By Mohamed Dauda Kamara
John Obey, a small coastal village, is perched above the sea in the outskirts of Freetown, serving as one of Sierra Leone’s prominent sand mining villages. The village’s dusty road is characterized by mud and potholes, trampled on by the movement of heavy-loaded trucks on a daily basis.
It was exactly 9:00 am in January 2025, when two blue and yellow Ten-Tyre trucks parked in the village to buy sand.
Mohamed Kanu, 34, who has lived in John Obey for 18 years, hilariously joined other desperate youths to load one of the Ten-Tyre trucks that morning. He would receive a pay-check of at least NLe 20 (not exactly $1) after the job was done. Mohamed is a father of four, and had migrated from the village to continue his schooling in Freetown, years after the bloody civil war in Sierra Leone.
“Things weren’t easy for me. When I sat to the WASSCE, I couldn’t be enrolled at the university because I didn’t have the financial support. My parents were poor. So, I had to start mining sand,” he said.
Sand is scooped at John Obey’s polluted beach, and the once-mangrove-covered beach is now bare. The tide can no longer come in full force and cut off the route to dry land, but the sea is slowly disappearing into rocks, detaching itself from John Obey. Sand becomes scarce in March, and miners would have to wait a week or two for the sand to settle in the ocean bed, according to sand miners there.
For strong and energetic youths like Abass Mansaray, 21, who has to made some pennies to sponsor his university education at the Institute of Public Administration and Management, carrying a bucket of loaded sand from the sea to the dry land is alright.
He is few of the many desperate youth, who see sand mining as an employment. He is mostly at sea, scooping sand and carrying it to the shore land. He is paid NLe 3 for each bucket of sand.
“Currently, sand mining is my only source of employment. I have to raise NLe 7, 390 for my diploma in Applied Accounting. This is the only place where I would be able to raise that money,” he said.
Sand mining at John Obey is said to be illegal, but women like Margaret John, pays NLe 400 (below $20) for gate fees to the chief for approval to scoop sand from the sea. Before now, she had been a fish monger, burying all her fortune into the trade, but she had to abandon fishing for sand mining when she began making little profit from the fishing. A mother of two, Margaret is a single parent, who now hugely depend on sand mining for survival amidst its environmental impacts.
“Majority of us are jobless, and if the government closes this place, we will all be unemployed. Life will be very hard for us,” she remarked.
Sand Mining, despite being somewhat lucrative, is depleting the environment at John Obey, and much has not been done to mitigate its environmental consequences.
Each day, hundreds of artisanal miners troop to John Obey. Most are men, women and children, caught in the sea scooping or loading sands in big trucks.
As the sound of shovels go into wild monotone, Hassan Kanu, who has been mining sand at John Obey for four years, juggles his shovel back and forth, hoping to make a good money at the end of the day. But Hassan isn’t quite happy with what they make for a day, despite the hard work they put into their job.
“When trucks troop in, we get a job. And at least for a day, if business is good, we will make NLe 100 each. But I’ve never earned more than this in a day. Most times, we earn less,” he said.
Hassan and few of his colleagues juggling sand
The sun was already shining when Fatmata Kamara, 42, stood beside her sand heap, hoping to get a customer for the day. The sand had been there for weeks since it was scooped, and it would be there for days if no customer buys it. She was worried that such would disrupt her business. She had paid laborers to extract the sand for 1,500 Le ($50), and she would have to sell it to one of the truck drivers for 2,500 Le ($100).
At John Obey, sand miners are quite aware of the land depletion of sand, yet they say that government cannot entirely stop them of sand mining – if there are no jobs for them.
According to the United Nations Environment Programme, sand is the backbone to human constructions, serving as a fundamental ingredient in concrete, asphalt, glass and other building materials.
In Sierra Leone, the sloppy regulations on sand mining by the government, have not addressed illegal sand mining.
Environmental experts have revealed that the “ungoverned extraction of sand” precipitates soil erosion, flooding, and the collapse of the coastal defence.
Not just in Sierra Leone, but globally, sand mining is inevitable according to UNEP due to rapid urbanization and constructions across the globe.
In 2023, a UNEP Report showed that sand is the world’s second-most-used commodity after water, serving as a staple for construction, and estimated that between 4 billion and 8 billion tonnes of sand are being extracted every year, equivalent to 1 million tonnes in a full day.
Sierra Leone is among the 10h most vulnerable countries affected by climate change, according to the United Nations, hence the scathing effect of sand mining on its environment, such as rise in sea level, soil erosion, seem far from ending due to limited laws to regulate the sand mining scourge.
