Sierra Leone News: A year after the slide

Politics

Yesterday marked the 1st-year anniversary of the Motormeh landslide. The event claimed more than 1,000 lives and showed people the raw power of Mother Nature, particularly when she is trifled with. It may have taken a giant disaster to get people’s attention of the consequences of doing dangerous actions, such as illegal logging and living in unsafe areas. But hopefully people have learned the stakes of messing too much with the natural balance of nature. Just like other national disasters that have happened in Sierra Leone in recent history, the slide will leave physical and emotional scars on the country and its people, but I believe this one will create lasting positive change for the country going forward. In the past two decades, Sierra Leone has ended a gruesome civil war and endured a large Ebola virus outbreak. Combined with the already-poor infrastructure, subpar governance, commonplace corruption, and increasing urbanization, this country already had enough to deal with. But the slide is a different kind of disaster, largely because it was a preventable one. Wars happen for different reasons in various countries and the war that transpired in Sierra Leone stemmed from the pursuit for national power without much drastic philosophical change. By this, I mean that the war was fought to gain power, not to input some large altruistic change that will noticeably improve the nation. It was a fight for the sake of fighting. With Ebola, diseases can happen anywhere, even back in the US, so it’s not exactly accurate to say that someone could have prevented the Ebola outbreak. Combining the infrastructure and governance problems that this country has been known for, something like Ebola was only waiting to happen. But the landslide is different. People generally know what caused the catastrophe—deforestation—and there’s been real movement to get people to respect the local logging regulations. Of course, the slide was exacerbated by the abnormally heavy rains that came last wet season, but the situation was made as bad as it was due to the large amount of deforestation. If there were more healthy trees in the area, the chance of the hillside collapsing would have been much lower. Since then, from what I’ve seen and heard, people have generally respected the rules. Nothing is perfect, but people have ceased logging illegally from the area—whether because of fear for their safety or respect for the natural force, I’m not sure—and I’m glad that people are more aware of the issue. Usually awareness leads to actions. Clearly, the mudslide was a horrible event that devastated the country, countless families, and the natural integrity of a prominent part of Freetown. But the scale of the incident, as well as the identifiable cause, gives me hope that this country can move past it. People know what they can do to ensure that this kind of disaster doesn’t happen again. It gives them a chance to bounce back more effectively than ever before. The civil war ended nearly two decades ago and yet it is still an asterisk on any conversation about Sierra Leone. Ongoing recovery is the general excuse for many of this country’s problems, but it doesn’t have to be like that. Instead, the story should be one of toughness. Since the slide, I’ve seen that people are taking natural disasters more seriously. It’s the kind of thing that they know they can help to prevent and so they’ve putting out efforts, even small ones, to help do their part to not contribute to the chances of causing another catastrophic event. It has largely recovered, it will continue to recover, and I feel strongly that eventually this incident can help to improve the nation as a whole. It takes mistakes to learn lessons. Instead of producing another story of death and destruction, I believe that this one can actually help Sierra Leone become a story of resilience. JR/14/8/2018 By Jack Russillo Wednesday August 15, 2018.

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