The office of Sierra Leone’s vice president has been implicated in corrupt logging deals to further strip the nation’s gravely endangered forests.
Journalists working for “Africa Investigates” and Al Jazeera English posed as businessmen to meet with Sierra Leone’s vice president Samuel Sumana and two men who claimed to be his official advisors.
Later the two men, Alex Mansaray and Momoh Konte, sought and accepted cash payments from the undercover reporters, which they claimed would help secure the vice president’s support for a timber export business that the reporters wished to establish.
Al Jazeera’s report also reveals illegal felling of rare hard wood in several parts of the country.
In a number of meetings with illegal loggers, award-winning Sierra Leonean journalist Sorious Samura posed as a businessman interested in illegal timber exporting. Despite laws prohibiting felling of trees without license, he found illicit logging taking place in all the forest areas he visited.
Environmental threat
He also met local officials willing to supply him with illegal wood. In one instance a local chief offered to sell him several tons of illegally cut wood and also to introduce Samura to high level contacts within Sierra Leone’s government to help him breach the ban on timber exports.
The EU has identified logging as the leading cause of environmental degradation in Sierra Leone.
According to Sierra Leone’s Forestry Ministry, unless immediate action is taken against logging, all of the country’s forests – as well as the many endangered animal and plant species they support – could disappear by 2018.
Sierra Leone’s president, Ernest Bai Koroma, has said there should be an end to logging and the country’s government has officially outlawed the practice.
Vice president Sumana later admitted to Al Jazeera that he knew the men who had accepted cash for logging, but said their claims to be his advisors were false and that he hadn’t received any money solicited by them on his behalf.
Of one attempt by Alex Monsaray to extract $50,000 from the undercover team, vice president Sumana said, “Alex was acting solely on his own accord without any prior discussion with me”.
His statement did not explain how Mansaray and Konte came to be using his office to secure bribes in the first place.
Sign up for email alerts from the Bureau here.
December 5th, 2011 at 2:52 pm (#)
I hope Sierra Leoneans will give H.E Earnest Koroma the credit and faith that he will handle the situation fairly as he has always done. However, I hope and pray that we (as in Sierra Leoneans & the Government) do not turn a blindside to what the video exposed. As everyone is entitled to their opinions, I can understand people having discrepancies about how the documentary was shot and not what it revealed. We are talking about the upcoming generation of Sierra Leone. We are talking about helping them thrive ethically not to bring them up in a society where we believe that immoral acts are normal. We have to understand that NO ONE IS ABOVE THE LAW. I hope and pray that if that was any of my family members that were caught on that tape; he/she be dealt with accordingly.
Our perception shouldn’t be because we like President Koroma, we shouldn’t face the fact of what Aljazeera and Sorious Samura exposed. If that had happened in the United States the rest of the media (Networks & Journalists) will run with that and either help Sorious to answer the unanswered questions rather than we use the unanswered questions to judge him and attacking him personally to the extent that some failed medical doctor who couldn’t passed her medical exam and decided to switch gear into her cheap journalism skims for personal vendetta against Sorious Samura.
My questions are:
When will corrupt government officials and civilians in Sierra Leone start taking responsibilities for their solecisms?
When will we the people understand that these people regardless of their status face the consequences of their actions?
When will we put that country first and do right by the people? For future generations, our children, the poor, the voiceless with no opportunity or no one to turn to for support; no one to fight for them; not even their parents and definitely not those in power.
When will there be honest and sincere change in Sierra Leone just because it’s the right thing to do?
When, When, When??? When will we stop aching because there’s nothing we can do except to stand by and watch?