“The man who asks a question is a fool for a minute; the man who does not ask is a fool for life” (Confucius). If this is true, then I am blessed with the culture and discipline of the “After Action Review” (AAR). The habit of following activities, operations and tasks with questions on what to sustain, develop or reject. All in the name of being at least equally as good and preferably better the next time. This psyche even shaped my opening sentences as I took command of the Bo District Ebola Response Centre in December 2014.
“Let us use lessons learnt while fighting this epidemic to build local disaster response capabilities. Handing over your problems to others is not a sustainable habit”.
Life is about learning. We have things we know, things we think we know but don’t know, things we think we don’t know but do know, and things we don’t know we don’t know.
Lessons are stimulated by events, identified through reflection and confirmed as learnt by conscious decisions to act or not act on them. Fifteen-months with the International Military Advisory and Training Team in Sierra Leone (IMATT SL) threw up many lessons on Sierra Leone and her people. While travels during the posting added to my experiences of the country, the abiding and troubling revelation was of the powerlessness of the people and their institutions in matters of their lives. For me, the satisfaction of bringing difference to people’s lives sat with the awareness and frustration of knowing that working for a British organisation was more of a game changer than the Sierra Leonean in me and my willingness to do something. I still remember, twelve years on, my heartbreak and embarrassment when a young gentleman in Bo Town concluded a lament of his struggles to my colleagues and me with “if I was a foreigner I would have made it by now”. These experiences made me pull people I worked with, first in Port Loko District and later and for longer in Bo District, into the idea that local capacity and capabilities had to be better; much better.
Capacities and capabilities are nothing if they are not relevant. They must bring value to the need to live in peace, safety and security as well as enhance the sustainability of communities and nations. Their relevance is assured through learning and asking, and asking again, is part of the process. Probably what Albert Einstein meant when he said: “The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existence.”
Sadly, the uncomfortably familiar images of last week’s floods in Freetown were followed by responses from authorities that looked tragically and customarily dislocated. The floods of last year, the year before and the year before that too are only the more recent of a now seasonal ritual. I learnt in school a few decades ago that Freetown’s rainfall ranks amongst the heaviest in the world. We saw floods then and have watched their ferocity and powers of destruction stay on upward trajectories. Unfortunately, we have also seen authorities do the “let’s get over this one” without much to suggest “we must do better with the next one”. There seems to be no embarrassment with responses that each time seem like the first time.
I am not an expert on rains, floods or drainage. What I do appreciate is that something needs to get done differently if there is to be real hope of less of the disruption and destruction. There is so much information out there telling us we cannot get rid of trees and break up the soil without consequence. It also shouldn’t take much working out to know that water will find a path downhill. So, in a hilly city like Freetown we must either do sensible interfering with and management of the water’s path or accept water’s aggressive route planning. The whole piece needs to become very joined up and that should include addressing attitudes to the environment.
Sierra Leoneans, especially in Freetown do not seem to do environment beyond their high concrete walls and sturdy steel gates. Why else would the capital be full of “palaces” you can only get to by roads fit for cross-country driving training? It is all about what you have with scant regard for what it does to your environment. In the process trees have been felled and once green hillsides are either hosts to monstrous carbuncles or exposed stretches of dangerously loosened soil. Anyone bothered enough to engage with the hot topics of the Twenty-First Century will know where I am going with this.
Yes, there is so much knowledge out there on these matters and there cannot be excuses for the cluelessness we see played out each year. The learning must be done earnestly and with determination to act. As it is now, questions are not being asked and there are individual and collective trips to Confucius’s fool for life predicament. The refusal to learn must be part responsible, if not wholly so, for Sierra Leone having so much water but lacking an effective plan to get it where needed or a strategy to stop it regularly causing so much damage. What all this adds up to is not a country with a water supply problem or crisis as is often suggested. It is one with a water management crisis that comes out of the absence of strategy that is down to the absence of meaningful learning.
© Othame Kabia