A little girl walks up to me. The not-more-than 7-year-old looks emaciated. Seeing a microphone in my hand, she somewhat smartly asks if I am “someone who talks on radio”. “Yes I am a journalist”, I reply. “I have a message that I want you to tell the public about” she says to me in Krio. Sure! I say. I hurry to get my digital recorder from my back pack to switch on. Strangely she declines to give me the message even without saying a word. “Mhmm I am ready when you are ready with your message”, I say to her. But she still refuses. She is shy because of the microphone being put before her, I naively say to myself.
Naively indeed! The girl looks terrified. And, as it turns out later, also smart. The precocious girl has noticed that someone else, a Guinean, has joined us. Her face sinks. It does not float again up to when I leave. Whatever she wanted to tell me I leave without it.
This was in Yenga, the disputed small border town claimed by both Guinea and Sierra Leone. The girl is Sierra Leonean. As I write this piece, unfortunately and somewhat curiously, I am still struggling to figure out what it was she wanted to say to me. She looked clearly famished. But she also looked to be in bondage. That she declined to talk me on seeing someone else she knew that I didn’t know has kept haunting me.
Next door: I met a woman, Kumba, with a large family to care for following the death of her husband, she says. They live by miracle, she tells me, with hunger knocking down her knuckles which now look thin. Even though she is clearly under threat, she does not mind speaking out and saying just that. The Guineans, she says, are making life unbearable for them. But she cannot leave the town of her birth, she bellows. “This is where I have always known as home. Going to Koindu or anywhere else will only compound our problems”, she tells me.
Kumba says she and her children sometimes go for days without a proper meal. One of her children looks on, apparently hungry. Her eyes seem to be sinking steadily. Her collarbones beckon to anyone who cares to see them. Hers are not for a model preparing for a show or an audition. They make her look as if she has only a few more hours to live. Inside their mud-built house, the pots, pans and plates are jobless. Kumba’s family have hunger clearly written on their faces, making her look too old for her age.
The issue of Yenga is not esoteric even to the ordinary Sierra Leonean. They not only know about it but are also passionate about it. And in what sounded like the clutter of the clearer, Guinean military and civilian personnel who only laid claims to what was until 2002 a bona fide part of Sierra Leone’s territory caused all the wrong noise last week in what was clearly an attempt to stop our parliamentary committee on defence from visiting the town. This was a classic dangerous display of what the committee chairman Abdul Rahman Kamara referred to as an “unfriendly behaviour”.
The committee, made up of mostly ex-servicemen, coruscated and stood their ground insisting they be allowed to visit their people in the disputed border town to find out about their welfare amidst persistent reports lately that they were being harassed. And the MPs got their way and were able to see at firsthand the situation in the town. See it they did.
The Guinean soldiers, joining their Administrateur Civil, looked senescent but determined. This probably explained why the Regent Chief of Nongowa who is based in Koindu declined to join the delegation to Yenga. Many residents in the town spoke of how badly the Guinean troops can behave to them sometimes.
Somewhat incomprehensibly, in all of this the Freetown government has suspended talks with Conakry until an elected government is in place there. The reason as advanced by defence minister Pallo Conteh, is to avoid dealing with a temporary regime which the junta there say they are. But come to think of it, would it not have been more prudent to have established an entente cordiale with the junta as they could have found it much easier to cede control of the town if only to buy favours. It was a World Bank official who told me many years ago that he preferred dealing with military regimes in Africa. “They do not have a Parliament that is self-seeking to contend with each time they want to take a decision”.
I definitely believe that President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah presented the best opportunity to have resolved the Yenga issue not least because he is so fluent in Susu, the ethnic group of the then Guinean president Lansana Conteh, that the two would have found it more fraternal. However, while we await the report by the parliamentary committee on defence it would perhaps be a good idea if the government rethought its position of disengagement and reopened talks with Conakry. President Ernest Bai Koroma could even appoint Kabbah as our Yenga Envoy.
If all of that is not agreeable or fails, we can take the case to the International Court of Justice for arbitration on who really owns Yenga. It is just a few years ago since Nigeria and Cameroon resolved the issue over their disputed Bakasi Peninsula and the two countries are still good neighbours even though theirs was far more complex. Unlike the Bakasi which had a good number of Nigerians whose nationality issue later became contentious, Yenga is a far clearer cut case. All those living there are Sierra Leonean.
But if for some reason the ICJ rules in favour of Guinea, it will be far easier resettling our people further into our land. After all “When God takes something from your grasp; He’s not punishing you, but merely opening your hands to receive something better.” No-one is talking about military intervention at this stage or any other stage at that. But such hideous level of apparent insensitivity to the plight of our compatriots must end at the shortest possible time; before Yenga becomes a hanger in a hangar.
By Umaru Fofana