the system has not absorbed them. A few of them I challenged on why they were not farming instead. One, a former civil militia fighter, told me that their hopes were raised during the disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration programme. He said he was trained in computer science and could not imagine himself working on a farm. “My hope was pinned on the sky. Now it is down to the mountain. But certainly not down to the earth on the farm” he philosophically told me. I brought out my recorder to interview him. But he declined. Is he a real ex-com, playing some advocacy, or just pulling a fast one on me? I asked myself. But his views of frustration were expressed in a chorus of complete unanimity.
Like the war days when residents of Kailahun were held in bondage, today they are in a bit of a sticky situation. Probably in prison. Kailahun is almost cut off from the rest of the country. The road leading to the district headquarter town is the worst I have seen in nearly twenty years, since my return to Kono from Tongo on a road that almost impassable.
The Kailahun road was bad when I last visited some six years ago. But I thought it was because I went there in the rainy season. It was even worse when I visited last week. And this is the dry season. The 17-mile distance that is between Pendembu and Kailahun town is a nightmare that lasts for hours. I could not help but ask why the religious loyalty to any party or government. This clearly is a scar on the conscience of successive governments in a country where road user charges are paid with the roads either not fixed or fixed with donor funds.
Even though I travelled on a 4×4 vehicle alone with only the driver, the discomfort was discomfiture for our leaders. There are injuries all over my head due to the incessant banging to the roof of the car, never mind the pain all around my body. One can only imagine what the vast majority who are crammed in the few public transports available on the road go through.
A lady in a truck that was stuck in the mud on the road on my way back lamented that they had been left stranded there for days. With her baby strapped to her back, looking completely aback, she was taking badly-needed goods for sale to the district. I counted four vehicles that had a similar fate. The district is bare. It is like a bull with horns uprooted due to long years of abandonment.
When I bothered to find out in 2003 from the roads authority as to why the road network in Kailahun was abysmal, hear the defence: It rains in the area for between 8 – 9 months in a year. No way around it? I quizzed. There is, I was told, but hard to find. It is still being searched for.
For good measure and in supposed readiness for the good, the bad and the ugly that the district is prone to, the RSLAF has a battalion station in Kailahun town. They are overstretched, under-resourced even if still looking in high spirit. They have a skeletal presence in Koindu which is just about three miles from the disputed border town of Yenga. Despite the bad roads, or may be because of that, they complained about the lack of vehicles for their forward patrols. They live in poor shelter conditions. But they say they have been receiving their pay regularly lately.
I left Kailahun on a very high note even if that was blurred by my travelling mercilessness. Four class one pupils (three girls and a boy) of the RC school in Koindu, passed my very difficult spelling test. They spelled such four and five -letter words as woman, class, book, and even bicycle. They even told me the name of the president of Sierra Leone even if they said the president of Guinea was Lansana Conteh. Clearly the next generation of Kailahun’s professionals must not be allowed get stuck up in the district like vehicles going there so often do. In this article I have not mentioned the infamous Court Barry which brings both laughter and tears depending on who you talk to. I have stuck to the reality that affects all, regardless of their political conviction. And to say the people are poor and suffering is an understatement.
By Umaru Fofana
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