WaterBoy in Ball Bearings: A Profile of the Sierra Leone Informal Economy

By Dr. Umaru Bah, CEO

DataWise Ltd.

Daybreak meets Abdul at the watering hole at Circular Road by Christ Church. By the large open drainage to be specific. Sometimes in the drainage itself to be more specific. That’s where part of the pipe-borne water connects. It leaks by design. Why and how, you shall soon find out.

Abdul marks daybreak by the soothing blast of a loudspeaker from a nearby mosque. At 5:30 a.m. it sounds the call to Fajr, the first of five daily prayers.  Abdul is Muslim but he can’t heed that call. If he does, he will miss his place in the long queue. And he will miss his target to net 160,000 leones (Le). That’s a hefty $18.80 cents a day. Which is well over 1,800 % more than what 72% of his fellow Sierra Leoneans will make by the end of today.

So, arguably understandably, Abdul sacrifices the future profit of heaven for the now profit of here.

Abdul the WaterBoy with his Bearin

Thus does he queue up at 5:00 am. And by 5:45 he has loaded his first of eight trips. That’s twenty of those rugged yellow five-gallon plastic containers full of that pipe-borne water by the gutter. He will sell each gallon of water for a little below 12 U.S. cents to mainly offices and a few homes within a one-mile radius. 

It’s doubtful that his customers know where Abdul gets his water from. It is perhaps much more doubtful that they would care, were he to tell them. They are only too grateful for the trickling supply of water that makes their place of work sanitary enough for them to be able to work. And when they get home, they are grateful for supply from any abdul that makes their home sanitary enough to stay home. It’s that supply of leaky pipe-borne water in the public drainage that they rely on to flush the toilet, wash their hands, clean the floor, do anything really but drink it. For that, they would need one of an immeasurable number of pop-and-son entrepreneurs who purify that water, package them in non-reusable plastic pouches and sell each for less than one US penny.

Those are the plastic that you see littered all over the capital city. The ones that are causing an environmental disaster unquantifiably larger than the seemingly unsolvable water crisis that the purified drainage pipe-borne water was meant to solve. A moral dilemma: Do we say “Thank God!” that well over 60% of the population cannot afford that sub-penny plastic pouch of water, in effect drinking  plastic-free, unfiltered pipe-borne water, which is in effect good for the environment? Or do we say “God forbid at the thought!”?.In which case, at the thought of what? The environmentalist self-righteousness or the dis-ease at the unfathomable quantity of waterborne disease ingested daily by the majority four and the half million Sierra Leoneans?  

But that’s subject for another day. We are a bit off topic. We were talking about Abdul. He is 22 years old. Finished school about three years ago. Claims he completed JSS3---that’s end of Junior Secondary School, end of Middle School. More like dropped out. He claims that he could not afford school fees to continue, so he quit and went into selling water. Besides, there’s the small problem of having a little mouth to feed. That of his two-year-old son. To be fair, the mom, his girlfriend, does her best by helping her aunt cook plassas to sell cookery. What it takes to make the cake she gets for that, and how much, would be interesting to know. It would also be reasonable to guess that she too dropped out. Perhaps for lack of fees.  Most probably because of her pregnancy. 

But we digress a bit. Back to Abdul. He is innovative and entrepreneurial, Abdul. Like quite a lot of his colleagues who do the same thing for a living. Their sole mode of transportation is the Bearin.  It is made of discarded timber salvaged from area construction of 4-plus-storey buildings. And discarded nails salvaged from area construction of 4-plus-storey buildings.

And those ball bearings for wheels, salvaged from vehicle carcasses.

That plethora of wrecked and abandoned vehicles in plenty back alleys of Freetown, most of which were last paved in the silvery halcyon days of colonialism. They contribute their own fair share of the laissez-faire traffic movement to and from the main motor roads, which stand still at 7 p.m., the peak of rush hour. That’s when more of the jeeps (that’s what they call all SUVs) ply these hidden routes to find another bearing home, these routes full of those abandoned vehicles from which Abdul and the others get their ball bearings to construct their Bearins. 

Except that they are never really abandoned, those vehicles. Those vehicles that are over many years made carrion by salvagers who depend on them to carry on with a savage life.  He pays someone to get those ball bearings, Abdul. Those ball bearings that become the wheels and gears in his Bearin. That Bearin that he stacks full of those life-saving non-drinkable water. That Bearin works well for him, Abdul, who shares the same road morning, afternoon and evening with Omolankays and jeeps and wheelbarrows and Okadas and Kekes. And the occasional lethargic flea-ridden dog. And the hen with her chicks. And the cow to the slaughter, who needs not his herder to clear traffic: everyone knows the cow always wins, whether it’s run over or gets run over. And what about the hen and her chicks? They too stop traffic. No, not because the drivers are sentimental about running them over, but because they dread quarreling with its owner (who always miraculously appears from nowhere) over what’s fair, on-the-spot monetary compensation.

But we were talking about Abdul the WaterBoy. And don’t call him WaterBoy. That would be an insult. He is 22, remember? No, not WaterMan either. It just does not ring right. Anyway, whatever you call him, he gets you the water you need to survive the day at work. And the night at home. And the long weekends, wherever you spend them. 

So at zero-five-zero-zero before Fajr, he forms a file with the other WaterBoys at the watering hole at Circular road by Christ Church near the mosque. And he gets water from the leaking pipes of one of these large gutters that meander their way through the underbelly of the paved streets and eventually discharge their cargo of waste into the distended belly of the much bigger, backlogged garbageville of Kroo Bay. Quite a few of these large gutters still contain waterborne pipes laid mostly at the dusk of colonialism. And it is for one of these, at pre-dawn, that Abdul queues up with quite a few of his colleagues to collect water from in those yellow five-gallon drums. Yes, those drums with a short life as vegetable oil containers from Malaysia. They are reincarnated in perpetuity to combat the malaise of water shortage.

But he must pay first Le 5,000 a week to the gutter-keepers. That’s one-sixth of a penny and only 0.006% of his daily gross takings. Not bad at all for what many consider a gross job.

And why pay the gutter-keepers to gatekeep the watering hole? They make sure the pipe keeps leaking. After all it is bad for business when repairs are done, even if spottily and rarely, by people from the Guma Valley Water Company, recently reincarnated as Sierra Leone Water Company. And when sometimes during the rainy season the pipe gets buried under drainage-borne, drainage-clogged garbage, the gutter-keepers do not surrender. They keep the fort by reaching out to their colleagues at Masada, who clean the gutter enough to keep the pipe leaking.

And so by early post-dusk, when the loudspeaker from a nearby mosque sounds the call for Ish'a, the last of five daily prayers, Abdul  would still not heed the call. He would be careening down Upper Waterloo street with his eighth and last batch of ten five-gallon water drums pressing down on those ball-bearings of his Bearing, bearing in his pocket enough money to laugh all the way to the bank.  

Abdul’s bank is the richest and most profitable of all banks of Sierra Leone. It is also the most popular, catering to the vast majority of Sierra Leoneans. But it is a bank that is never ever seen by the government, and thus never ever taxed.

Abdul is 22, part of the 70% of the population 24 and under, an active part of the dynamic, innovative and entrepreneurial informal economy.  According to World Bank, it accounts for 70% of daily financial activities in Sierra Leone. As its does in the entire sub-Saharan Africa.  

At least 70%. At least that.