A Reflection on Corruption, Dictatorship, and Disease in Sierra Leone

By Chernoh Alpha M. Bah

About ten years ago in mid-April 2015, reports emerged in Freetown that ten people – all of them opposition party activists – were arrested from their various homes across the city. The arrests followed a massive police raid in response to a youth protest that occurred three days earlier at the gates of the United Sates Embassy in Freetown.

The arrests occurred on April 19, 2015. All ten arrested individuals were alleged to have been part of a group of youths who stood at the gates of the United States Embassy on the morning of April 16, 2015, with placards to protest against Ernest Koroma’s handling of the Ebola outbreak. They were allegedly angry that the national Ebola response was troubled by massive state corruption and the president’s abuse of national constitutional provisions.

The protest itself occurred a day after a meeting between Barrack Obama and the presidents of Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea (the most affected countries) in Washington during the 2015 IMF/World Bank spring meetings. At the said meeting, Obama praised the three presidents’ national response mechanisms to combat the outbreak. He said they demonstrated exceptional leadership in the fight against corruption and the Ebola outbreak.

The Obama statement appeared to have directly angered citizens of Sierra Leone and Guinea. The statement, which openly endorsed the leadership of the three presidents, deliberately ignored the prevailing public moods in Sierra Leone and Guinea. Weeks before this event, a campaign of sustained national protests ensued in Sierra Leone and Guinea against undemocratic practices of these national leaders and their poor handling of the Ebola outbreak. In Conakry, for example, opposition political parties were staging violent protests in the city over the president’s lack of willingness to implement an elections timetable. And in Freetown, a national audit on Ebola funds reported that public officials affected the Ebola fight by stealing more than a third of the donated funds for the outbreak. In fact, Koroma had unconstitutionally dismissed the elected vice president of Sierra Leone just a few weeks before his Washington trip.

These incidents created intense political moments across Sierra Leone and beyond. In Europe and America, Sierra Leoneans held massive demonstrations against Koroma demanding the reinstatement of the sacked vice president and prosecution of individuals accused of stealing Ebola funds.

The multiple demonstrations held mainly in London, Washington DC, and New York aimed to draw the attention of international policy leaders on the unfolding corruption and constitutional violations that surrounded the Ebola response efforts in Sierra Leone. But the several protests appeared to have been ignored by global political leaders. In the case of Sierra Leone, the United States Embassy in Freetown turned down an asylum request from Sierra Leone’s vice president a few days before he was dismissed by Koroma for his reported ambitions to succeed the president. His asylum was denied despite the deployment of armed men to his home by the Koroma administration. State Department officials in Freetown claimed that the conflicting parties should utilize the national legal framework available in the country for redress. With the Obama statement, however, it appeared that the United States had publicly backed Koroma’s government despite the escalating national and international demonstrations by Sierra Leoneans.

Koroma came to power in 2007 through controversial elections that were allegedly marred by corrupt electoral management: over 477 polling stations in the predominant base of his opponent (an incumbent party candidate) were unprecedentedly excluded from the general vote count by the Sierra Leone National Electoral Commission (NEC), a factor that gave Koroma an undue advantage in the presidential race. Leading representatives of the United Nations missions stationed in Sierra Leone at the time were accused of having aided Ernest Koroma in the alleged electoral malpractice that brought him to power in 2007.

The leading contender to Koroma’s candidacy petitioned his victory in the Sierra Leone Supreme Court, challenging the validity of the votes. Regardless of the Supreme Court petition and protests against his questionable electoral victory, Koroma’s ascension to power was overtly supported and hailed by Britain, the United States, and numerous western multinational corporations engaged in the decades of resource exploitation in the country. Immediately after the elections, the British Department for International Development (DFID), who had withheld donor funding to the previous government, announced that England was providing some US$72 million to support Koroma’s “new economic reform program.”

Douglas Alexander, Britain’s Secretary of State for International Development, revealed that the fund was a new British assistance to help Koroma implement policies that would “maximize revenue” as part of a new national agenda. The said national agenda referred to Koroma’s corporatist program: a neoliberal program that aimed to enhance western corporate monopoly over land, minerals, and energy resources through policy enactments or reforms that offered a range of favorable guarantees and tax incentives to western investment capital. When he came to power, Koroma, an insurance broker, announced that he would pursue an aggressive business plan: transforming Sierra Leone into an investment destination for large-scale multinational capital holdings on diamonds, iron ore, bauxite, petroleum, and other extractive industries. He told the British business and political class at Chatham House in London (formerly the Royal Institute for International Affairs) that his government would run Sierra Leone as a business, putting every sector of the country on auction to corporate bidding – obtaining “profit” and “capital regeneration” in exchange for natural resources.

To implement his new business plan, Koroma hired former British Prime Minister Tony Blair as his international lobbyist and public relations campaigner. Blair established a desk of his Africa Governance Initiative at the State House in Freetown and operated a multi-million dollar budget from Sierra Leonean taxpayer funds. To promote Koroma’s new market investment agenda, Blair branded Sierra Leone a bastion of stable democracy. An investment conference in London, convened with Blair’s efforts in late 2009, billed the country as a destination for endless marketing opportunities conducive for international financial investments.

The International Finance Corporation (IFC) funded a reform of Sierra Leone’s investment climate. The Sierra Leone Investment and Export Promotion Agency (SLIEPA) was formed to ease the burden of doing business in the country mainly for western business ventures. A year later in 2008, the IFC, in its annual doing business report, ranked Sierra Leone as one of the leading destinations for safe and easy-to-do-business countries.

The Blair campaign eventually culminated into a flood of so-called foreign direct investments in the country’s natural resources. British and other European corporations and multinational financial organizations immediately arrived in Sierra Leone to acquire concessionary holdings in the iron ore and petroleum resources. By 2011, some of these multinationals had acquired more than 500,000 hectares of farmland in Sierra Leone. Addax Bioenergy of Switzerland, Quifel Natural Resources of Portugal, CAPARO Renewable Agricultural Developments of England, and Sepahan Afrique of Iran, the new agribusiness corporations who had taken over farmlands in the country, were now face-to-face with local communities over simmering disputes arising out of the new land investment deals they had signed with the Koroma government.

An Oakland Institute report, released in June 2011, stated that there was a tremendous lack of transparency and disclosure over land investment deals and mining agreements signed between government officials and the new multinationals that arrived in Sierra Leone after Koroma assumed power. Towards mid-2012, when African Minerals and London Mining intensified their iron ore operations, government officials in Freetown boasted that Sierra Leone’s economy was one of the fastest growing in the world. But these claims of economic growth were only temporal and largely based on speculated revenue inflows anticipated from the many shady deals and concessionary agreements signed between Koroma and the flood of international corporations that occupied strategic economic interests in the country. In reality, however, the anticipated growth essentially meant that London Mining, African Minerals, Vimetco, Bollore Africa Logistics, Addax Bioenergy, Socfin International, African Petroleum, and Chevron, among others, became the new economic giants driving foreign capital investments and economic activities in Sierra Leone. They paid little dividends and enjoyed tremendous tax breaks from mineral exports while local patrons (the national political elites) stuffed the meager financial royalty payments into their private bank accounts in Europe’s offshore tax heavens.

The numerous multinational corporate influx that followed Koroma’s neoliberal agenda was anchored on a sloppy chart: despite its avowed claims of economic growth and development, global development indexes ranked the country among the most repressive economies in the world. In 2013, a year before the Ebola outbreak, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) stated that more than half of Sierra Leone’s six million people (mostly unemployed urban youths) lived on less than a dollar a day in the teeming slums of Freetown. Political repression, state corruption, and graft that accompanied Koroma’s ascension to power were reawakening the ghosts of dictatorship, national theft, and underdevelopment of the pre-war years.

The new foundation of good governance whose roots germinated after the civil war was now plagued by rank opportunism, political sycophancy, and an emerging ethno-regional cronyism of Koroma’s political circle. The pervasive state corruption, incestuous corporatization and institutionalized deification of the presidency, which became hallmarks of Koroma’s corporatist agenda, meant that the postwar national democratic character, built out of the ashes of the war, assumed a path towards authoritarianism.

A Transparency International report in 2014, the year of the Ebola outbreak, ranked Sierra Leone 119 out of 175 countries for corruption. A previous Transparency International corruption survey released a year earlier confirmed that ninety percent of Sierra Leoneans confessed to having bribed police and/ or judicial officials for issues ranging from unwarranted traffic tickets to evading false arrest and to paying government officials for administrative services.

Sierra Leone’s corruption ratings ironically became increasingly alarming since 2008, the year when additional anti-corruption legislations were introduced. Under Koroma, theft of public resources extended from kickbacks on awarded state construction projects to pilferage from donor-funded development assistance budgets. An audit of a US$13.2 million United States Agency for International Development (USAID) fund for food and agricultural development in Sierra Leone conducted in December 2011, discovered unreasonable expenses of US$794,664 by the government of Sierra Leone which could not be verified. A year later in 2012, the inundating corruption within the health ministry of Sierra Leone caused the GAVI Alliance to halt a US$5 million anti-malaria campaign due to misuse of donor funds.

It was within this environment of authoritarian democracy, of state corruption, and of incestuous corporate investments that the 2014 Ebola outbreak unfolded.

When initial reports of unprecedented deaths first emerged in the eastern district of Kailahun, government officials in Freetown denied the outbreak in the country. They felt Freetown was a safe distance from the initial site of the outbreak (Kailahun is a distance of over 300 kilometers from Freetown). Political elites in Freetown never treated the unfolding epidemic with seriousness. The outbreak appeared within the same geographical space where, in March 1991, an armed insurgency started and spread to every village, town, and district across the country, leaving behind unprecedented numbers of casualties and deaths.

Back in 1991, government officials in Freetown adopted a dismissive attitude towards the start of a rebellion that later overwhelmed the entire country and tore it apart for a decade, eventually warranting the deployment of massive foreign armies and troops of aid organizations. As the Ebola death toll swelled in Kailahun, journalists in Freetown quoted a government minister as attributing the death reports to opposition propaganda designed to undermine support for the government. The government’s lack of a response translated into state denial of the outbreak, while local journalists and civil society activists mounted a sustained campaign of pressure calling for an all-out national response to stop the outbreak. Newspapers decried the government’s inaction; it appeared the outbreak was not a priority on the national agenda.

What was responsible for the non-prioritization of the national response to the outbreak? Did the outbreak take the government of Sierra Leone by surprise in any way? And did the national emergency laws eventually invoked in response to the outbreak actually help to stem the rising tide of infections and death?

These questions are at the core of the national response of the government of Sierra Leone to the outbreak. The answers to these questions address why the extremely robust military measures invoked by the Sierra Leone government did very little to contain the outbreak.

It should be remembered that, at the time of the outbreak, the operations of leading government functionaries in Freetown were largely anchored on Koroma’s political party consolidation plans. In fact, a national convention of his party, All Peoples Congress (APC), held in 2013 endorsed Koroma for the third time as chairman and leader of the party immediately. This was a few months after the controversial presidential elections of 2012 that gave him a second presidential term. During the convention Koroma threatened potential successors with severe consequences, all in a bid to suppress internal party opposition and dissent. National party executive positions, including that of the party leadership for which Koroma was endorsed, were never contested or challenged. Koroma’s staunch loyal supporters staffed all national positions of the party, including the deputy leadership position. Potential contenders to Koroma’s leadership position within the party, including his vice president, were marginalized from participation at the convention.

After the convention, Koroma focused his attention on a new political agenda in the country; his supporters started a campaign for a constitutional amendment to allow Koroma a third term in office. Leonard Balogun Koroma, his 2012 elections campaign coordinator who would later be appointed transport minister, and another party spokesperson, Robin Fallay, started mobilizations in support of a third term agenda for Koroma. At the time of the outbreak, when deaths and infections were constantly reported in eastern Sierra Leone, Koroma and his supporters were largely focused on the third term campaign in Freetown. On April 27, 2014, during a road opening ceremony along the hillside of Freetown on the Jui-Regent highway, Koroma assured those promoting his third term agenda that they were exercising their rights to free speech. Before the ceremony, tens of thousands of t-shirts were distributed to Koroma’s supporters. Monies, amounting to millions of taxpayers’ funds, were spent on the mobilizations for the ceremony. As Koroma’s political celebrations continued in Freetown and his supporters plotted his third-term roadmap, the outbreak was sporadically claiming many lives in the eastern districts of Sierra Leone.

By this time, the Ebola Management Center in Kenema alone had lost twenty-eight health workers, including two doctors, nurses, lab technicians, and some ambulance drivers. In some of the referral hospitals across the country, health workers had gone on strikes over non-payment of allowances and lack of basic personal protective equipment. Many hospitals had no gloves, stretchers, and other isolation supplies needed by nurses and doctors caring for Ebola patients. Barely a month after Koroma’s political celebrations at the Jui-Regent road-opening ceremony, the outbreak became a full-blown national nightmare; the infections and deaths spread to most parts of the country. The government’s inaction and failure to rapidly respond to the unfolding catastrophe when it first began ultimately resulted in irreparable damages: countless deaths and infections were hitting every community in the country.

Frustrated by this unfolding situation and the inaction of senior government officials, the business and mining community threatened to withdraw its essential staff from Sierra Leone in early July if drastic steps to stop Ebola were not taken. By then, the eastern districts were in dire conditions and protests by health care workers had even erupted in Kenema. With the threat of expatriate business workers pulling out of the country, Koroma announced on July 18, 2015, that the government had created an Emergency Operations Center (EOC) to deal with the unfolding catastrophe. But the Koroma government’s response still remained slow until the death of the country’s leading Ebola doctor, 39-year-old Sheikh Umar Khan. The outbreak was never clearly prioritized by the Koroma administration from the very start. Subsequent measures assumed by Koroma in the following months after Khan’s death were mainly spontaneous and largely population containment actions aimed at suppressing the rising dissent and anger that resulted from the government’s slow and ineffective response to the outbreak.

After Khan died, for instance, Koroma declared a public health emergency in the country, assuming strategic draconian measures that included new executive orders which empowered the police and army to support health workers in identifying and containing the chain of transmission. Around this time, the horrific accounts of the rising deaths and infections figures, now headline news in the local and international press, resulted in serious blame on Koroma. People calling into radio talk shows blamed the widespread explosion of the outbreak on the president’s failure to seriously deal with the virus when it first began. It took the president five weeks to issue an official statement on the epidemic. He never visited any of the areas affected by the disease until ten weeks into the outbreak, and only did so after persistent pressure from the local press and a section of civil society.

On August 15, 2014, when Koroma issued his first public statement on the crisis, he tried to avoid responsibility for the outbreak. He blamed the international community for the country’s failure to confront the Ebola virus. “I am disappointed at the international community in their delay in responding towards the fight against the deadly Ebola virus in Sierra Leone. We have not been provided with enough equipment, resources, qualified health officers, and we have lost the only expert we had in the country to the disease amidst the declaration of the international health emergency on Ebola,” Koroma said in a press release issued by the State House Communications Unit. The government shifted away its responsibility to handle its own affairs. Koroma’s blame on the international community for the deteriorating situation was indicative of government’s inability and unwillingness to deal with the emergency.

Report of the outbreak in West Africa was announced months earlier, but the Sierra Leone government failed to adequately prepare for the unfolding catastrophe regardless of local pressure and appeals. The Association of Nurses and Sierra Leone Medical and Dental Association were never engaged by authorities to discuss the situation during the initial stages of the outbreak. When the outbreak was announced in the country, Sierra Leone’s health ministry was totally unprepared. Health workers in Sierra Leone reported, at the early days of the outbreak, that the stockpiled Ebola test kits had already expired and that the personal protective equipment (PPEs) used by the health workers were totally inadequate for the Ebola response efforts. Even before Sheikh Umar Khan’s death, several frontline health workers had been infected and many died due to a lack of basic protective gears and equipment, necessities such as facemasks, stretchers, mattresses, protective gloves, and other isolation supplies.

A foreign diplomat told the New York Times in October 2014 that Koroma’s emergency response was a complete mess. The diplomat said no one appeared to be in charge of the Emergency Operations Center (EOC), the Sierra Leone government’s agency established in response to the crisis by Koroma. “Different factions made decisions independently,” the diplomat told the New York Times. Indeed, the EOC, established supposedly as an emergency office to coordinate the efforts of national and international groups involved in the response efforts, operated out of the WHO local office in Freetown, but technically it was still under the management of Sierra Leone’s health ministry. The health ministry itself had been inundated with some of the scariest corruption and graft scandals since Koroma assumed power.

A year before the outbreak, twenty-nine of the ministry’s top health officials were indicted in relation to the theft of over half-million dollars in donor funds allocated for a vaccination program. All indicted persons were later freed following a court trial that found them not guilty of the corruption charges. A free health care program set up by foreign donors was also damaged by similar corruption scandals. A former health minister was convicted in 2010 on corruption charges. At the time of the outbreak, the corruption reputation of Sierra Leone’s health ministry had reached alarming heights across global health circles. Nearly all so-called donor funded health initiatives of Koroma’s administration had suffered tremendous setbacks or collapsed due to administrative mismanagement, graft and inefficiency. In the wake of the outbreak, questions emerged regarding the competency of Koroma’s choice of a health minister.

The health minister, Miatta Kargbo, had no experience in medicine and was already at odds with Sierra Leone’s medical community even before the outbreak. In 2013, she condemned doctors who had gone on strike over unpaid salaries as greedy. When the outbreak was reported in Sierra Leone, Kargbo appeared before parliament on June 17, 2015, and blamed Ebola victims in Kailahun for their own infections. Kargbo said a female nurse had brought the illness upon herself because she slept with a boyfriend who was infected. “They stayed in the same house and throughout the process when he was infected, they were sleeping together in the same room as boyfriend and girlfriend,” she told parliamentarians.

Kargbo’s incompetent leadership over the health ministry added to the general confusion that resulted from Koroma’s spontaneous handling of the crisis. Even within the cabinet there were dissensions regarding Kargbo’s capacity to deal with the workload of the health ministry and the rising pressure exerted on its officials by the exploding outbreak. Kargbo’s colleagues complained of her arrogance and disdain for other officials within government. Some wondered why Koroma continuously retained her as health minister regardless of the public outcry and condemnation of her leadership of the ministry. Incompetence within the health ministry, massive public corruption, the lack of an effectively coordinated national response, and absence of the outbreak’s genuine prioritization all translated into an organized state confusion. The outbreak found a fertile terrain amidst this context and thrived in its onslaught, claiming more deaths, more infections, and additional geographical space. The casualties of the outbreak overwhelmed the national response, disorganized and confused as it was.

In the middle of this ensuing confusion, Koroma adopted additional robust measures. He was now forced to act by the rapidly deteriorating situation. Around this time, in early August 2014, the United States government considered the outbreak in Freetown a serious cause for concern and mandated its embassy to evacuate family members of embassy staff and personnel. The numbers of infected people had tripled and the death numbers had similarly climbed in the four months since emergency laws were imposed. The robust measures – quarantines, lockdowns, travel restrictions, and checkpoints – only increased people’s suffering and added to the general chaos in the national response.

International aid workers and CDC officials deployed in West Africa spoke of security concerns and the potential risks of full-scale violence erupting in the region in protests against national response mechanisms. Reports of isolated protests and attacks against health workers and ambulance drivers across the country were featured in local media coverage. This boiling state of potential instability ushered in a draconian climate, resulting principally from Koroma’s handling of the crisis; he now saw the epidemic with military eyes and assumed robust military powers in his response to the raging public health crisis and its potential instability.

Koroma eventually fired health minister Miatta Kargbo the same week the United States issued a mandate to withdraw its non-essential staff from Freetown. Abu Bakarr Fofanah, Kargbo’s former deputy, was named the new minister of health, and Madina Rahman, a Koroma operative, was also appointed his deputy. At the same time, Stephen Gaojia, a former minister, was appointed head of the EOC to head the national Ebola response. Gaojia declared a three-day national lockdown and house-to-house search operations, a move initially claimed to be a success but later declared a sham and wastage of resources. The EOC had been riddled by failure due to inefficient strategy and a daunting bureaucratic arrangement crowded by national officials and international aid staff. Koroma eventually dismantled the EOC, created a National Ebola Response Center (NERC), appointed defense minister Palo Conteh as its head, and turned the Ebola response efforts over to the Sierra Leone military. Then on November 5, 2015, Koroma caused parliament to validate his assumption of section 29 of the Sierra Leone Constitution, under which he was empowered to arrest and detain any individual without a court order or formal indictment as part of his emergency laws. By this time, the British and Chinese armies were already in the country carrying out their diverse response agendas.

Koroma’s new regulations did not only change the Ebola response plan and its staff, but it gave birth to a new political climate: corruption stories, arrests of journalists, and suppression of dissent followed the militarization of the country with the introduction of additional robust measures. The ugly stories of suppression, of individual sufferings, of police brutality, and of the selective application of emergency laws appeared as frontline news in daily press coverage of the outbreak. Only a few weeks after Paolo Conteh took charge of the NERC, radio journalist David Tam-Baryoh was arrested after he hosted an opposition politician on a radio talk show that listed a chain of abusive applications of Ebola control measures. During the radio show, Tam-Baryoh and his guest the opposition politician questioned the effectiveness of the national Ebola response and cited instances of mismanagement of Ebola funds. Tam-Baryoh was later arrested by a presidential order and detained for eleven days without a charge under the emergency laws.

Opposition political party members and supporters accused Koroma of using emergency laws and the outbreak to crackdown on free speech and democratic rights. Some said he was using the Ebola epidemic and state of emergency to “create a police state in Sierra Leone.” A month after Tam-Baryoh’s arrest, several protests erupted in Kono district following tensions between police and supporters of ousted vice president Samuel Sam Sumana. Scores of youths, including a sister of the vice president, were randomly arrested on allegations of having threatened violence and violating emergency laws. It later appeared that Koroma directly ordered the targeted and selective arrests under the emergency laws. Additionally, two women and six men from Kono were arrested and ordered detained for six months without charge by Koroma over an alleged dispute relating to a contested Ebola suspect. Another group of five youths were also arbitrarily arrested under the same presidential orders between February and March 2015. Independent enquiries later revealed that the arrested individuals were detained because they supported the vice president, who Koroma was determined to remove from the ruling party.

As police continued the use of emergency laws to crackdown on youth protests in Kono, it became clear that Koroma was using the outbreak’s response measures and laws to brutally settle internal party dissent towards his leadership and also muzzle external political opposition to his style of governance. An Africa Confidential article published in June 2015 stated that Koroma’s removal of Samuel Sam-Sumana from the vice presidency position was based on Koroma’s fears that Sam-Sumana was building support for a bid to succeed him as president. “Koroma was alarmed because his deputy was courting important factions of the governing All People’s Congress (APC) and building up momentum,” the Africa Confidential article stated.

The deliberate use of the outbreak for corrupt accumulation, embezzlement of donor funds, and abuse of constitutional authority hindered the real fight against the outbreak. Towards the end of 2014 when police brutality intensified in Kono, the WHO announced an alarming discovery in the district: eighty-seven bodies were found buried and a hundred and nineteen cases of infections were officially reported in Kono during the first ten days of December 2014. This was around the same time police amplified brutal actions against protesting youths, mainly supporters of the vice president, Sam-Sumana, whose long-drawn out political struggle with Koroma and his henchmen in government was at its tipping point.

By the time Koroma unceremoniously led the expulsion of Sam Sumana from the ruling party and dismissed him from the vice presidency, his wrongful use of the state of emergency laws to suppress opponents and frustrate democratic rights had reached its peak. Local and international human rights groups then realized that an alarming climate of repression was resulting from government’s handling of the outbreak. National and international groups expressed immediate concerns over the deteriorating human rights violations and abuse of democratic principles in the country. The Sierra Leone Human Rights Commission on April 23, 2015, for example, issued a press release and condemned Koroma’s discriminatory implementation of the emergency laws. The Commission said it was worried that pro-Koroma groups were allowed to hold meetings and voice opinions on national questions while other groups considered anti-government were repeatedly denied the same opportunity to meet and discuss issues affecting the country.

The Commission’s statement came after police disrupted a meeting of the Sierra Leone Bar Association held at the Law Courts building in Freetown to discuss the constitutional merits of Koroma’s dismissal of the vice president. Police alleged that the meeting violated the emergency laws. The week preceding the Commission’s statement another group of opposition party members were arrested by police in Freetown for organizing a peaceful protest at the gates of the United States Embassy. They were arrested three days after they protested against the president’s wrongful use of emergency laws against his opponents. Four days following the Commission’s statement, police proceeded and also used the emergency laws to ban a planned march by the Sierra Leone Association of Journalists (SLAJ) to launch a women’s leadership campaign against Ebola. Police similarly alleged that anti-government operatives planned on using the proposed peaceful march to protest against non-Ebola matters.

The ongoing list of human rights violations and anti-democratic actions of the government forced Amnesty International to join the Sierra Leone Human Rights Commission in condemning the government’s wrongful use of emergency laws. Sabrina Mahtani, Amnesty International’s West Africa researcher, called on the Sierra Leone government to stop the use of the emergency regulations brought in to combat Ebola as a prooftext to restrict freedom of expression and peaceful assembly. The organization was concerned that a senior regional human rights officer and fifteen other opposition party members were arrested following a protest at the regional office of the Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) in Kenema. Police claimed that those arrested violated the emergency laws. Reportedly, the arrested human rights officer had recently criticized the police on a radio station for the wrongful use of emergency laws to violate civil liberties and individual freedoms.

The government continued its brutal response to citizen’s protests despite these growing concerns and criticisms from local and international organizations. On one occasion, a man named Ansumana Bangura was given a six-month prison sentence for allegedly insulting the president in front of a police officer. And another, Mahmoud Tim Kargbo, was also detained for several months and charged with five counts of defamatory libel for forwarding a social media message critical of the president’s actions even though he did not write the message.

These grave injustices and violations continued in the full glare of the thousands of international aid workers and hundreds of representatives of international governments who constantly visited the country, yet these international representatives failed to raise the issues when they met Koroma to discuss the outbreak. The United States and its European allies, for example, closed their eyes on the numerous cases of human rights violations and public theft commissioned by Koroma and his government. In fact, the international community, led by the United States, intensified support for Koroma and his presidential colleagues regardless of the persistent complaint and demonstrations that were staged around the world against the excesses and violations of the Sierra Leone government.

The April 2015 youth demonstrations in front of the United States embassy in Freetown, in particular, were a direct response to Obama’s public endorsement of the corruption and human rights violations of Koroma. The action of the youths in Freetown was a calculated strategy to send a direct message to Washington that Obama’s praise of Koroma was not reflective of the corrupt and undemocratic leadership of the three West African presidents. The youths knew that State Department officials, in particular, were aware that a constitutional crisis was created in Sierra Leone by Koroma’s unconstitutional dismissal of the vice president just a few weeks before his Washington trip. They were aware that a national audit report in Sierra Leone confirmed that public officials in Koroma’s government stole funds donated to the Ebola fight.

State Department officials were fully in possession of relevant information relating to the corruption of Koroma’s administration. A 2013 diplomatic notice sent by United States embassy staff in Freetown revealed that Koroma held a ten percent personal share in Addax Bioenergy, the Swiss ethanol company that has millions of dollars in a sprawling sugar plantation in the northern district of Bombali (the home of Koroma). An audit report on missing Ebola funds implicated individuals and companies tied directly to Koroma’s business associates. In June 2015, Africa Confidential reported that a US$1.1 million contract for the purchase of 20 ambulances was awarded to a fictitious Lebanese company owned by Koroma’s squash-playing friend, Mahmoud Bahsoon. It alleged that Koroma offered the contract to Bahsoon on a squash pitch while the two were playing a game.

“The president telephoned the then minister of health, Miatta Kargbo, to arrange for an advance payment of 50% of the contract to Bahsoon on the following day. The money was disbursed even before the contract documents were put together,” the Africa Confidential stated.

Representatives of foreign governments knew these stories of corruption stemmed from the top echelons of the Sierra Leone government, but they did not speak about them. They knew that the Ebola response efforts were hampered by the misappropriation of the funds donated to the fight against the outbreak. They were aware that Koroma saw the outbreak as an opportunity to consolidate his grip on power and used the health crisis and the emergency laws to suppress opposition, undermine democratic values, contain free speech, and violate individual freedoms. The United States government, in particular, took the lead in endorsing and supporting the undemocratic practices and authoritarian tendencies of Koroma and the pervasive corruption of his appointed officials. Whenever Koroma’s opponents raised questions relating to abuse of national democratic rights, they were challenged by Koroma’s propagandists with the public statements of foreign leaders and governments that endorsed Koroma as a democratic leader.

These deliberate actions of foreign diplomats and leaders in support of Koroma and his corrupt officials not only undermined the fight against the outbreak, but also helped to fuel the monstrous character of a vicious authoritarian democracy that evolved into a full-blown despotic regime with no regard for constitution and the rule of law. Koroma’s declaration of state of emergency laws was not genuinely aimed at halting the casualties of the outbreak. Rather, it was a political decision in pursuit of his political ambition. His continued retention of the emergency laws and ongoing ban on public gatherings were also part of his plans to keep both the internal opposition within his party and the external opposition tamed, via draconian military and police power. Sadly, this was accomplished with the active support and endorsement of international governments and their diplomats in Freetown.

Koroma has been out of power for six years now. Three commissions of inquiry indicted many of his officials of graft and unexplained wealth. However, corruption and dictatorship continue to flourish under his successor Julius Maada Bio. In the six years that Bio has been in charge of the presidency, a rising drug epidemic is ravaging many of the unemployed urban youth in Freetown and other cities across the country.

Amidst a growing crisis of legitimacy, and disregard for law and transparency, Bio – like Koroma – equally enjoys similar support from foreign agencies and government.

Chernoh Alpha M. Bah is author of The Ebola Outbreak in West Africa: Corporate Gangsters, Multinationals, and Rogue Politicians. His new book, Democracy Betrayed: Corruption, Dictatorship, and Authoritarianism in Sierra Leone, is scheduled to be published in June 2025.

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