In the past week, I have witnessed with horror and outrage as individuals, businesses, NGOs, Plenipotentiaries, foreign heads of state, and even our own local government ministries make direct donations of cash, cheques, and supplies to the president and vice president for victims of the recent flood and mudslide in Freetown. These donations, amounting to millions of dollars, are made under no concrete instruments of accountability. C’est a dire, these donations are not for t...

From a distance one could hear the sangbes, accompanied by a segula and the soothing voice of a female Mende singer, the sort of griots I grew up hearing in the town squares of my Southeastern villages. But I was faraway from the villages of my childhood, where dust clouds rose from the feet of dancing women, and their waist, adorned with beads, moved like the spinning threads of a kondi gula. I was in the west of Freetown, and for a moment, a conference room in the luxurious R...

We live from tragedy to tragedy, surviving on strings of misery, but all I hear are prayers, even when God has nothing to do with our suffering. The same leaders who fail us are the ones who encourage us to pray, so that while we are conjuring angels and casting demons, they can continue to squander our resources. As long as we continue to believe that our tribulations are connected to a divine punishment for waywardness, we will never be able to remove the beam from our eyes in order to see ...