SIERRA LEONE-EDUCATION: The Legacy of Military Rule

By Lansana Fofana Reprint | | Print |

Lansana Fofana

FREETOWN, Mar 13 1998 (IPS) - One of the biggest challenges facing Sierra Leone’s newly restored government is rehabilitating an education sector that received a battering during the anarchy that characterised military rule in the West African nation.

The Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) junta, which overthrew President Ahmed Tejan Kabbah in May 1997, ruled for only nine months before it was deposed by a Nigerian-led West African force last month. However, it took a heavy toll on schools and other educational institutions.

“School furniture was either stolen or transformed into fuelwood for cooking by the junta, university campus hostels vandalised, laboratories and libraries looted and some school buildings burnt down,” explained Kanja Sesay, Minister of Rehabilitation, Reconstruction and Resettlement.

Sesay said the government needed money to rehabilitate destroyed schools and to pay the salaries of administrators and teachers, along with those of other public servants whom the AFRC had failed to pay.

Some of the destruction to educational institutions has been blamed on the thousands of Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels who flocked to the main towns after the AFRC invited them — soon after it ousted Tejan Kabbah — to come out of the bush and help it form a government.

“The RUF combattants did not have accomodation in the capital and provincial metropoles so they simply occupied school buildings and vandalised furniture and other infrastructure,” says educationist Mike Taylor-Lewis.

The violence and looting that followed the coup also forced thousands of people, including teachers and pupils, to flee the country. Those teachers who remained joined other public servants in a civil disobedience campaign against the AFRC.

As a result of all this, education ground to a halt and efforts by the AFRC to change the situation, such as supplying buses for students and incentives for teachers, failed.

“We told them we would not return to school until democratic rule was restored and that is exactly what we did,” said Alpha Timbo, secretary-general of the Sierra Leone Teachers Union (SLTU).

Now that Tejan Kabbah has been reinstated — he returned to Sierra Leone on Mar. 10 after a nine-month exile in Guinea — the government has appealed to non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and UN agencies to help rehabilitate the education system, but even if this is done, not all children may be able to benefit.

Ibrahim Kakay, for example, says he will not be able to go back to school unless the state helps him out. “My parents were killed by the junta and our family house razed to the ground,” he told IPS. “I don’t have anyone left to pay my school fees so I would like President Kabbah to declare free education for a year at least.”

Many children are still refugees in neighouring countries, while some teenage girls drifted into prostitution or became pregnant over the past nine months.

Says psychologist Margaret Jones: “The government should find ways of encouraging the growing number of dropouts to return to school and we should devise counselling strategies for them.”