By Kortor Kamara
The president of the African Development Bank, Mr. Akinwumi Adesima, in a recent interview stated that “what Africa does with food is going to determine the future of food in the world”.
This bold statement opened my ears regarding the nature of the food and economic situation in Sierra Leone, and has prompted an appraisal of why our nation continues to spend over 100 million dollars annually, in scarce foreign exchange, to import foodstuffs into a country that possesses all the factors of production required for self-sufficiency.
I’m sure this statement was not uttered because the African Development Bank President was anticipating or projecting a radical increase in food production by African countries, but rather was underlying the abysmal lack of African nation’s contribution towards feeding their own populations.
Statistics compiled by Kusi Ideas Festival, a Kenya based media organization festival, slated to take place in Kigali, Rwanda in October, 2019, reveals that “65 percent of the world’s uncultivated arable land is located in Africa, while 35 billion US dollars is expended by African countries importing food items to feed their populations; with a projected 110 billion US dollars, estimated for importation of food items to feed the African population by 2025”.
Since Sierra Leone’s independence in 1961, when the nation’s guiding principles were self reliance, personal responsibility and nation building, our nation was not only self sufficient in food, but was a net exporter of foodstuffs.
How such a nation has evolved over the past 50 years into a society of dependency on government and NGOs for every facet of its development – including its feeding, economy, trade, healthcare, education, employment and other basic and public sector essentials is a question worth examination by Sierra Leoneans.
It is thus not surprising that fundamental policy discussions regarding the role and extent of government intervention in the affairs of our nation’s affairs are mostly relegated to the extreme fringes of academia, if at all discussed by the political intelligencia.
Questions such as who pays the cost of government in Sierra Leone and which sector of society receives the greatest benefits need to be discussed and addressed by the citizens.
While we continue experiencing the corrosive nature of governmental dependency, at the expense of private sector activities and individuality, vices such as corruption have continued to stymie our society’s development.
The citizen’s individuality, as a voter, taxpayer, buyer and seller, is hence being replaced by a centralized big government, inefficiently attempting to provide such services.
This culture of dependency has so permeated our nation, that it’s not uncommon for our compatriots to have expectations of government providing even the basics of sustenance for the individual.
Our nation has since 1968, embarked on a socialist economic model, in which a centralized economic state saw its primary function as providing for the needs and essentials of the citizenry. It is thus no gainsaying that the public sector wage bill even today represents the nation’s largest budget outlay.
The recent public interviews by the Governor of the Bank of Sierra Leone and the Finance Minister, despite perceived gaffes, have shown that our nation’s economy is gravely indebted to a bloated public sector wage bill and foreign imports and their resultant foreign exchange instabilities.
However, rather than seeking to address the import/export imbalances in our economy and the rising foreign exchange rates concomitant with our nation’s inability to export, our elites seem predisposed with trivialities, such as the manner of the television presentation by the finance minister or the central bank Governor.
In a June 26, 2017 article in the Sierra Leone Telegraph, it was reported that “over 80 percent of basic foods consumed in Sierra Leone are imported from abroad, costing hundreds of millions of dollars every year”.
As an example, in 2017 Sierra Leone’s total imports was 1.3 billion dollars, of which rice imports alone accounted for the largest share at 14.7 percent. How a country, which at independence was exporting rice has now been reduced to importing the basic commodity, as its number one import, reveals the sorry state of our society’s economic inertia and underdevelopment.
According to the Sierra Leone Telegraph Newspaper, the country was “spending over 200 million dollars on importing foods every year”.
Finally, while we all constantly lament our nation’s state of development, we have however failed to understand and demand that our representatives rearrange our nation’s budget, to better reflect expenditures on development projects and programs, and away from the bloated wage bills for civil servants and public servants which add no development value to our
