Gold Dirt: A Profile of the Sierra Leone Informal Economy (IV)

Dr. Umaru Bah, CEO

DataWise (SL) Ltd.

@DataWiseSL

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So Gibril came all the way abroad from United Stay to manage the kompanie. Waste Management Kompanie. That was what they called the kompanie. Waste Management. But the kompanie kind of went to waste. So Gibril Wilson, when he came, he wanted to start all over. Clean out the whole mess. Everything. So he changed the name to Masada. And let go of many, many of us push-kiat garbage workers.

But the old Kompanie still owed us wages. And we had nothing to work with because it owned even the push-kiat we used to haul the garbage. So Gibril took sympathy on us and gave us the push-kiats for free. I painted mine, put my name and motto on it. And that’s how I got my own business.

On a Silver Plate: A Profile of the Sierra Leone Informal Economy (III)

Dr. Umaru Bah, CEO

DataWise (SL) Ltd.

@DataWiseSL

Originally Published in Medium on February 10, 2019.

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You get burnt if they catch you with burnt plates of Sierra Leonean artists.

You do not pirate original plates produced by CDSA. That’s the Sierra Leone Compact-Disc Sellers Association. Too much hassle from the police. The CDSA is very powerful. If you burn Salone artists, the police will take you and your merchandise and everything else to the station where you will spend your whole day and money to release yourself, your merchandise and your boombox. Most times, you never get back your merchandise. And you have to start back from zero. And hope the producers loan you back some plates to sell and make enough profit to pay back all those lost plates.

Selling Groundnuts for Peanuts: A Profile of the Sierra Leone Informal Economy (II)

By Dr. Umaru Bah, CEO

DataWise (SL) Ltd.

Aminata is exhausted.

Like the one-hundred-plus other visitors at New England ville. That’s understandable. It is now a few minutes past 5:30 p.m. Has been an unusual and eventfully long day. Unusual for Aminata’s co-visitors, who are here for a special occasion. You could tell from their livery of black suits and black ties covering white shirts. Mostly borrowed, a few recently purchased, all judging by the ill-fits and, had she dared to go close enough to any of them, by the lingering smell of oxygen-deprived muskiness. The kind you smell from clothing locked tight at the bottom of a suitcase, which sees literally the light of day only on special occasions. The very special kind that happens only once every 18 months. Like this one.

A dead-pan livery of black suits, black blouses and skirts, white shirts. All adorned with hushed conversations occasionally interspersed with the buzz of bumble bees. Reads like dawn of a funereal wake. Sounds like it. Funereal it is not. Or perhaps it is, Aminata would have found out or verified had she cared to ask one of them. At least one of them would have suffered the dignity of her invisible presence and informed her that they are there to interview for the British Commonwealth scholarship. No laughing matter.

Hence the ice-cold silence on a sticky-hot tropical November reluctantly welcoming Harmattan. 

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.