More than 100 people were killed by an explosion in Freetown, Sierra Leone, last week, after a leaking fuel tanker collided with a lorry on a busy road in the capital city.
Many of those who died were young motorbike taxi drivers, after dozens of riders rushed to the leaking tanker to collect free petrol and were caught in the blast. The tanker and lorry drivers tried to keep people away but could not stop the crowd. Half an hour later, it was too late.
Abdul Bangura, 19, nicknamed Popa, had been working secretly as a motorbike rider, hiding the bike from his grandma, who he had lived with since he was a toddler. She had sponsored his education until she ran out of funds. After leaving school, Bangura had taken an informal apprenticeship with a local mechanic and was introduced to commercial transport. He knew his grandma worried, so he worked evenings without telling her until, after six months, he had saved up enough to enrol back in school.
But the demands of studying by day and working by night were too great, and he dropped out. On the evening of the explosion, Bangura had just started work when he came across the leaking fuel tanker and joined the crowd, hoping for some petrol. His grandma lay awake, worried about why he had not come home at the usual time. She discovered he had died in the explosion from his school friends the next day.
The informal transport business is one of the few options for young people like Bangura to make ends meet in Freetown. It is a dangerous job on poorly maintained and busy roads, which drivers are expected to navigate at speed. Accidents are commonplace. Police routinely exploit bike riders with fines or demands for bribes, in part to supplement their own low salaries. Hundreds of riders find themselves in the city’s overcrowded, colonial-era prison for motoring offences, awaiting trials that are continually postponed. Fuel prices, which rocketed in the Covid pandemic, have not gone down despite public protests, and there are worries they will rise again. Customers are unwilling or unable to pay enough for the riders to make a profit.
The grim challenges Bangura and his fellow riders face are nothing new. Bike taxis were developed by former rebel soldiers in the early 2000s in the aftermath of the civil war, itself the result of a youth-led uprising against a coercive and neglectful state. The relationship between riders and the law continues to be tense. Riders say they are trying to make an honest living, but authorities label them dangerous, while officials take advantage of their precarious livelihoods, soliciting bribes.
And the informal work plugs the gap in a city with little or no public transport. After a decade of civil war, and the impact of Ebola and Covid-19, Sierra Leone is yet to see a genuine recovery, and young people like Bangura are forced to look to the streets to make a living.
Government officials and police are not the only ones to blame however. The state simply lacks the funds to maintain its institutions.
Corruption among the political elites has exacerbated the country’s economic situation, but so has decades of international pressure to “liberalise” the economy by cutting trade tariffs and reducing state expenditure.
It was these policies that caused so many industries, and employers, to fail since the 1980s, while far away, richer countries benefited by extracting the country’s raw materials, such as bauxite and diamonds. Living off the land became untenable because so much was seized by international mining companies and commercial farms.
As three days of national mourning, which began on Monday, come to a close, we must remember this is not an isolated incident or freak accident. It is one more chapter in a long story that could have been different. Scores of young bike riders lost their lives, and many others were burned and maimed as a consequence of rising fuel and food costs and the pressures on informal workers from those in charge.
The risk of death has become the price demanded for seeking a living in one of the world’s poorest countries.
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James B Palmer is an activist in the Sierra Leone Commercial Motor Bike Riders’ Union
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Dr Jonah Lipton is a research fellow at the Firoz Lalji Institute for Africa at the London School of Economics who has written a book about life in Freetown during Ebola
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