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NATIN
PAS ADVANTAGE!
By
PAUL CONTON
The wholesale destruction
visited by the government upon Wilkinson Rd leaves one,
at times, dumbfounded. Even during the darkest days of the AFRC what we
witnessed then in terms of property damage within a limited area was child’s
play compared with
the havoc the APC government has wrought. The images before us
are of an extended disaster zone, perhaps an earthquake of magnitude 8.5 or
9.0 Richter. I have lived on the same compound off Wilkinson Road for the
last forty five years, and the first time I ever heard mention of a Wilkinson Road widening
project was in a discussion with one of the affected residents in April or
May this year. During my extended stay in this area there has been, from time
to time, public discussion of many other
road projects to ease traffic congestion in the West end, most notably a
coastal road project which has been talked about for decades. As far as one can tell this particular
project, the widening of Wilkinson Road, appears to
have been hastily conceived by President Ernest Bai
Koroma and his advisers, perhaps in response to the
impending 50th
Independence
anniversary celebrations. In its eagerness to gain credit for improving Freetown the government
has not hesitated to bulldoze the properties of honest, tax-paying,
law-abiding, citizens, while blithely ignoring the numerous illegal, unplanned and
dangerous shanty towns that are springing up every day around the peninsula.
Doubtless, tribal, regional and political considerations play a part in this
biased and discriminatory treatment.
Questionable project
This brutality has been
inflicted in the name of a project of questionable merit, and I say this in
the knowledge that many of my compatriots appear to support it. It was
enlightening to listen to the Minister of Works, Honourable
Allimamy Koroma on a talk
show on Universal Radio last weekend. The minister cited numerous other
ongoing road projects, but the Wilkinson Rd project stood
out as fundamentally different from them all and perhaps from any other major
road project undertaken in this country. Wilkinson Rd. is an intra-city road. The vast majority of
major road projects have been inter-city
roads. The requirements and specifications for the two types are
drastically different. The economic justifications are also wildly different.
Wilkinson Rd is long and
heavily urbanized. Property owners have clear, uncontested title, in some
cases dating back more than one hundred years. Many of the structures are
substantial and they were built with the blessing and approval of all the
relevant government ministries and departments. There are already serious,
unaddressed environmental issues from the hills overlooking the road. There
were numerous opportunities for lay-bys and parking areas to alleviate
traffic delays along this road that went unaddressed for years by SLRA, which
has to be one of the most hopeless, helpless arms of government. One was dumbfounded morning after morning
to see traffic held up at Methodist
Girls High
School and Government Technical for vehicles to
discharge schoolchildren, even though there is ample room there to create an
extensive waiting area. Many other opportunities exist for bypass routes that
would have substantially reduced traffic delays but these have all been
happily ignored by SLRA
Regular users of Wilkinson Rd. will readily
tell you that the vast majority of the traffic delays are caused by three
intersecting roads – Aberdeen Rd., Murray
Town and Congo Cross. The very long stretch of Wilkinson Rd. from Aberdeen Rd. junction to
Lumley has no bottlenecks – the problems here being the very poor
maintenance, the lack of drainage to channel the huge amounts of water coming
down from the hills and the failure by the SLRA to properly demarcate the
numerous opportunities along the road for parking and waiting. To lump these
two sections – Congo Cross Bridge to Aberdeen Road junction and Aberdeen Road
junction to Lumley – together and treat them as one is a big mistake and will
lead to huge, unnecessary expenditures by a perennially cash-strapped
government.
In developed and even
developing countries traffic planning and management is an advanced science.
Accurate traffic statistics and projections are essential for this science –
one regularly sees traffic monitoring devices on the roads; I have yet to see
one on Sierra Leone’s roads. In serious road projects environmental impact
assessments and public consultations are mandatory. Before embarking on a
multi-million dollar four-lane highway that will affect the lives of
millions, in one way or another over the next fifty years, a few other
studies – cost/benefit analysis, alternative route assessment, safety assessment - are all very desirable. If this had
been a donor-funded project all these and more would have been done, and
competent consultants would have been employed. The project would not have
seen the light of day in its present form. But this is a government-funded
project in Africa. Only in third-world
banana republics can a president wake up one morning and say, “I want a
four-lane highway from my village to the city!” (The honourable
minister confirmed as much in his radio programme).
And then a short while later, send in the bulldozers!
APC’s 99 tactics
The manner in which the project
was started last week revives all the old memories of the APC’s 99 tactics, with threats and
intimidation being the key words. The government positioned a bull dozer at
one end of the road and gave residents the option of demolishing their walls
and other structures or having the machine do it for them, with some vague
promise of perhaps rebuilding walls on whatever was left of the people’s land
at some later date. And once structures are demolished there is nothing
physical left to show what was there or where the boundary was. Compensation
becomes even more uncertain.
Are we thinking of the children?
As far as one can tell the
safety issues associated with this project have not entered the minds of SLRA
and the politicians. A number of major schools straddle the road, not to talk
of hundreds of residences, and inevitably schoolchildren and others trying to
cross a four lane highway would be at a substantially greater risk than at
present. This is even more so because taxis, poda-podas
and okadas, already given free rein by the police
and the government, will be driving at greater speeds. (2) The government is
trying to avoid paying compensation, and this means that many structures will
find themselves only a few feet away from a major highway. Any major accident that occurs on this
highway (and you can be sure there will be major accidents on a four-lane
highway) could readily result in disaster for nearby buildings and their
occupants. Think of the number of disasters and fatalities there have been in
the last few years on the short, two-hundred-yard length of the Congo Cross Bridge.
Now multiply this a hundred-fold. This is what we
face with this ill-advised highway. Apart from death and destruction, the
road will bring hazardous levels of noise and smoke pollution to those
ill-fated to be living and working only a few feet from it. To decide,
virtually on a whim, at a political level, without serious public discussion or
professional planning that all this is of no consequence, smacks of arrogance
at its highest.
Development or bankruptcy?
Development can mean different
things to different people. For some, development is primarily a question of
building minds and attitudes and sound organisations.
For others, development is all about bricks and mortar. There can be no
question the APC fits into this second category. When he first came to power
the late Siaka Stevens did some good work. One
thinks of the Congo Cross bridge and Aberdeen Bridge,
monuments that have stood the test of time. But as the APC got madder and
madder during its 24-year rule it increasingly turned to grandiose projects
the country could not afford rather than real people-based development,
culminating in the most disastrous prestige project of all: the hosting of
the OAU Heads of State Conference, which bankrupted us and set the stage for
the war and our 30-year malaise. Siaka Stevens was
hailed and glorified at the time for bringing ‘development’ to Sierra Leone.
When one thinks about all the ‘developments’ that were initiated for the OAU
conference one can only shake one’s head: the new hotels, Bintumani
and Mammy Yoko, and the expansion of Cape Sierra have only seen a decline in
tourist numbers. The Lumley approaches, with the huge new roundabout that was
supposed to welcome visitors to Freetown’s
glittering crown jewel, can now best be described as Aberdeen fakai. The big, new ferries that were bought to bring the visitors
across from Lunghi are rusting carcasses and the
Sierra Leone Ports Authority has been unable to replace them. The specially
installed street and traffic lights were abandoned soon after the conference
ended. Parts of the Heads of State village lie in ruins. The Sierra Leone
Broadcasting Service, outfitted with brand new broadcast-quality colour equipment, later collapsed completely and does not
now have anything near the professionalism it had then. The list goes on and
on. All were large-scale ‘developments’ that turned out to be unsustainable.
In short, they were not developments. One might say, “This is a road. Roads
are different. Look at the Waterloo
New Road. Was that not a good thing?” Yes, certainly inter-city (as opposed
to intra-city) four-lane highways greatly facilitate the movement of people
and goods over long distances. But even here there is a downside. The rise of
the road system, including the Waterloo New Road,
coincided with the demise of the railway, which many to this day consider our
most serious economic mistake. And one only needs to walk a few hundred yards
to the old Waterloo Rd to see the
squalor in which residents now live and work on what was once a proud
thoroughfare. So this ‘development’
did not come for everyone.
Budding megalomaniacs
Which brings to mind the point
that Siaka Stevens, for all his one-party rule and
violent political tactics, seldom used force
majeure to dispossess citizens of their
property for the purposes of implementing his ‘developments’, and even more
rarely was this done without compensation. Much of the Waterloo New Road was laid
out on virgin land, causing minimal damage to existing structures on the old
road. All the Freetown projects I can think
of, The National Stadium, the Youyi Building,
the bridges, the hotels,
Heads of State village etc were all implemented on uncontested
land.
Daylight robbery
The destruction is a fait
accompli. Nothing can now be done about it. There is still an opportunity for
the politicians to look again at the road design. The government has embarked
on this reckless gamble, spending millions of dollars from the nation’s
meager coffers, a significant percentage of the annual budget, on this one,
poorly-thought-out, intra-city road
in Freetown,
and yet politicians have taken a decision not to compensate landowners for
the land seized in this exercise. This is an outrage, an abomination. This
precedent would give government the right to seize anything, anywhere. This
is a mass human rights violation inflicted upon peaceful, law-abiding
citizens. These poor property-owners are in effect being asked to subsidize
the politicians’ political ambitions, for, make no mistake, as much as
‘development, 2011 and 2012 are prime motivators for this grandiose project.
One of the fundamental rights afforded to citizens by our constitution is
protection from deprivation of property without reasonable compensation. The
politicians should put their money where their collective mouth is. If the
government and the country can afford this project then the government should
pay market-price compensation for the land seized from property owners. Once
they do that, people who, like me, are skeptical about this project can only
hope that the benefits will outweigh the numerous disadvantages. If the governemt can’t afford to pay compensation for this land
then it can’t afford this project at this time, and it should set its sights
on more sustainable development
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