See why Sierra Leone's Freetown is a ticking time bomb

standing at the Western tip of Africa sier Leon is one of the world's most beautiful countries and one of its poorest now 5 years after the end of its brutal Civil War the country's capital city Freetown is facing a new threat Urban migration and uncontrolled development threaten the city's resources and the people themselves the laws are just in the books they're not executed nobody to execute them if they don't Empower these people they will destroy the environment and the environment will destroy the country what are they going to do for water I mean if this Forest is gone that's the end of it so environmental disaster and in a few years we will we will see how that comes to pass after 10 years of Civil War peace has come to sier Leo but for many people living in free Town life remains a daily struggle for survival with vast slums sprawling around the city [Applause] people living in slums lack security of tenure they lack access to basic sanitation basic communities usually overcrowded and in the places they occupy the homes are actually badly put together if you to stretch that definition then it's obvious that over 90% of the population of Freetown live in slums yeah we have come a long way but it's been at so much sacrifice for so little ground ground gain there's no attempt to preserve the old listed buildings there's no attempt to preserve the old planning which went into Freetown it's a dump standing at the foot of the city the crew baslam Bears the brunt of many of freet Town's environmental [Music] problems Freetown has enlarging there are many more people in freet toown so we have a lot more debris there are no more dust beans all over the place as they used to be so this is all caused this dumping into the gutters and all this Fields coming down we can see that it's a good B inside for mosquitoes we start having same signs of urban fasis Onasis there's also malnutrition because of again diarrhea and the under fives malaria warms this area could been cleaned up and you know health education is done we can actually minimize our malaria incidents in the under fives diarrheal disease like choler outbreaks and a lot of all the other infectious [Applause] diseases 5 10 years back these houses were not in this area okay but because they constructed houses shs all around the drainage system and this people you don't have toilet you don't have garage systems so this is not only just a dump inside of ref dump waste matter pces soil everything people all living around the area although lack of Sanitation is a problem in crew Bay much of the waste comes in from outside washed down by heavy rains this this ref is not from the k Community only it is all from fre town so yes we can clean it up but we also have to sensitize the whole Freetown Community not to dump things in the gter because whether you clean ha up it will always be coming down so we have to tr to stop that also you will remove the the the garbage from the G today the next man when you come you meet another one there so if these projects are supported continuously for for youth to to be to be supported provided with incentives then that will to minimize the problem I would recommend that actually the government actually gets some sanitation Engineers some people with the know how to do environmental health cleaning to sort of like actually look at this problem not just for 5 minutes or for the short term but in the call how it could be cleaned up now and how we could have a continuous process whereby it should not happen again of course improving on the sanitation in freet toown area because if the sanitation is improved in Freetown area waste disposal we will not have all this rubbish coming right down into K these here are actually a result of all the field that comes right down from the whole of fre toown area this children are all going to pass through this debris walk through you see them holding onto the field for support and climb too and they all affected does this cause flooding during the rainy season doesn't it cause flooding the major problem in this what you said happens is during the rains the a piece pieces um broken off the huge mass and they actually come down this way and because they they get stuck in the middle here the waters all just rise up and go actually flood all of their houses all on this side and she even said that was it last year last year last year two people were actually killed because of that kind of flooding in this area they actually have to move from their houses during May and June when the rains are very heavy because they know their tendency is for the place to flood so they move up to houses further up maybe with friends relatives and sleep there at [Applause] night the problem of free T slum seems set to continue as more and more people flock to the city from the provinces the legacy of the early owned Civil War means many people see the city as a safe haven normally in most developing countries people are moving from the rural areas into the cities and so on but the case of freet town what uh accelerated the process for us actually the War around the hills of freet town you see how populated those places are those places were not as populated as before my feeling is roughly about 2 million people in the free town area at least 2 million people I think the entire building code has been blatantly ignored the entire building code nobody has regard to them Financial attraction seems to outweigh any modicum of sensibleness you know people doing things properly people wanted to sell the land at any cost with total disregard to whether there was a master plan or or not for instance nobody is supposed to build on the beach but if you go down lumely Beach you will find that there are number of buildings that are you know whether they're temporary or not are been put on the beach there's obvious environmental problems associated with that in the rush to grab land for building it is Freetown Hills that have been most seriously affected this area was actually being advised to be left under its um natural um land use when the American Embassy came to establish um their construction here we had a massive Rush of people who wanted um to actually do construction here and that of course has been very indiscriminate no road construction no other service provided when you ask the officials nobody um seems to know the trend of what is happening now um nobody seems to know um who is authorizing all of these um sale of land and construction that is going on there were vast lands that were left as um reserves as catchment areas and water catchment areas and so on so all these people saw was land that we can leave it's not about um Forest there or um catchment there it's nothing like that it's about where can I live the character of the site of leester peak has completely changed um it is almost totally uh without vegetation almost the stone the stone outcrop of the hill is been broken to provide Aggregates for building construction and so you have an eroded denuded site some of the rocks will will obviously uh slide down the mountain there might be land SLP there is now a mishmash of development going on Everybody Needs water everybody has septic tanks you know and so on and how these things are going to work within that type of development which is not planned it's hard to say whatever was planned for freet toown did not take into account the kind of population we have now and that's why we have problems with all the Serv services in this country all the utilities you know they can't cope without proper protection sier Leon's environment is the first victim of this building boom with no effective sewage system in the Hills the city's groundwater becomes polluted the position of landfills close to the Sea also poses a threat to the environment presently in fown we have two D sites one at Kinto and the other at Granville Brook for the East those sites are wrongly located they are located within the city limits they are located in uh water bodies close to the Sea and uh as a result of that you would have a lot of contamination of the estares which are very sensitive [Music] areas well over the years we have been monitoring the creek and what we have noticed over the last 10 years or more is that the bad diversity has actually dropped Birds depend on the fish and the fish breed in those mangoes and what has actually impacted on bases is generally the human activities because of the deforestation in the mountain region you know when there's downpour of rain you have all these debris coming down so siltation as also called you also have building of of settlements people reclaim land to build settlements and that has impacted greatly on the ecology apart from the fact that they deposit a lot of rubbish um they also deposit seage you know and these things do impact ecology a lot of people depend on the fish they depend on the and lobsters that they they get from this place right if that decline further obviously that would impact on the economy of the people in the area over I see people and they throw rubbish over dirty you see people getx so all the one area so that that mean to say feel the effect of that go but you go for so government will provide that but loal commity andle yes but some people for light fire because of the pleas there needs to be a system of ensuring that human excretor sea wage in general the deposit deposition of of rubbish should be controlled government have very do have very good policies but they are not being implemented and I think government should look at those policies refu them in the current phase of the problems we are having at the creek and then see what they can do the thing is that if you stop it now then you'll be able to see future development in terms of restoring the Ecology of the creek but if you don't then the situation will deteriorate further pollution and soil runoff are not the only dangers Free's Coastal environment faces along the city's beaches the need for materials to fuel the building boom has led many unemployed people to take up sand mining destroying ecosystems and damaging water from properties but perhaps the most dangerous side effect of freet Tan's growth can be found back in the city's Hills yeah so we've been here for almost 11 years now um The Sanctuary was founded in 1995 and um this is where it all started this is the the original place where the whole thing started I think as you know with the with the war situation we had everything stopped for many many years so I think uh selonian uh having this confidence to build back and you know they have this confidence to do something before everybody was worried whether it's worth investing here anything like that so I think this suddenly there is this thirst everyone wants to build people even want to come back to selion those who left um so there is a huge um demand for land if you're going to allow people to build all the way up to the forest boundary and you don't monitor these Forest because the Forestry um is very weak on the ground they're very thin in terms of personal on the ground so they won't be able to monitor so that is going to be a huge problem chimpanzees are considered to be highly endangered selun has lost most of its population over the years because as we continue to destroy the habitats we basically destroying the wildlife in it saruna has lost more or less 97 98% of its Forest C it's only secondary Forest scattered in here and there maybe a very small portion of a primary Forest around the goola area apart from that there's nothing left there all these people all these development you see you know there is Need for fuelwood and energy and things like that and in a country like this we don't have power most of the time most of this destruction is not done by the immediate village community sometimes you have people coming from far away and they have no regard they just destroy everything and busloads of charcoal or firewood goes away from the area that is where the problem is the local community I think we have educated them enough they're not doing it on a commercial basis if they're doing it for their own use I don't think nothing anything is wrong with that I think because that's how they have lived all you know from their forefather's time so I don't think we have a problem with that it's only when you commercialize it then it's a problem this is also a catchment area I mean it's no Point opening up all these areas all the way up to Regent opening it for development what are they going to do for water I mean if this Forest is gone that's the end of it I mean there is no absolutely no water there there's no way Guma water company can pump water from River I mean from mile 13 to leester Peak here it's not going to happen without trees rainwater drains away causing soil erosion siltation along the coast and flooding in areas such as crew Bay but forests also form part of the water cycle and ensure good rainfall without them water simply drains away into the sea lying in the Hills above the city the gumma Dam supplies free town with drinking water relying on the surrounding Forest to keep it full with a growing population to supply and the forest getting smaller the danger to the city's inhabitants is growing the dam the capacity that was set up in the ' 50s when it was completed was to service at least 300,000 people in the city today we are talking about a population in free time of about 1.9 million the capacity of Kuma has been stretched it is the same down that was constructed in the 50s and we are still operating on right now at my own house I don't have water and haven't had for about a month not a drop and this you know other people themselves in the area come in here and just cut the PIP and once they finish getting the water they want they just walk they don't have water running water in their own compounds probably so they just decide to come down here and cut these pipes we have limited Supply and yet still people are in the habit of interfering with our system we have used all the different methods of sensitization we've gone to the radio we've had Outreach programs wherein we go into into some of these communities this is treated water which is good for you take care of it you see a pipe wasting report to so and so number of so and so address people still do it with impunity what we are experiencing now there is a change in the what we call the weather pattern in this country free time used to have 6 months of rainfall intensive rainfall during the rainy season and we have 6 months of dry season today that has changed we have more of dry season than the rainy season we have at least at most three four to four months of rainy season in this country all those small streams that cause a runoff onto the actual Reservoir the now they all cease to exist they dry up so no water runs down the hills into the reservoir the lake these uh streams were sourced from the forest area and when you look at the frean peninsula today most of the forest covers have been cleared off in 200 2006 a combination of increased demand for water and destruction of the forest cover led to crisis in free town as the rains came late and the Guma Dam fell to its lowest level since records began the government was forced to ration supplies leaving the city's poorest residents struggling for access to drinking water as the city grows and expansion continues this situation seems certain to get worse but the country as a whole is rich in resources and despite its crowded Capital does not have a high population with proper management and awareness it might yet be possible to reverse the damage being done further migration to free toown is simply not not sustainable this country is has a wealth in every single District so what we have to do is to help people tap into that wealth help to ensure that in every single District you have the means available uh that you have basic Sal soural services available but which makes it very attractive to people to go living back to the rural areas and to make a decent living sier Leon also boasts incredible tourist potential with pristine beaches wildlife and scenery with proper management these resources could create jobs while encouraging people to protect the environment they used to come to number two they used to come to to go down to Turtle islands all over the beaches they used to come and not even touch free Town directly to airport airport to to or to laaka or to St Michael Lodge or all these were done by the French people all by the French the French are more into tourism than anybody else we know we have enough to offer but we do need a help to promote it and like put it to a standard and most of all we need a good management for it lying off the coast of Freetown the Banana Island show how it may be possible to improve people's livelihoods without damaging the environment when I first came the idea was a lot of excitement you know that someone has come to help them to develop the area and so they offered to cut down all the trees and burn the area so that I'd have a nice large empty area on which to build something then I tried to explain what we wanted to do was to preserve as much of the environment as possible slowly I think they understood this well by E ecotourism or ecotourism what we mean is uh a way of developing a place to make it attractive to paying tourists which enhances the environment and doesn't destroy it I chose this approach because I think it's the most developmentally sound and it will lead to both protection of the environment and uh economic sustainability unlike many other development initiatives Gary Walker's project draws its support and funding from the people themselves the majority of the investors are sier leonian uh they're in the UK for the most part so far we've created 16 full-time jobs at the guest house people also benefit because guests come they want to rent paddle canoes and they go out with our local fishermen for the day and pay them to so instead of having to fish all day and maybe make 5 or 10,000 Leons they can make 30 or 40,000 Leons by taking guests out and the guests are doing the fishing if the people of the island do not take ownership of this kind of facility and feel like they own it and are responsible for it when I'm gone it will not be maintained or managed and this is a chance to make something that really will last for Generations not just for a few years so we are dealing with a delicate problem of how do you bring relatively affluent individuals into an area of enormous poverty and allow those individuals to generate income and life livelihoods for local people without creating more problems than they solved I see this as an example of sustainable rural growth in a very impoverished country without damaging the environment that could be replicated around the country I think the country has enormous tourist potential the physical beauty of the country is unrivaled in West Africa I think and I think anyone coming here would agree the challenges facing frean are immense but with the country finally at peace there are also new opportunities to balance increased Prosperity with a sustainable future to manage the country's growth in a way that does not destroy the environment and jeopardize its people with these goals in sight there may yet be a chance to restore the balance and make free time the city its people deserve morning [Music]

Channel: Journeyman Pictures

Views: 311,295

Keywords: freetown, sierra, leone, capital, people, journeyman, pictures, news, documentary, current affairs, journeyman pictures, 4292, Lost Freetown

Id: dvTmqnVpSng

Length: 28min 9sec (1689 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 04 2013