17 October 2012 at 01:33
3 month ago I moved to Sierra
Leone to work for a GSM operator. This desperately poor country is still
recovering from the bloody civil war that took place in the 1990s. I
was initially without private transport, and soon learned to cut about
the muggy capital Freetown on the back of motorbike taxis called
"Okadas"..
After assign me a car I found that acquiring a vehicle in Sierra Leone would prove challenging. It is nearly impossible to conduct business transactions in an environment without trust. The task introduced me to areas of the beleaguered state that I had come to cover; a country that only recently lifted itself from last place on the UN human-development index. Gross National Income per capita in Sierra Leone stands at $340. One in eight women here will die in childbirth.
I knew I needed a four-wheel drive. For my work I regularly should travel to the extremities of this diamond-shaped and diamond-rich little country. Beyond the regional capitals, linked to Freetown by ribbons of aid-project asphalt, the roads are medieval. Even Freetown is a city of yawning potholes, unfenced storm drains and alarming plank drawbridges.
In these conditions the thinking man’s car is a Land Rover. Despite its recent embarrassments and recalls, the British firm makes machines that can withstand not only Africa’s brutal roads but also the depredations of the continent’s mechanics. Bush-car doctors are men of extraordinary ingenuity (I soon discovered). They get vehicles moving with wire, string, tape and mysteriously powerful compote of superglue and wood ash. But in the long term, such tinkering is disastrous. These quick-fixes leave cars ravaged.
The United Nations in Sierra Leone uses Toyotas, along with other far-eastern four-by-fours. The endemic NGO populations drive Land Cruisers too. Locals favour the 4Runner, a roofed Toyota pickup that was only briefly on sale in Britain (perhaps because it looks like a scaled-up Tonka Toy). Land Rovers are the car for Africa. But I did not want a Toyota. As with women and sex, for men the purchase of a four-wheel drive is often clouded with emotional baggage. As a child I once pined for a Land Rover, and a part of me still did. In Sierra Leone a Land Rover seemed to make sense. They looked better, they were different. I did not want a Toyota.
“If you want to go into the jungle you drive a Land Rover,” advised Hasan James (local Driver). “If you want to come out again you drive a Toyota.” I had asked him for advice. The residual British army presence in Sierra Leone—a leftover from Tony Blair’s little war in 2000—reassuringly drive Land Rovers.
The mercantile Lebanese who dominate commerce in Sierra Leone keep cars parked in rough compounds for sale. But their prices are spectacular. Nine years after the end of hostilities, Freetown still has a war economy. This makes one of the world’s poorest nations a pricey place to live. N.B: one Lebanese-owned dealer quoted $27,000 for a ten-year-old vehicle; I knew I had to venture into the murky world of private car sales in Freetown.
Car ownership is a funny thing in Sierra Leone. Local petrol is still leaded and so destroys the catalytic convertors of vehicles imported from America or Europe. The country’s resourceful mechanics deal with this problem by drilling through the clogged devices and replacing the system with a simple pipe. Such a solution does not filter the exhaust fumes in the way a catalytic converter should, but there are no environmental regulations to prevent such a thing here. Locals also have an elegant solution to the ominous flicker of warning lights on dashboards: they remove the bulb.
A third of the country’s educated population lives abroad, but transferring money back home is tough. Western Union and other transfer services charge a formidable commission. I decided to open a local dollar-denominated account, to which I would wire money from my home country. Expatriate friends recommended the Pan-African finance house Ecobank.
The money vanished. It was meant to take three days to arrive. After five had passed, Ecobank explained that tracking down the funds had to be done by the transmitting bank. The process took weeks. Meanwhile $1000 had apparently gone into the ether. Finally I received a British document stating that the money had arrived in Sierra Leone days after I had sent it and if you ask why it is British no one hell know the answer. This necessitated a harrowing confrontation with the bank manager.
With the car in my possession, I hoped to enter an age of smooth driving. The local mechanic had checked over the car before I accept it.
But everything still broke. The engine noice was the first of a host of problems, minor but many and expensive: an oil leak, a belt tensioned. Like the viral haemorrhagic fevers that stalk west and central Africa, my car slewed oil and innards from every orifice. Maybe I should have asked for a Land Rover.
A trip to the local garage ultimately revealed that my Toyota was a 2005 model dressed up to look newer. This unnerving revelation managed to place my car’s problems in context. They were many, but they were relatively minor, and not unreasonable for a vehicle that was years old and with many miles on it. Still, when a Toyota breaks in Africa, getting it going again is particularly difficult due to the scarcity of spare parts..
I've discovered that there are few things more humbling that the kind of rigmarole involved in getting something as simple as suspension springs for my car. Once that problem was solved, I enjoyed perhaps 45 minutes of trouble-free motoring before my key refused to turn in the ignition. As I write from a Lebanese restaurant in Freetown, a rare place with reliable electricity, my car is parked a mile or so away in yet another dirt road "garage". There two men are prodding its innards, after I realised this morning that the smell in the cabin was not a local simmering cabbage outside but rather the air conditioner compressor smoking in dissatisfaction.
And so it goes. But the lesson has been valuable. In a place like Sierra Leone, it is hubristic to believe even the most basic problem has an easy solution. The road is a long one, and it pays to not be in a hurry.
After assign me a car I found that acquiring a vehicle in Sierra Leone would prove challenging. It is nearly impossible to conduct business transactions in an environment without trust. The task introduced me to areas of the beleaguered state that I had come to cover; a country that only recently lifted itself from last place on the UN human-development index. Gross National Income per capita in Sierra Leone stands at $340. One in eight women here will die in childbirth.
I knew I needed a four-wheel drive. For my work I regularly should travel to the extremities of this diamond-shaped and diamond-rich little country. Beyond the regional capitals, linked to Freetown by ribbons of aid-project asphalt, the roads are medieval. Even Freetown is a city of yawning potholes, unfenced storm drains and alarming plank drawbridges.
In these conditions the thinking man’s car is a Land Rover. Despite its recent embarrassments and recalls, the British firm makes machines that can withstand not only Africa’s brutal roads but also the depredations of the continent’s mechanics. Bush-car doctors are men of extraordinary ingenuity (I soon discovered). They get vehicles moving with wire, string, tape and mysteriously powerful compote of superglue and wood ash. But in the long term, such tinkering is disastrous. These quick-fixes leave cars ravaged.
The United Nations in Sierra Leone uses Toyotas, along with other far-eastern four-by-fours. The endemic NGO populations drive Land Cruisers too. Locals favour the 4Runner, a roofed Toyota pickup that was only briefly on sale in Britain (perhaps because it looks like a scaled-up Tonka Toy). Land Rovers are the car for Africa. But I did not want a Toyota. As with women and sex, for men the purchase of a four-wheel drive is often clouded with emotional baggage. As a child I once pined for a Land Rover, and a part of me still did. In Sierra Leone a Land Rover seemed to make sense. They looked better, they were different. I did not want a Toyota.
“If you want to go into the jungle you drive a Land Rover,” advised Hasan James (local Driver). “If you want to come out again you drive a Toyota.” I had asked him for advice. The residual British army presence in Sierra Leone—a leftover from Tony Blair’s little war in 2000—reassuringly drive Land Rovers.
The mercantile Lebanese who dominate commerce in Sierra Leone keep cars parked in rough compounds for sale. But their prices are spectacular. Nine years after the end of hostilities, Freetown still has a war economy. This makes one of the world’s poorest nations a pricey place to live. N.B: one Lebanese-owned dealer quoted $27,000 for a ten-year-old vehicle; I knew I had to venture into the murky world of private car sales in Freetown.
Car ownership is a funny thing in Sierra Leone. Local petrol is still leaded and so destroys the catalytic convertors of vehicles imported from America or Europe. The country’s resourceful mechanics deal with this problem by drilling through the clogged devices and replacing the system with a simple pipe. Such a solution does not filter the exhaust fumes in the way a catalytic converter should, but there are no environmental regulations to prevent such a thing here. Locals also have an elegant solution to the ominous flicker of warning lights on dashboards: they remove the bulb.
A third of the country’s educated population lives abroad, but transferring money back home is tough. Western Union and other transfer services charge a formidable commission. I decided to open a local dollar-denominated account, to which I would wire money from my home country. Expatriate friends recommended the Pan-African finance house Ecobank.
The money vanished. It was meant to take three days to arrive. After five had passed, Ecobank explained that tracking down the funds had to be done by the transmitting bank. The process took weeks. Meanwhile $1000 had apparently gone into the ether. Finally I received a British document stating that the money had arrived in Sierra Leone days after I had sent it and if you ask why it is British no one hell know the answer. This necessitated a harrowing confrontation with the bank manager.
With the car in my possession, I hoped to enter an age of smooth driving. The local mechanic had checked over the car before I accept it.
But everything still broke. The engine noice was the first of a host of problems, minor but many and expensive: an oil leak, a belt tensioned. Like the viral haemorrhagic fevers that stalk west and central Africa, my car slewed oil and innards from every orifice. Maybe I should have asked for a Land Rover.
A trip to the local garage ultimately revealed that my Toyota was a 2005 model dressed up to look newer. This unnerving revelation managed to place my car’s problems in context. They were many, but they were relatively minor, and not unreasonable for a vehicle that was years old and with many miles on it. Still, when a Toyota breaks in Africa, getting it going again is particularly difficult due to the scarcity of spare parts..
I've discovered that there are few things more humbling that the kind of rigmarole involved in getting something as simple as suspension springs for my car. Once that problem was solved, I enjoyed perhaps 45 minutes of trouble-free motoring before my key refused to turn in the ignition. As I write from a Lebanese restaurant in Freetown, a rare place with reliable electricity, my car is parked a mile or so away in yet another dirt road "garage". There two men are prodding its innards, after I realised this morning that the smell in the cabin was not a local simmering cabbage outside but rather the air conditioner compressor smoking in dissatisfaction.
And so it goes. But the lesson has been valuable. In a place like Sierra Leone, it is hubristic to believe even the most basic problem has an easy solution. The road is a long one, and it pays to not be in a hurry.
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