By KABS KANU
Today, Sierra Leone is considered a poverty-stricken country that depends on handouts to survive .
Successive governments have to spend millions of dollars a year to import rice, the nation’s staple food , to stave off starvation.
There was a time in the not-too-distant past when Sierra Leoneans formed lines under rain and burning sun to buy rice that had become so scarce and was being rationed by the government that the wolf of starvation was knocking on every door.
Yet, this was not the story at the turn of the new century in the 1900s. Sierra Leone was producing sufficient food for internal consumption and was even exporting rice to West African countries and other produce to Europe.
I have laid hands on copies of some of the annual colonial reports prepared by the colonial British Government on Sierra Leone. Every year, the colonial government prepared a report on the country , which was a kind of THE-STATE OF THE NATION REPORT on every aspect of life in the country.
Reading the 1909 report , one thing that struck my mind was that Sierra Leone was self-sufficient in food production and was even exporting food to other West African countries and Europe. Sierra Leone exported not only rice, but coffee, cocoa, cacao, kola nuts, benni ,bananas, plantains, oranges ,piassava , palm kernels, palm oil , ginger etc.
The Report notes that “The quantity of rice exported in 1909 amounted to 55,537 bushels….The product is increasing in importance every year . There is a constant demand along the West Coast of Africa for the rice grown in Sierra Leone, and it is generally acknowledged to have more nutritive properties than even American or Indian rice. “ Can anybody imagine this sordid fact ?
Today, we have to import rice from the very America and India.
As we seek to rebuild our country, we have to ask difficult questions about what went wrong in Sierra Leone and why we fell so dramatically from glory—from a major exporter of rice that was considered more nutritious than American and Indian rice , to a country that now slavishly depends on these countries for the very food we used to supply them.
Something definitely went wrong in Sierra Leone ! ! !
