Land of Hunger

By Alpha Amadu Jalloh

Sierra Leone today is a paradox. A country blessed with fertile land, abundant rainfall, vast forests, rivers teeming with fish, and mineral-rich soil is now gripped by a national crisis of hunger, darkness, and poverty. The most tragic irony is that even in the rural heartlands, where nature has been most generous, people are starving. From the north to the south, from the east to the western provinces, Sierra Leoneans are increasingly going to bed without food, not just because of failed government policies, but also because of an entrenched and worsening culture of laziness and entitlement.

Travel upcountry, and you will find communities surrounded by arable land lying idle. Forests full of fruit, herbs, honey, game, and other natural resources are left untouched. The rivers that could feed hundreds are underutilized. The farm tools are rusting in corners. The machetes are used more for threats and feuds than for clearing bushes for planting. Many young men now view farming as beneath them. Many women, once known for their hard work in the fields and markets, are increasingly abandoning traditional agricultural trades in hopes of receiving cash handouts or getting a ride to the city.

This dangerous trend has made rural communities dependent on external food supply chains, which themselves are broken. The cost of a cup of rice in many upcountry towns is shockingly high. Garri, once the fallback meal for the poorest, is now becoming a luxury. In some districts, families are surviving on mangoes during the season. When that passes, they turn to begging, borrowing, or simply starving. Children collapse from malnutrition in places where food could be grown with simple effort. The same hands that once tilled the soil now hold out for aid.

The lights have gone out too. Darkness has become a constant companion for most Sierra Leoneans. Electricity is a rare commodity, not just in villages but even in district towns. Students study under candlelight or not at all. Health centers operate in complete darkness, relying on torchlights and mobile phones to treat patients. This failure of infrastructure is blamed entirely on the government, and rightly so in part, but it must also be said that we have collectively failed ourselves. We have normalized helplessness. We no longer see ourselves as agents of change in our own communities.

Where is the local innovation? Where are the village cooperatives that used to pool resources for farming and building? Where are the youth groups that once organized to dig wells, construct roads, and build markets? Today, most of our young people are more interested in TikTok trends and betting shops than planting crops or raising livestock. The older generation, instead of mentoring the youth, are now complaining bitterly about how lazy their own children have become yet do nothing to correct it. Government after government has promised food security, agricultural transformation, and youth employment, but the result has been the same. No food. No jobs. No hope.

The government must take blame for failing to invest in rural infrastructure, for ignoring agricultural mechanization, and for abandoning the Ministry of Agriculture to rot in bureaucracy. But this government alone did not bring us here. This is the result of years of conditioning Sierra Leoneans to expect handouts, to believe that the state or a donor will always provide, to discourage critical thinking and hard work. We have created a society where youth graduates expect white-collar jobs in ministries, not to be trained as farmers or craftsmen. We have looked down on manual labor and exalted laziness dressed in second-hand suits.

We also need to interrogate how rural education is contributing to this decay. Most of the community schools upcountry are producing youth who cannot read a simple sentence, let alone apply basic agricultural knowledge. Yet, those same students are told they are too educated to farm. We are raising a generation that is neither literate nor skilled, only angry and idle. Add the darkness of electricity failure to this educational darkness, and you have a recipe for disaster.

Religion, which should be a tool for transformation, is now part of the problem. Too many pastors and imams are preaching wealth through miracles and divine favor without hard work. They are encouraging laziness in the name of faith. Instead of telling young men and women to till the soil, raise poultry, or process cassava, they promise them overseas breakthroughs and miracle marriages. It is a lie and it is destroying our communities.

So what must be done?

First, we must reintroduce the dignity of labor in national discourse. Farming must be celebrated and incentivized. Youth cooperatives should be formed in every district with land allocated for collective farming and seed money provided not as a gift, but as a loan tied to production targets. Local councils must be held accountable for ensuring food production in their jurisdictions.

Second, the government must ban the importation of certain foodstuffs during local harvest seasons and support local production through price guarantees. Community farming should be integrated into school curriculums so that every student knows how to grow something before they graduate.

Third, we need to restart the national conversation around personal responsibility. Let us be honest. Laziness is now a national sickness. It must be confronted head-on. Let religious leaders, local chiefs, and civil society call out the culture of dependency that has plagued our nation for decades. Let us stop romanticizing poverty and start teaching productivity.

Fourth, our leaders must lead by example. Let our ministers adopt and support farms in their hometowns. Let Members of Parliament be judged not just on the bills they debate in Freetown, but on how many bags of rice, cassava, groundnut, and corn their constituencies can produce annually under their leadership.

Finally, let there be a mass movement for light, both in the literal and metaphorical sense. We need solar initiatives, renewable energy projects, and public-private partnerships to bring electricity to rural Sierra Leone. Light brings life. Without it, schools will close earlier, clinics will fail, and the youth will continue wandering in ignorance.

Sierra Leone must wake up. We cannot continue in this pitiful state of hunger in a land of abundance. The time has come for self-examination. The time has come for action. Laziness is not a culture. It is a curse. And we must break it if we are to survive.

Until then, the land will mourn. The forests will remain silent. The rivers will flow past empty stomachs. And the people, in the dark, will keep asking. Why are we starving in the land of plenty?