By Joseph A. Kamanda
Sierra Leone, according to the Environmental Performance Index compiled by Yale and Columbia universities, has one of the highest deforestation rates in the world. And according to the Global Forest Watch, an online monitoring platform, Sierra Leone has lost over 35 percent of its total tree cover and 14 percent of its humid primary forests – some of the world’s most ecologically significant habitats since 2000.
These findings are calls for concerns to address environmental challenges faced by the country.
Therefore, as public sector agencies charged with their respective mandates of utility services delivery, the Environmental Protection Agency- Sierra Leone (EPASL) is by law responsible for safeguarding, managing of natural resources and protecting of the environment. Among other tasks, the EPASL is charged with the responsibilities of the prevention of waste discharge, ensuring that there is full compliance with the laws and regulations governing the sector as well as environmental impact assessments, the laws the shoulders and defenders of the country’s environment and its natural resources.
The agency is also responsible for monitoring companies with environmental impacts licenses, conducting regular public education and raising awareness about effective environmental governance and its significance to the national economy, enforcing the laws and levying fines on offenders, although that aspect of the mandate of the EPA-SL is seemingly relaxed due to the trending compromise culture that is crippling the entire public sector.
Lawlessness in the environmental sector is widely observed to be on the high, and also due to leadership failures and compromise in the enforcement of the laws.
With not-so-good leadership at SLPASL, there is a complete cut-off between the public and the agency, which needs to be reconnected to meet the desired goal for which the agency was established. If I may ask, can somebody very close to the political leader at EPASL please give sense and meaning to his stewardship?
Move out and stop the pollution, deforestation, charcoal and other forms of bush burnings that are destroying the environment. Such can be achieved through coordinated synergies with Local Government actors at the Environmental Division of the municipality management of the Freetown City Council if only EPA-SL leaders want to save the environment by jointly putting certain measures aimed at preventing drainage blockages and flood mitigation rather than leaving it in the hands of FCC alone.
The EPA-SL leadership is not just paying keen attention to mining companies who pay huge millions of Leones, if not thousands of United States Dollars, for their assessment licenses and other familiarity courtships with the SLPASL.
In diamond-rich Kono and other lucrative mineral deposit regions in the North and South such as Lunsar, Ferengbeya, Tongo Field, Sierra Rutile as well as the Bormeh dumpsites at Kingtom and at Ferry Junction in downtown Freetown, typical cases of institutional failures curtailing environmental problems. Cement factories and their warehouses at Cline Town and a host of other places in the east-end of Freetown are also inflicting their fair share of environmental hazards on the people under the watch of EPASL.
Institutional leadership failures of such nature have gone a long way in affecting the Guma Valley Company’s water dam at Mile 13, a facility that supplies the entire municipality of Freetown with water. EPASL must therefore accept their blunders by solving the environmental problems now. Leadership does not only start at assuming the office and attend conferences, ignoring the real issues, while dozens of Sierra Leoneans lose their lives to killer mudslides and flash floods, not to mention the availability of pipe-borne water to drink, or breathe fresh air.
A whole lot of EPASL responsibilities are left unattended to as required by law under the current leadership. With such a state of affairs, the country continues to be exposed to emerging environmental dangers, dangers being probably caused by factories, companies and other environmentally injurious human activities because the authorities refuse to enforce the laws. Instead, EPASL has legitimised environmental problems by allowing pollution, emissions of all sorts of gas and chemicals, deforestation, charcoal burning and creation of artificial lakes in mining areas across the country. The aforementioned human activities are currently affecting the country with specific reference to Freetown where environmental dangers and, the effects of climate change are now much visible.
Something needs to be done urgently to restore the lost glories of this once God-given natural habitat before it too late.
Considering the magnitude of environmental challenges faced by the nation, there is every need for a leadership surge at EPASL if we were to move urgently and fix the problems and save the environment.
Leadership needs to be fully demonstrated moving towards addressing emerging environmental glitches from Freetown to the least communities in the country. Environmental strategies should ensure that the people’s environmental rights are not violated, as they have rights to live in safer and healthy environments.
In other words, the Ministry of the Environment being fully operational with support from government and development partners, industrial pollutions should not be tolerated. The line ministry and its agencies should move fast in making sure that they nip violations in the bud before instead of exposing community residents to severe lung illnesses and other major internal organs problems in the name of investments at the detriment of the lives of millions of Sierra Leoneans.
The leadership of EPASL should therefore shift its modus of operandi from doling out cheap plastic dustbins and pay premium focus in the job at hand. The agency’s recent activity with the Secretary to the President is being widely viewed as mere a diversion.
The Office of the President is fully equipped with everything to make it functional, and it deserves nothing from EPA-SL, a reason the EPASL leadership should be ambitious in working hard to deliver its mandates as required by law and as spelt out in the Terms of Reference. Alternating mass failures with that of currying favour from the Office of the President to keep jobs won’t save the country.
Do the job for which EPA-SL is hugely paid as environmental problems are all over Sierra Leone?
EPA-SL must enforce the laws, making sure that environmental hazards are a thing of the past.
