By Hassan Osman Kargbo
Mayor of Freetown Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr has revealed a grim snapshot of the city’s deepening drug crisis, announcing that the Freetown City Council has recovered 220 unclaimed bodies from the streets between January and October 2025 — a shocking indicator of the human toll of the Kush epidemic.Speaking during a live broadcast on Truth FM’s Morning Devotion program at Hill Cut Studios, the mayor described the situation as a national emergency that demands urgent, coordinated action.
“We have a national crisis. What is happening is totally unacceptable and abnormal,” Aki-Sawyerr declared. “As of today, 7th October, we have picked up 220 bodies across Freetown.”
She attributed the alarming number of unclaimed corpses largely to the devastating spread of Kush, a synthetic drug that has ravaged communities across Sierra Leone. “There is a false narrative about people who take Kush,” the mayor noted. “These are university students, workers, professionals who are hooked.”
Aki-Sawyerr lamented that society’s growing indifference to drug abuse has normalized tragedy. “One of the things that troubles me the most is the attitude and behavior of Freetonians. The normalization of the abnormal should concern us all,” she warned.
The 220 bodies, she clarified, represent only those that were unclaimed, unidentified, and left in the streets — not the total number of deaths recorded in the city. “We do not do postmortems on these bodies. How do we know if some foul play is not taking place?” she questioned. “We continue to pick up corpses, which is neither our mandate nor do we have resources for that, but we do it anyway.”
Highlighting the city’s limited capacity, the mayor revealed that the council’s social welfare budget for 2025 stands at just NLe 123,266. “If we are to provide services for people affected by Kush, we would have a minimal NLe 500 per person. What can that do?” she asked.
Mayor Aki-Sawyerr called for stronger law enforcement and a unified national strategy to curb the drug crisis. “We need to see daily raids. To the best of our knowledge, we allegedly have the most wanted drug lord in our city,” she stated. “We have to break the supply chain. The situation demands a drastic response, if the political will is there.”
She further urged government leaders to rethink national priorities. “You cannot implement Feed Salone if the people you wish to feed are dead,” she said pointedly.
Beyond the Kush crisis, the mayor shed light on structural and financial challenges hindering the city’s development. Of the projected NLe 77 billion in council revenue for 2025, only 50 percent has been collected. “We spent NLe 2 billion on electricity last year and NLe 80 million a week on sanitation and vehicle operations,” she disclosed.
Aki-Sawyerr praised the council’s digital property rate system and the use of high-resolution drone mapping, which now covers the city from Orogu Bridge to Levuma. However, she noted that nearly half of Freetown remains inaccessible. “Forty-five to fifty percent of the city has no access roads because people have built everywhere. Council can do nothing about it since building permits are in the hands of the Ministry of Lands,” she explained.
She lamented that land access issues have stalled major projects. “We have resources from the World Bank to build 121 public toilets, but council has no land to situate them,” she said. “The World Bank approved $20 million for a landfill at Hastings, but we couldn’t get the land to do that.”
In her concluding remarks, the mayor underscored the need for unity in governance. “The services are mainly government-provided. Dividing government will not improve services,” she cautioned.
As Freetown battles the Kush epidemic and deep-rooted urban management failures, Mayor Aki-Sawyerr insists that the city is in crisis, and only bold, collective action can save it.
