When Sierra Leone can declare a public health emergency after two confirmed cases of mpox, it should be capable of treating an estimated road death toll of more than a thousand people in a single year with the same urgency. Yet road deaths occur one by one, week after week, without the coordinated national response…
Sierra Leoneans often live together more easily than our politics suggests. Across the country, people intermarry, trade, worship and build friendships beyond ethnic lines. Afrobarometer’s 2025 survey found that 93 percent of citizens express tolerance toward people of other ethnicities and 87 percent toward people with different political affiliations. Yet when elections approach, the country…
In Freetown, there exists an evil ceremony, and that is our reliance on emergency power generation from a ship in our harbour. Neighbours adjust their evening plans to the sound of their neighbour’s generator. Welders and hairdressers drop everything in the middle of their workday, and cold-chain drugs spoil in refrigerator cabinets in clinics. Students…
In 1991, Sierra Leoneans made a defining constitutional choice about the country’s political future. Through a national referendum held in August of that year, roughly 80% of participating voters approved a new constitution that restored multiparty politics and formally repealed the 1978 one-party constitutional order. It should be noted that the 1991 Constitution did not…
Imagine a small business owner in Kenema who needs a business licence. For weeks, she shuttles between the local council office and a ministry in Freetown, facing endless queues, requests for “transport money” to move files between offices, and the constant anxiety that her paperwork might be lost in a dusty filing cabinet. Now imagine…
In August 2017, after three days of heavy rain, a section of Sugar Loaf Mountain overlooking Freetown collapsed, sending mud, boulders, and debris through the informal settlement of Regent. The disaster killed over 1,000 people and left more people homeless. In July 2025, flooding in the hillside community of Col Wata claimed the lives of…
A young man from a nearby community prepares charcoal amid a deforested clearing in the Kambui Hills Forest Reserve on September 25, 2024. Sierra Leone is confronting a dual environmental and energy crisis that threatens both its unique biodiversity and the daily survival of its citizens. The nation has lost approximately 2.17 million hectares of…
