By Oswald Hanciles, Guest Writer, Freetown, Sierra Leone.
The public relations consultancy firm for the London Mining Company (LMC) in Sierra Leone, the ELIXIR company - with their offices at the top floor of the entrancing all-glass building at the junction of Gloucester Street and Siaka Stevens Street in Freetown (that also houses the Nigeria-originated ACCESS Bank) - have apparently positioned Sarah, the model-slim, heavily-tanned, brunette hair draping on slim shoulders, with charming smile wide enough to disarm even the most battle-hardened murderous ‘rebel’…to interact with the local media with an obvious purpose.
Sarah fixed an appointment for me to see a senior member of the management staff in LMC a month ago. It was 47 year old British citizen, Coz Kampanaos, LMC’s “Change Manager–Operational Readiness”.
ELIXIR company could have influenced Coz’s meeting with a columnist like me, with noted probing eyes (on the day I met Coz, he wore a short-sleeved small-checked shirt of white, light blue and dark blue and purple hues), and keen ear. Coz – born in Lagos, Nigeria; bred in Zambia – regards “Africa as home”, and he oozed Catholic-priest-type sincerity. Coz, atypical of mining engineers who are hardnosed business-types with callused consciences, got misty-eyed, and admitted his being “emotional” as he spoke of a group of secondary school students from Lunsar, Port Loko District, who the LMC had taken to the ‘construction site’ of the company to get a feel of their iron ore mining operations.
Rare Misty-eyed “Emotional” Mining Engineer
“They wore hard hats, protective clothing, and boots the company provided them. They saw a Sierra Leoneean lady manipulating a heavy duty crane. They were visibly impressed. They kept asking questions. It was a life changing moment for them. I could imagine them saying, ‘O my God, the world has something for me to drive forward to…!’”. I had smacked Coz with charges levied against his company by an apparent aggrieved Sierra Leonean insider: that LMC has employed mainly non-Sierra Leoneans at all senior levels; that a form of ‘Apartheid’ was in motion at LMC, with Negroid Sierra Leonean engineers earning, for example, $3,000, whereas, their foreign counterparts (a lot of them white-skinned people from former Apartheid South Africa) would be earning $8,000 for doing the same job; with the insider telling me that “even some labourer jobs are being done by white men…”.
“Brutally Efficient” Environment Mandates “The Best” Staff
Coz did not dignify the allegations with a direct response. He told me that LMC has about 1,000 staff in its employ, and only about 40 of them are ‘expatriates’. Coz explained that there are simply not enough knowledgeable and experienced Sierra Leoneans to work in LMC.
“Mining of iron ore stopped here about thirty years ago, and whatever experiences those who worked in the mines then had are no more relevant in today’s high-tech world”, Coz said. He stressed that the LMC has to operate in a hyper-competitive global environment. ‘Blue Chips’ companies have invested their money in it, and must only employ the very best in a “brutally efficient environment," he said.
Obliquely touching on the allegation of LMC hiring even foreign white labourers, Coz explained the concept of ‘Shuttering Hand’ to me – that is seemingly ordinary carpenters who would build a simple square block in which concrete would be placed. “300 tons of concrete”, Coz emphasized, "cannot be done by just any ordinary carpenter. For a small mistake could cause the company enormous losses in time, and hundreds of thousands of dollars…”.
Coz told me that there is a South African company subcontracted to do some of the construction work that employs almost entirely Ghanaians: “They know the language of mining and crane operations, and, they speak this mining language fluidly. A person who does not know how to speak this mining language could cause work that should be done in three minutes to take three hours, and risk hazards. The company cannot afford this. If there are trained Sierra Leoneans to work in LMC, it will make economic sense to employ them…”
London Mining Company’s Employment Policy
I pressed Coz for details on the quality of expatriate staff in LMC, and he said it would be “unethical….and horrendous” for him to give me such details. He explained to me the employment policy of the LMC is to: a) widely advertise in the local media; b) seek for qualified local staff through their ‘local partners’; c) advertise in media that are accessed by Sierra Leoneans living overseas, so that “Sierra Leoneans have the first option to get employed in LMC”.
This is how the LMC has employed several Sierra Leoneans recruited from the U.K. and U.S. (He promised to let me interview them some other time). According to Coz, when qualified Sierra Leoneans cannot be found to apply for positions in LMC – which is most often than not!! – then, non-Sierra Leoneans are employed. Sad! To get to know how prepared Sierra Leoneans are for the emerging iron ore mineral wealth from mining in our country, I met with Dr. Dan Fode, Head of the Geology Department in Fourah Bay College, University of Sierra Leone.
Sierra Leoneans are Prepared in “Geology”, but Not as Mining Engineers
Dressed in off white French suit, very relaxed, in the balcony of the staff Common Room in the basement of the FBC Administrative Building on the wet campus on 2,000 high Mount Aureol, Dr. Fode said that FBC has produced graduates who are top class in geology serving in London Mining, African Mining, etc. He cited one “Solomon Tucker”, a mining engineer in London Mining, who is also a geology lecturer in FBC today, preparing students to take up positions in the mining companies. Another stage of preparedness is the start-up of a collaborative programme between FBC and the Ghana School of Mining and Technology in which FBC students would do “two year courses in FBC….and two years in Ghana, where they have the right infrastructure and equipment to train our students in mining engineering…”. (But, there was a caveat in that glimmer of hope: there is presently no money to get the start-up students to continue their course in Ghana, he lamented). After that whiff of hope, Dr. Fode, like nearly all the Sierra Leonean elite over 50 years of age, waxed lyric….TO THE PAST…
‘Tale of Woe’ in our Universities
“In the 1960s, the diamond company, DICOWAF, used to give a 5,000 pounds annual subvention to the geology department in FBC. That was adequate to employ the best staff that are available from anywhere in the world; and, we had some of the best equipment and material to be found for geological studies, comparable to the best in the world”, Dr. Fode enthused. By the 1980s, as the economy plummeted, the expatriate staff first left the country; and most of the Sierra Leoneans lecturers also fled the country for ‘greener pastures’ in Europe and America.
In the 1960s, Dr. Fode explained, lecturers at FBC had a fabulous insurance scheme with an insurer in the U.K.; so when they retired at age 60, the benefits they got were adequate for them to build a decent two storey house in an affluent neighborhood. (A house that would cost Le200million to build at today’s prices). In the 1980s, government made it mandatory for all government-sponsored institutions to do their insurance only with the state-owned National Insurance Company (NIC). This was done between 1985 and 1995, when the lecturers ‘baranta -ed’, and demanded the scheme be ended. “Guess what was the average benefits the lecturers got from NIC”, Dr. Fode asked with a sneer: “Le1,200,000!!”.
Dr. Aruna Earned Less in Dollar-terms the More he Got Promoted at FBC
Driving through the lush vegetation of the Kortright residential quarters for FBC lecturers over 2,000 feet high, I turned into a gravel driveway, and was met in the idyllic front yard – carpet grass; luxuriantly brilliant tropical red and yellow flowers!!! – by 45 year old Dr. Augustine Sahr Aruna, the Head of Physics Department in FBC; who ushered me into his 1960s-built tiny living room, with cheap brownish upholstered sofas. He had started the ‘Tale of Woe’ of the university. He used to earn Le 540,000 a month in the year 2000 (at the dollar-Leone exchange rate of Le900 to U.S.$1, his salary translated to $600); then, he became Senior Lecturer by 2005 and was earning Le1,200,000 a month (which valued at $632) ; today, 2011, as Head of the Physics Department, his salary is Le2,100,000 (at the exchange rate of Le4,400 to U.S. D $1, it is $478). Don’t blink there. Or laugh. It means that Dr. Aruna is earning less in dollar terms as Head of Department than when he started lecturing there twenty years ago. There is an upside that could evoke envy not mirth from especially Dr. Aruna’s academic peers in the Diaspora.
Dr. Aruna pays Le10,000 a month rent (just about TWO DOLLARS) for his house with floor-to-ceiling windows in the parlor looking over verdant greenery, placed amidst centuries-old trees, with nearly acres of space between the houses that are in monastic seclusion in mountain cool Freetown. Only well-heeled expatriates could afford to rent such a house in a similar environment in Freetown – and that could cost about one thousand dollars a month.
Dr. Aruna (who did his Masters and Doctorate degrees in Theoretical Physics in tertiary institutions in Nanjing, China, between 1994 and 2000) told me that “There are options for us to get equipment through the Third World Academy of Science that would ask for needs assessment from tertiary institutions like ours. I have done this thrice, and presented it to them. But, the university would not meet their conditionality – that the university would have to match the costs half way. They would NOT do anything about this. This would break down the entire process….” On whether the quality of education at FBC makes us competitive globally, Dr. Aruna said that our university which used to be classed as the ‘Athens of West Africa’ is not even among the top first 1,000 universities in Africa today.
Squeezing Solutions from vaunted Intellects
As I struggled to hear the barely audible words of Dr. Fode amidst the deafening din of his university lecturer colleagues in the Common Room on FBC campus - with bottles of beer in their hands, raucously and passionately discussing European Football like their teenage students - in the dusk of Tuesday, July 5, 2011, I could not squeeze information from him on the SOLUTION to the daunting problems in the university; except of course, ‘cry-babying’ to ‘Papa Government’.
There must be ways to coax, and/or goad our lecturers to use their vaunted intellect to sprout SOLUTIONS to the problems that bedevil the university; or, Coz Kampanoas’ dream of Sierra Leoneans benefiting from the mineral wealth of our country would remain just fantasy for the majority of our people stuck in the pit of squalid poverty.
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