Kaita (r) is one of thousands of Sierra Leonean children who have ended up homeless. According to a 2010 survey it is estimated that there are as many as 2,500 street children in Freetown alone. Credit: Tommy Trenchard/IPS

By Tommy Trenchard
FREETOWN , Jun 7 2013 (IPS)

On a street corner in downtown Freetown, Sierra Leone’s capital city, 12-year-old Kaita sits with a friend on a peeling steel railing watching the headlights of motorbikes cruising through the otherwise silent streets. It is after midnight, and motionless human forms lie curled up in doorways or stretched out on pavements nearby. For Kaita, these streets are home, and have been for almost six years.

Kaita is one of thousands of Sierra Leonean children who have ended up homeless after being given away by their parents on false promises of education.

Joice Kamara is the deputy director of children’s affairs at the Ministry of Social Welfare, Gender and Children’s Affairs – until last year the focal point for the government’s anti-trafficking taskforce.

“Some of them (child traffickers) are relatives, some are strangers, some are friends – they go to the villages and they ask people to give them their children. They promise to give them the best education in the city,” she tells IPS.

Despite making significant progress since the end of an 11-year civil war in 2002, this West African nation remains one of the world’s least developed countries, with many rural families simply unable to effectively care for and educate all of their children.“Child protection is simply not a priority of the government.” -- Lothar Wagner

“Unfortunately when these children are brought to the cities, instead of (the child traffickers) fulfilling their promise to educate them … they engage them in child labour, some are used as sex-slaves, some are even used for rituals,” says Kamara.

Kaita’s uncle was looking after him, but rather than sending him to school the uncle neglected him and denied him food, ultimately prompting Kaita to run away. “It’s cold,” he says of his new life on the streets. “And all I get to eat is leftovers.”

Lothar Wagner is the head of Don Bosco Fambul, an NGO dealing with homeless children in Sierra Leone. “The reason that they (children) are on the streets is human trafficking,” he tells IPS. “After a certain amount of mistreatment many feel they have no option but to run away.”

According to a 2010 survey it is estimated that there are as many as 2,500 children sleeping rough every night in Freetown alone, though other estimates put the figure significantly higher.

Mohammed, 14, is one of them. He has been living on the streets since he was 12 – his only possessions a tattered Chelsea football kit, a thin sheet of cardboard to sleep on, and a wicker basket for clearing rubbish from the street, which earns him enough money to buy a little food.

All the children who spoke to IPS talked of the fear of abuse, to which they are very vulnerable. Crimes against street children are rarely investigated and are often allegedly committed by the police themselves.

“The police are not there to protect the children,” says Wagner. “They are there to exploit them.”

The medical report from one street child who was arrested, and claimed police beat him while in jail, details a series of arm wounds allegedly inflicted with batons and an electric probe.

A police spokesman denied the allegations. “It is absolutely false,” he tells IPS over the phone. “A deliberate attempt to smear the reputation of the Sierra Leone police. The station does not usually even have electricity, so how can we electrocute him?”

A few NGOs are taking action to reduce the prevalence of trafficking in Sierra Leone, and to reunite the victims with their families.

The Faith Alliance Against Slavery and Trafficking (FAAST) has been raising awareness about the problem, as well helping to integrate trafficking issues into police training programmes. “All the recruits should now be getting training on what trafficking is, and how to deal with it,” says Janet Nickel, the organisation’s country director. FAAST also recently started a shelter for trafficked children.

Similarly, Don Bosco Fambul runs various shelters and programmes to support homeless children. “Child protection is simply not a priority of the government,” says Wagner, adding that it has neither the capacity nor the funding to protect children.

Back at the Ministry of Social Welfare, Gender and Children’s Affairs in Freetown, Kamara disagrees. She highlights some of the government’s successes in tackling the problem, including the conviction of 13 traffickers since 2005, who received sentences of up to 22 years. “The government is really helping, and working hard to eliminate trafficking in Sierra Leone” she says.

A 2012 report by the United States Department of State concluded that while the government is trying its best it is still not yet fulfilling all its anti-trafficking responsibilities.

A solitary coconut lies on the fine sand of Tokeh Beach, Sierra Leone, about 20km south of Freetown, just over half way down the Freetown Peninsula. The area is home to a small fishing community. Tommy Trenchard/IPS

By Tommy Trenchard
FREETOWN, Mar 8 2013 (IPS)

On the fourth floor of a new office block in western Freetown, Cecil Williams sits beneath posters of idyllic tropical landscapes as he discusses the many natural attractions that once brought tourists flocking to the small West African nation of Sierra Leone.

“Very few countries have the mountains dropping down to the sea, with unspoilt beautiful beaches,” he tells IPS. “Sierra Leone is just waiting to be explored.”

Williams is the head of the National Tourist Board, and the man tasked with reviving an industry that used to provide much needed jobs and revenue to Sierra Leone. In other circumstances, his job should not have been difficult – the country boasts a coastline unrivalled in West Africa, with dazzling sandy-white beaches.

Indeed, such is the beauty of one beach near Freetown that before the war it was featured as the backdrop to an advertisement for Bounty chocolate bars, offering the consumer “a taste of paradise”. Beaches line much of the country’s 360 kilometres of Atlantic coastline, the majority of them strangers to tourism.

But unlike Ghana or the Gambia which have managed to cultivate thriving tourism industries – over 800,000 tourists visited Ghana in 2009, according to the latest World Bank figures – on Sierra Leone’s unspoilt beaches you are likely to be the only tourist.

Eleven years after the end of Sierra Leone’s civil war, which lasted from 1991 to 2002, the country is fighting a new battle – to change its image in the eyes of potential tourists in Europe and America who tend to associate it more with child soldiers and blood diamonds than they do with sunshine and beaches.

Ibrahim Kargbo, a former minister of information and current special advisor to President Ernest Bai Koroma, acknowledges the problem. “We have always said that we need to rebrand the country,” he tells IPS. Kargbo explains that the ministries of tourism, foreign affairs and information are the core of the extensive rebranding exercise, “so that people can know what is happening here and be happy to come to the country.”

The tourist board is also heavily involved in trying to alter perceptions of Sierra Leone, but Williams says a lack of funds is imposing limits on the effectiveness of the project. “We have to market Sierra Leone in a more aggressive manner, but it takes money,” he explains.

The board is currently restricted to what it terms “soft marketing” – attending international travel fairs, producing brochures, posters and short videos, and inviting foreign journalists to come and see the country for themselves.

But after peaceful elections last November, deemed to be largely free and fair by observers, there is a feeling that Sierra Leone is ready to put its troubled past behind it, and finally shed the violent image that has kept visitors at bay for so long. Freetown now feels no less safe for a European than parts of London.

At his inauguration in February, Koroma, embarking on a second five-year term in office, addressed an audience in the national stadium about the potential for tourism in Sierra Leone: “We have a country with beautiful landscapes…our beaches are unsurpassed…the physical beauty of our hills is breath-taking, and our land is home to rare species of animals and birds.”

Thomas Armitt, founder of travel company West Africa Discovery, is also confident that a tourism revival is imminent. “I’m sure international tourists will start arriving in the next year or two,” he tells IPS. “I first came here in 2011…and I feel in the air that things are changing here.”

Armitt, who is from the United Kingdom, is set to launch a new company in Sierra Leone, offering off-the-beaten-track tours with a focus on sustainability and community living. He sees West Africa as “the last frontier of tourism.”

“People are looking for new destinations,” he explains. “And this is, for me, an ideal destination which can’t be kept a secret for much longer.”

He does, however, acknowledge that challenges remain in doing business in Sierra Leone. “You have to get used to a whole new business culture, so we are expecting a slow start,” he says, though he sees enormous long-term potential.

Sierra Leone is also still affected by a fundamental lack of tourist infrastructure. Simply getting from the airport, which is situated on one side of a wide estuary, to a Freetown hotel usually requires a lengthy journey over land and water. Hotels are generally expensive for the mediocre service they provide, and road transportation can be tricky.

But here too, change is in the air. Against the backdrop of an economic boom driven by the mining sector, new roads are being built across the country, as well as a new and more accessible airport. A school for workers in the tourist industry is also being revamped, in a bid to improve standards of service.

“Tourism facilities are being constructed in every district,” the president’s spokesperson, Unisa Sesay, tells IPS, adding that there are also improvements in telecommunications, internet connections and accommodation. He says the government is also working on creating an “enabling environment” for private sector investors in the tourist industry.

The Radisson and the Hilton are just two of the hotel chains due to start operating in Freetown in the next two years, while at least two cruise liners have also added Freetown to their itineraries.

Sinneh Bangura is a fisherman living in the village of John Obey on the Freetown Peninsula. He too is keen to see more visitors coming to Sierra Leone. “It would be good for everyone. It could bring development to our community,” he says.

Youth unemployment stands at over 60 percent in Sierra Leone, and it is hoped that a revival of the tourism industry could bring much-needed jobs to coastal communities.

Williams also sees enormous potential in the tourist industry, particularly at the top end and in eco-tourism, as a driver of development in Sierra Leone.

“In five to 10 years’ time tourism will be the number one sector….the number one industry in terms of revenue, in terms of benefits,” he tells IPS, arguing that ultimately it is Sierra Leoneans themselves who are the key – “because despite all we’ve been through, this is a country visitors can come to and feel at home.”

Mabinti displays a papaya in the village of Makonkonde. Like many farmers in rural Sierra Leone, she struggles to get her fruit to the market. Credit: Tommy Trenchard/IPS

By Tommy Trenchard
FREETOWN , Jan 31 2013 (IPS)

In the village of Makonkonde in western Sierra Leone, Mabinti, who no longer knows her age, sits on a low wooden stool in the dappled shade of several palm trees. She clutches a solitary papaya fruit in hands toughened by a lifetime of hard manual work.

Small-scale farming is not an easy way to make a living in rural Sierra Leone. Mabinti’s only real chance of selling her papaya is by waiting for customers travelling along the sandy track running through town, which sees just one or two motorbikes per hour.

The alternative – transporting the fruit by bike to the nearby town of Waterloo – would cost more than Mabinti would receive from the sale.

Like many others in this West African nation’s underdeveloped fruit industry, she has suffered from the lack of an accessible and profitable market for her papayas. The domestic market for Sierra Leone’s fruits has its limits. It offers very low prices for some products, such as mangoes, and can be effectively inaccessible to growers based far from the larger urban centres.

In these conditions, much of the country’s fruit harvest has traditionally gone to waste, particularly in rural areas, and the sector continues to bear the hallmarks of subsistence, rather than commercial production, with most fruit consumed locally.

“Over the past years a lot of our fruits have perished,” Samuel Serry, a spokesman at the Ministry of Agriculture, tells IPS. “Most of them have just got rotten in the rainy season.”

The ministry, in conjunction with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), has been undertaking efforts to commercialise farming in Sierra Leone by improving access to markets, promoting the addition of value to the country’s raw products and providing support to socially responsible investors.

The FAO is also encouraging the formation of farming collectives, each consisting of around 35 farmers, and is establishing a series of Agri-Business Centres (ABCs) across the country, each of which will be used by three or four collectives.

This system, according to the organisation’s representative of programmes Joseph Brima, is hoped to improve output, provide access to processing equipment and storage facilities, and facilitate the passage of goods to market.

But the FAO, like its partners at the ministry, is also trying to attract investors capable of processing and adding value to Sierra Leone’s crops, and in doing so providing a lucrative new market for local farmers.

One such company is Africa Felix Juice, a manufacturer of Fairtrade tropical fruit juice and concentrate for export to Europe. Africa Felix Juice represents a new business model that offers Sierra Leonean farmers a guaranteed market and a fair price for their fruit.

What makes Africa Felix Juice unique, says its Italian founder and CEO Claudio Scotto, is that it is the first company in Sierra Leone exporting a manufactured product to Europe since the country’s 10-year civil war ended in 2002.

Like many African nations, Sierra Leone has traditionally exported raw materials including rutile, iron ore, and most famously, rough diamonds.

By turning fruit into concentrate at a small factory in the village of Newton, near the capital Freetown, Africa Felix Juice adds value to its product, employs 45 permanent staff and can afford to offer higher prices to the 2,000 mango farmers whose fruit they buy.

“It was very easy to persuade the farmers to sell me mangoes, as they were going rotten all the time,” says Scotto, who traces the origin of the business to meeting his Sierra Leonean wife.

Even in places where a market already existed, because Africa Felix Juice is Fairtrade certified they pay well over the normal price for produce – up to three times as much in the case of rural mango producers. In turn they encourage increased production.

In the village of Garahun, local chief Momodou Kamara is thinking of planting more mango trees after the village started selling the fruit to Africa Felix Juice. He explains that the villagers used to have to transport their mangoes to Waterloo, where they would sell them for 500 Leones (10 cents) per dozen. Now they receive more than three times that. “There is profit in it now,” he says.

Scotto blames the legacy of the civil war for the slow growth of agribusiness in the last decade. “The absence of peace can just destroy the whole platform for business,” he says, citing a lingering lack of trust as an obstacle to successful business enterprise.

But Sierra Leone has come a long way since 2002. After a peaceful presidential election last November in which the incumbent President Ernest Bai Koroma won a second term in office, there is a powerful sense that the country is now fully open for business.

Abdullah F. Koroma, who stopped growing pineapples after rebels vandalised his irrigation system during the war, this year restarted production on his farm in the village of Mobangba. “The country has not been stable (until now),” he tells IPS.

The story of Sierra Leone’s fruit industry is one of vast – but still largely unrealised – potential. Back at the ministry, Serry sees the agricultural sector as a key component of Sierra Leone’s future economic development.

While much attention is paid to recent large-scale mining operations in the country, agriculture, says Serry, contributes 45 percent of the country’s GDP and employs over 3.5 million people, out of a total population of less than six million.

“There is a very great potential in the agricultural sector. Because diamonds are not forever, but the land will always stay.”

Residents of the country’s sprawling, seaside capital, Freetown, often prefer to administer summary justice than to rely on an inefficient judicial system. Credit: Tommy Trenchard/IPS

By Tommy Trenchard
FREETOWN, Jan 16 2013 (IPS)

On a steamy, starless night in Sierra Leone’s capital, Freetown, a teenager runs desperately down a potholed street before being violently brought to the ground by a bystander. As word spreads that a thief has been caught, young men come running from all directions.

Within a minute the narrow street is packed, and the boy, still protesting his innocence, receives the first of a hail of blows that will continue unabated for about forty minutes.

With sticks, bricks and rocks picked up from the dusty roadside the assailants beat, stamp on and slash at the prone figure in the dirt. “We are going to kill him,” says one man excitedly, repeatedly swinging a heavy stick into the boy’s head and neck. Blood pours from a large gash in his thigh, and he clutches his head in pain.

Eventually, stripped naked and barely able to stand, the traumatised youth is ejected by the mob, and left to his fate. “That one will die during the night,” says one man. “He is a thief,” he continued by way of explanation, “so he is a very bad man.”

Vigilante justice is rife in this West African country of nearly six million people, where an inefficient judicial system, widespread lack of trust in the police, and the legacy of self-defence groups operating during the country’s long civil war are causing civilians to take justice into their own hands.

Ten years after the end of its civil war, Sierra Leone is a peaceful country. Recent presidential elections were characterised by massive anti-violence campaigns and passed smoothly. But while general violence is widely condemned, the spontaneous beating of alleged petty criminals attracts little criticism.

Ibrahim Tommy, executive director of the Centre of Accountability and the Rule of Law (CARL), a legal NGO operating out of Freetown, links vigilantism directly to the failings of Sierra Leone’s judicial system, which struggles to hold petty criminals to account.

“What the public does is to respond to the weaknesses in the justice system, the lack of capacity…to provide justice in a reasonable period of time,” Tommy tells IPS. “So what they do is to beat the person up. As long as someone has actually had enough time and opportunity to beat up the suspect, he or she feels satisfied.”

“If we hand him over to the police, he will just be back here the next day,” says one man, during the beating of a teenager caught stealing a mobile phone.

Tommy highlights in particular the crippling delays that lead to low witness participation in court cases. “What happens is somebody is arrested, taken to the police station…the person is arraigned, but nobody comes up to testify. At that point the magistrate is left with no option but to discharge…To sustain a conviction you need witnesses.”

“People in this country do not go to the courts to serve as witnesses,” agrees Ibrahim Samura, assistant superintendent of the Sierra Leone Police.

Many are reluctant to waste their time in cases hit by massive delays. Others worry that by providing evidence they are putting themselves at risk of retribution. Even the victims themselves do not turn up in court, Samura tells IPS.

But according to Tommy, the lack of witness participation is only one of the factors behind the low conviction rate. He alleges that some criminals manage to make deals with police officers to avoid facing charges. “Most times they are detained at the police cells, and after a day or two, after the public forgets about it, they are released back into society.”

He suggests that the culture of vigilantism and “street justice” has its roots in Sierra Leone’s decade-long civil war, when civil defence groups rose up in response to the failure of the military to tackle the threat posed by the Revolutionary United Front rebels.

“Vigilantism really started in earnest during the war,” he says. “This is when members of the public lost faith in the defence forces and thought that they needed to do something about their own safety and security, so they tried to fill in the void that was left by the disgraceful conduct of military officers.”

Nameless victims in mass graves

Today vigilante violence is a common occurrence in Freetown. At the city’s main hospital, nurse Dura Kamara is used to treating victims of street justice. “We get them coming in at least once or twice a week,” he explains. “They are in a very serious condition. People throw acid on them, beat them up, break their bones, use machetes on them.”

But many never make it as far as the hospital. At the city morgue, attendant Alhaji Kanjeh sits in a ramshackle office decorated with withered human limbs in dusty glass cases. “It is very common, people who are caught stealing are beaten to death,” he tells IPS.

He displays a photo of a teenager who was killed by a mob after an event at the national stadium. He had tried to rob a passing motorist and had paid with his life. “We never knew his name,” says Kanjeh. Victims of vigilante justice brought in to the morgue have been as young as 15.

Thieves who die at the hands of vigilante mobs are rarely claimed or identified by relatives, who are wary of the stigma attached to criminality. “When the police come here with the body, we will enter it as ‘unknown’,” Kanjeh says. When relatives fail to turn up, the cadavers are taken away and buried anonymously in mass graves.

Owizz Koroma, the government’s chief forensic pathologist, says mob justice has become routine. He says a recent increase in cases of vigilante-justice deaths is posing challenges for his team, which is tasked with burying the bodies.

“I am really under enormous pressure as those things are not budgeted for … the burials and the fuel. It sounds disturbing but that’s what happens.”

“Mob violence is a cause of concern,” added assistant superintendent Samura. “People do not appreciate the rights of criminals.” He said the police are taking the issue seriously, and are doing their best to ensure the perpetrators are brought to justice.

They are also striving to restore faith in the justice system’s ability to hold petty criminals to account, in an attempt to dissuade the public from taking matters into their own hands. “The lack of trust (in the police and judiciary) is unfortunate,” he says.

The solution, he argues, lies in large-scale public ‘sensitisation’. “People do not know their civic responsibilities…We need to engage and educate the people,” he tells IPS.

He says the police still rely on the public to apprehend criminals, but rather than administering spontaneous mob justice, they should hand suspects over to face trial, and fulfil their civic duty by testifying in court.

But until faith in state institutions is restored, petty criminals will continue to face the unforgiving justice of the street, many ending their days as nameless victims in mass graves.

A youth smokes diamba (marijuana) at a gang base in Sierra Leone’s capital Freetown. Credit: Tommy Trenchard/IPS

By Tommy Trenchard
FREETOWN, Jan 9 2013 (IPS)

The air is heavy with the smell of marijuana as Gibrilla (23) expertly rolls a large joint at the Members of Blood (M.O.B) gang base in a poor neighbourhood of Sierra Leone’s capital, Freetown.

He is part of a generation of young people faced with a chronic shortage of jobs, many of whom have turned to routine drug use as a way to pass the time and deal with the stresses of life in what is still one of the poorest countries in the world.

“Most of the young guys smoke diamba (marijuana) here,” says Gibrilla, gesturing towards the slum neighbourhood of Susan’s Bay. He says he has been smoking since he was 11, and usually smokes about 15 joints every day. “I have my first one at about five o’clock in the morning when I wake up,” he told IPS. “It makes me feel good.”

Sierra Leone’s high unemployment rate is fuelling a culture of drug use among the country’s urban youth. Experts say the trend is responsible for acts of violent crime, while medical practitioners are concerned about serious health repercussions for long-term users, which the country is poorly equipped to address.

In another part of the city, Patrick, who estimates his age as “twenty-something”, swigs from a plastic sachet of gin as he talks of his relationship with drugs.

“I use cocaine, marijuana, brown-brown (heroin) and liquor,” he told IPS. “I did not choose to live like this. I was living the street life…sometimes I did not even have somewhere to sleep. I had nothing.”

Patrick now feels he needs drugs and alcohol just to get through the day. “I feel hopeless when I don’t have them,” he explains.

His friend Alimu, heavily tattooed, with the initials of his gang shaved into his hair, speaks of a similar dependence. “I don’t want to stop,” he says. “I need it now.”

Alimu is not sure how much he takes every day, only that he spends all the money he can get on drugs and alcohol.

Assistant Superintendent of the Sierra Leone Police Force, Ibrahim Samura, says he is alarmed by the “spate of drug abuse and addiction”.

“It is worse than before…amphetamines, cannabis and heroin are all a problem,” he says, adding that cannabis is the most widely available. “Cannabis is now grown in almost every district. In some places in the north it is even used as a currency for barter.”

Samura says that there was a large increase in drug use and addiction during and after the country’s eleven-year civil war. “People used drugs to deal with the stress of war,” he explains.

Dr. Edward Nahim at his clinic in central Freetown. Credit: Tommy Trenchard/IPS

Dr. Edward Nahim has been working on drug and mental health issues in Sierra Leone for over 40 years. He agrees that the problem is, to some extent, linked to the civil war. “The conflict itself might be a contributing factor, because once you’ve learnt bad habits it becomes difficult (to stop).”

But he also says that drug addiction in Sierra Leone is tied to a lack of job opportunities. “It is more common amongst the unemployed vagrants, because they don’t have any work to do. (They) are the ones who spend most of their time in the…drug abuse bases or ghettos,” he says.

Impoverished and traumatised youth even use drugs just to “kill boredom”, Samura says.

Youth unemployment in Sierra Leone stands at a staggering 70 percent, according to the World Bank, and many drug users in Freetown say that if the government provides jobs for them, they will no longer feel the need to use drugs and alcohol.

“If I have a job I will stop smoking,” says Gibrilla. “But when I don’t go to work in the morning I just sit down and smoke diamba.”

Ibrahim Jones, a Susan’s Bay resident sporting a ‘Fight Against Drugs’ wristband, also thinks reducing unemployment is crucial to addressing drug use. “People smoke because there are no jobs,” he confirmed.

Samura says he is concerned about the relationship between illegal drugs and violent crime. He sees drug use as closely related to an increase in “gangsterism” in Sierra Leone.

“There are over 250 criminal gangs in this country,” he told IPS, displaying a list with names such as ‘Gang Killers’, ‘Blood Drain’, ‘Hisbola’ and ‘Da Elusive Thugs’.

He believes drug use “spurs them to behave abnormally and do things they wouldn’t do in their right senses.” On drugs, these young people “have the guts to kill, they’ll be brave (enough) to stab.”

The combination of high-grade cannabis and other drugs, together with cheap but potent local liquor, is also having severe mental health repercussions for long-term users.

“Drug abuse is a big problem in psychiatry in Sierra Leone today,” says Nahim, who runs a small mental health clinic in Freetown. He says around 80 percent of his patients, all of whom are between the ages of 10 and 35 years, are suffering from drug-induced psychotic disorders.

“By the time they get to about 40 years they are dead from the physical and psychological complications of these drugs,” he admits.

He adds that the problem is worst with young men, “but the girls are catching up now”.

Sierra Leone lacks the means to effectively treat such victims of drug and alcohol-induced psychosis. Nahim uses what he calls the “cold-turkey method” to treat addicts, physically restraining them and administering “very strong tranquilising drugs” for sedation. “Then after ten days it’s over,” he says.

But relapse rates are high. After treatment there are few safeguards to prevent patients slipping back into drug use.

City of Rest Rehabilitation Centre  is one of only a handful of establishments catering to drug users and the mentally ill on a longer-term basis. More than half of its 40 inpatients are suffering from drug-related problems.

It is run by Pastor Morie Ngobeh, who uses religion and counselling to treat individuals with drug-induced mental conditions. “We rely on prayer, for God to renew their minds,” he says.

Abdulai Bah’s family admitted him to City of Rest to deal with his chronic alcoholism. It is the second time he has been a patient there, but he feels that with a job waiting for him he will be able to stay off alcohol when he leaves in January.

“Some of my relatives promised to help me start my own business. If I start to get myself engaged, I will not drink alcohol again,” he says with conviction.

(END)

By Tommy Trenchard
KOIDU, Sierra Leone, Dec 11 2012 (IPS)