Blood Diamonds (35 page)

Tensions have eased in the intervening years, but they're likely to flare anew. Koidu Holdings has proposed a $150 million expansion that will allow it to tunnel below its current mines and find more diamonds. Improvements in the operation will allow it to ramp up processing in order to churn through 180 tons of rock per hour and produce more than half a million carats of diamonds a year.
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However, the plans require the company to expand its “blast envelope”—a mining euphemism for widening its borders—and as a result, residents of another 660 Koidu households will be displaced and moved to a new resettlement camp. As before, the
company will build them new homes far from where they now live and compensate them for lost crops. Sierra Leonean newspapers often refer to the affected residents as “victims.”

Koidu's relationship with its largest employer is complicated. On one hand, a palpable resentment toward the South African firm is not hard to detect: Living by the light of cell phones and flashlights after the sun goes down simply feels unfair while electricity courses round the clock through the Koidu Holdings compound as it mines diamonds worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Knowing that there is a fully staffed modern medical clinic inside the razor wire breeds contempt when local doctors have to boil their scalpels in pots of well water. On the other hand, everyone wants a job with Koidu Holdings and is envious of anyone who has one.

“You're dealing with a country where there is a 10 to 15 percent literacy rate and very high expectations,” said Paul Ngaba Saquee, the paramount chief of Tankoro Chiefdom, where Koidu Holdings mines are located. “They want everything done by Koidu Holdings and that's not possible.

“Every time they hear a blast, they say, ‘My God, they're taking all of our diamonds,'” he continued with a laugh. “I admit, Koidu Holdings is not good at marketing themselves. The one year they were shut down [while the 2007 shootings were being investigated], the crime rate went up, prostitution went up, divorce rates went up [due to unemployment]. We need to increase economic opportunities. The fact of the matter is, this outfit is good, and I'm speaking not in absolute terms, but in relative terms. We have to create an enabling environment for their business.”

These opinions are not widely held in Koidu, and they've done little for the chief 's popularity. A few months earlier, Saquee was mobbed by a group of students organized to protest at a community
meeting where the company's latest expansion plans were being discussed. Saquee stood in support of company representatives, and as he attempted to leave, angry students surrounded his car and began banging on the hood and doors. Saquee's driver panicked and tried to flee in reverse, colliding with a car belonging to the secretary of the Ministry of Labour and Social Security, badly damaging both vehicles.

Although Saquee was born and raised in Koidu, prior to his election as chief, he worked in the United States as a supervisor for a long-haul trucking company. He returned to Sierra Leone and campaigned for the top job in the chiefdom after his predecessor, his father, died. Being chief is difficult to begin with, but it's much more so when one is such a vocal supporter of the city's most controversial company. Saquee has been called a sellout and worse. He chalks it up as shortsightedness among his people, who have lost everything in the war and prefer immediate returns over long-range vision.

“We've been taken for a ride for a long time,” said Saquee's lieutenant, Dr. Tamba Kpetewama, who summarizes critics' attitudes as “we deserve something in return.”

“We're not saying everything is great,” Kpetewama said, “but certainly it would have been worse without Koidu Holdings. This place was destroyed because of the war, but Koidu Holdings was the first company to come back in. They fixed roads, they fixed bridges, but when you're talking about Koidu Holdings, most people are not very objective. Koidu Holdings is a much better situation. This is one of the best things to ever happen to our country.”

Like other diamond exporters, Koidu Holdings pays a 3 percent federal tax on the value of its diamonds, which in its case amounts to $3 million of governmental revenue. Its mining lease agreement
requires it to set aside 0.25 percent of its gross revenue from exports for use exclusively for community development, another 0.1 percent of gross revenue for agricultural development, and $100,000 annually for scholarships and skills training. It has a local profit-sharing arrangement (though, as of this writing, the company has yet to be profitable) in which 5 percent of annual profits will go to the Tankoro Chiefdom, 3 percent to the Kono District Council, and 2 percent to the Koidu City Council. The company also pays annual surface rent to landowners and local councils.
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“The impact of this project on the local community and economy is huge,” Koidu Holdings CEO Jan Joubert claimed in a company press release. “We are currently one of the largest contributors to government revenues in terms of taxes, royalties and contributions to development programs.”
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Those living in the company's shadow clearly haven't gotten their share of this avowed largesse. That this disparity echoes 1991, when the RUF leveraged simmering resentment into early support for its rebellion, seems to be dangerously absent from most conversations. Dr. Barrie is one of the few people I met who expressed concern about it.

“Honestly, to me it's the same as before the war,” he said. “There's a lot of things, a lot of unemployment, a lot of suffering, while these stones are taken from right here. These are all things that were here before the war. It's all the same.”

Critically, it's no illusion that the game is stacked to benefit industry and its enablers in the government. It's clear to most which people among them benefit most handsomely from the diamonds being mined around them. For those in the Tankoro Chiefdom, they need look no further than their own chief.

When I met Saquee, we spoke in a courtyard inside his walled residential compound, which included two buildings, a concrete
gazebo, and a carport for his Land Rover. Although it's part of the resettlement village, his is the nicest home in the neighborhood—all of it (including the car and driver) provided by the mining company. Moreover, Saquee personally receives a sizable chunk of the surface rent the company pays, $4,350 per year. In a country where the average annual income is $150 to $200, that's a fortune. When the company expands, the payment will double. To many in Saquee's community, it's no mystery why he's such a fan of Koidu Holdings.

“The truth is,” Barrie said earlier, speaking about the government in general, “it's all about corruption.”

 

FRAUD, BRIBERY, NEPOTISM, graft, and outright theft are so rampant among governmental institutions and elected leaders in Sierra Leone that it's dangerously easy to assume they're as intractable in the local culture as palm wine and kola nuts. A confidential report commissioned by President Ernest Bai Koroma shortly after his election in 2007 called corruption in government “the greatest impediment to the country's development.”
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Here's a small sampling: The country's former ombudsman, Francis Gabbidon, was convicted and jailed in 2009 on 168 counts of misappropriation of public funds.
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A WikiLeaks cable hinted that senior members of the military spent a $1.9 million aid grant on flat-screen TVs and hunting rifles.
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The former agriculture minister was convicted of stealing $1.5 million of World Bank development funds; the judge who sentenced him by imposing a mere fine of $250 was convicted in turn for being bribed into giving him a light sentence.
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As former chief justice Desmond Luke has said, “If you have been here for some time, you will know that anybody and everybody is stealing everything.”
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In many countries, corruption in government is often considered a punch line, but in Sierra Leone, it's no laughing matter. In
fact, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, set up in the late 1990s to create a historical record of the causes of the civil war, identified corruption as the number-one factor. Everything else—the influence of Muammar Qaddafi on the RUF's leaders, Charles Taylor's disruptive hand in regional destabilization, weak controls on the diamond industry—was secondary:

The Anti-Corruption Commission, established in Freetown in 2000, was deemed so ineffective that Britain, Sierra Leone's largest foreign donor, ended direct budgetary aid to the country in 2007. In spite of a string of recent investigations that snared some big-name grifters, Sierra Leone still ranks 134th out of 178 countries listed on Transparency International's Corruption Perception Index.
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“When you talk about corruption, I don't know where to begin,” said Sahr F. S. Kaimachiande, the Kono District parliamentary chief. “You call it corruption. I call it petty thievery.”

In one example he gave, he'd arranged for the delivery of seventeen truckloads of mosquito netting to be donated to the hospital from an aid organization. They never made it to the hospital.

“Do you know where I found them?” he asked. “In the market being sold.”

For nearly an hour, while we sat on a second story balcony of a spacious stone house filled with people waiting for an audience with him, Kaimachiande ran through a litany of such examples. As the parliamentary chief, he represented the Kono District in the government in Freetown, much like a member of the United States Congress, and he had many people lobbying for his time and attention. A question I asked spurred his complaints. Someone had mentioned that Kono is the most corrupt of all the country's districts, and I wanted to know his view.

The problem, he said, is that elected leaders in Sierra Leone are more interested in retaining power and accumulating wealth than fighting for change. “It's more perpetual politics than governance,” he said. Representatives are too scared to stand up to the president and speak their minds. Sierra Leoneans have a deep-seated instinct for self-preservation that makes them myopic. Those who lived through so much death and suffering during the war and who still struggle to survive from day to day tend to think only in terms of their immediate needs. Planning for the future doesn't often enter the equation.

Kaimachiande gestured toward the road below us, indicating along its shoulder a long earthen berm from which ragged trenches had been dug. We'd seen many roads in the same condition throughout Koidu, as well as piles of construction material for sidewalks and seemingly abandoned Bobcat bulldozers parked on street corners. Pedestrians trying to get to many businesses had to
cross these trenches over planks and navigate around rusted spikes of rebar left lying about and threatening to impale someone. But we hadn't seen any actual work taking place. That, Kaimachiande explained, was because the project was between contractors. The first three or four had simply collected money and done nothing but tear up the road and leave town. That coup may have solved their immediate needs for money, but they would never be trusted with a road project in Koidu again, something they either didn't consider or didn't care about.

“What am I going to do? Should I drive the bulldozer?” Kaimachiande joked.

I thought it was a good question.

“What
are
you going to do?” I asked. “I mean you're a member of Parliament. Can't you fight for change?”

He looked at me as if I hadn't been listening. Politicians don't agitate, because they don't want to risk losing their jobs. That included him.

“Do you know what they call me in the newspapers in Freetown? The Honorable Chief Rubber Stamp.”

BY THE TIME I got back to Freetown, I was in need of some good news. Ten years had been a long enough time for me to forget just how mentally taxing Sierra Leone could be. After visiting Koidu, I'd drawn a dark scenario for its future. When I was here last, the big question had been whether or not the war was really over. Back then, you could practically still smell the gun smoke in the air, and the injuries—both physical and mental—were still freshly written on everyone I passed. I hoped that the war would truly end, if only
so that Sierra Leoneans could have some breathing room and an opportunity to resume their prewar lives. With enough distance from the horrors of the 1990s, I felt, they would finally have a chance to get on a track leading them away from such nightmares forever. The potential for such a future was obvious to everyone.

Instead, I returned to find that opportunity being squandered. The record needle has skipped all the way back to the late 1980s, and the same tunes are lined up to be played again. Perhaps most frustrating, no one seemed to know how to stop this reversal, or even agreed that it should be stopped. In one ear, a friend of President Koroma's was telling me that the government has made great strides and that increasing investment in Sierra Leone by businesses as varied as diamond companies and international hotels proves the future is promising. And in the other ear, a candidate for the Sierra Leone People's Party who'd fled to Norway during the war said the country is actually worse than it was in 2002, when the country was little more than a rubble pile filled with bones and spent ammunition.