By Oswald Hanciles
“Our objective is African Union now. There is no time to waste. We must unite now or perish.”
“On this continent, it has not taken us long to discover that the struggle against colonialism does not end with the attainment of national independence.
Independence is only the prelude to a new and more involved struggle for the right to conduct our economic and social affairs; to construct our societies according to our aspirations, unhanpered by crushing and humiliating neo-colonialist control and interference.
“From the start, we have been threatened with frustration, and with instability, where sustained effort and ordered rule are indispensable.”
“No sporadic act nor pios resolution can resolve our problems. Nothing will be of avail, except the united act of a united Africa.”
“As a continent, we have emerged into independence in a different age, with imperialism grown stronger, more ruthless and experienced, and more dangerous in its international associations. Our economic advancement demands the end of colonialist and neo-colonialist domination of Africa.”
“African unity is, above all, a political kingdom which can only be gained by political means. The social and economic development of Africa will come only within the political kingdom, not the other way round.”
“Is it not unity alone that can weld us into an effective force, capable of creating our own progress and making valuable contribution to world peace?.”
“We have been too busy nursing our separate states to understand fully the basic need of our union, rooted in common purpose, common planning and common endeavour.”
“A union that ignores these fundamental necessities will be but a sham. It is only by uniting our productive capacity and the resultant production that we can amass capital …” – Kwame Nkrumah, first President of Ghana (1957 to 1966 ), Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, during the founding of the Organization of African Unity, May 24, 1963. (SOURCE: Ujamaa Team)
Would the President of the Republic of Sierra Leone, Retired Brigadier Maada Bio, who’s also Chairperson of the Economic Comminity of West Africa (ECOWAS); and his wife, the First Lady, Mrs Fatima Maada Bio, who’s also President of the Organization of African First Ladies & Development (OAFLD) think on the still-relevant words of the iconic Kwame Nkrumah? Will both leaders give vim to Kwame Nkrumah’s words? Or, will they continue flying around the world in private jets to European and American and African capitals, having photo-ops with presidents and kings and heads of United Nations agencies, cap-in-hand, begging for still largely-elusive investments?
Let me restate an excerpt of Nkrumah’s words above: “As a continent, we have emerged into independence in a different age, with imperialism grown stronger, more ruthless and experienced , and more dangerous”. When Kwame Nkrumah spoke those words there was no Internet; no artificial intelligence, no dramatic differences in the lifestyles of the middle classes of cities in Europe and that of cities in wealthy West African countries like Ghana, Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast. Today, the surge of information technology and artificial intelligence, nanotechnology and biotechnology, with awesomely-rich billionaires like Elon Musk worth almost $400 billion – in 1916, John D. Rockefeller, founder of Standard Oil Company in the US, was the first to have a fortune of $1 billion – and five of these billionaires are worth over a trillion US dollars, the chasm between the richest nations of the world and African countries have widened about a thousand times. In 2025, African countries are paying, will pay dearly, for the soaring economic success of the West which is still has a stranglehold on Africa, and we’re also paying for the carbon emission sins of the richest nations of the world: which is Climate Change.
Timothy Kabbah, Sierra Leone’s Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, said in a recent television interview posted in several social media platforms that “if it’s the will of God”, he would be ready to succeed Retired Brigadier Maada Bio as President. Those words reflect one of the biggest problems of the African psyche.
In the aforementioned interview, Timothy Kabbah did not tell the public much on what he has achieved as foreign minister (he would ofcourse not say anything about President Bio’s innumerable foreign trips that eclipse the role of foreign ministry), but he invoked God. (It appears as if all Africa’s politicians have been given God’s private mobile number). Then, Timothy lavished praise on the real ‘SLPP-God’: Retired Brigadier Maada Bio. (Another bane of the bureaucrats and political class in the Bio government: flattery that is highly rewarding for them would be thrown about like potent policies).
Timothy Kabbah: Whoever or whatever the force we know in the English language as “God” that has created the known universe – that according to world-famous astrophysicist, Brian Cox – of an estimated two trillion galaxies in the observable universe; the God that has created the force of gravity holding galaxies and suns and planets in place; the God that has created still-mysterious forces known as “dark matter” that keeps suns and planets from flying off into space as they spin within galaxies, and “dark energy” that gets the universe to be stretching at faster than the speed of light…is not likely that this God is interfering in the minutiae of human affairs on a planet 4.6 billion years in age, a God interfering in the affairs of homo sapiens just about 300,000 years old, on a planet where life started emerging over three billion years ago. If God was a meddling God, how would this God have allowed a Adolf Hitler to be Chancellor of Germany, allowed to plunge the world into the Second World War, resulting in 70 million people dying? And the Holocaust on 6 million Jews? After his scorched earth guerilla tactics for nine years, after his policy of amputation of men, women, children, even babies, did God listen to Foday Sankoh’s prayers so that he would be made in the Lome Peace Agreement of 2000 “equivalent to Vice President” in President Tejan Kabbah’s government, and for Foday Sankoh to be made Chairman of the Strategic Minierals Commission, having more economic powers than President Tejan Kabbah? Come on!!
When Africa’s national leadership, and political class, fail to think, and act strategically to find solutions to Africa’s mounting problems, after being moved more by selfish desires, they put the blame on God as their people wallow in worsening poverty. What is the strategic thinking of the African leadership on the harsh realities of Climate Change?
Fatima Maada Bio
About a week ago, on social media there was a poster with the beauty queen beautiful photo of First Lady Fatima Maada Bio, with these words: “Building Resilience for Women and Girls in the Face of Climate Change and Conflict….”. It’s quite good. The enchanting beauty, resonance, and Nollywood-practised poise of the First Lady, would be a powerful force in the Climate Change War. Yes, it’s WAR! But, take a closer look at key words in that poster: “building resilience”.
What is “resilience”?
According to the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, resilience (a noun) is:
1. ” _the ability of people or things to feel better quickly after something unpleasant, such as shock,_ _injury, etc.
2. _the ability of a substance to return to its original shape after it has been bent,_ _stretched or pressed”._
Let’s try to see how this “resilience” can work out in the context of vulnerable women and girls in the throes of Climate Change as it would affect poverty-stricken countries like Sierra Leone.
Please read the following paragraphs carefully! Slowly.
It’s now or never
“After a contentious approval session where scientists and government officials went through the report line by line, the UN’s Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has now published its guiding on what the world can do to avoid an extremely dangerous future.
“First, the bad news – even if all the policies to cut carbon that governments had put in place by the end of 2020 were fully implemented, the world will still warm by 3.2 Celsius this century.
“This finding has drawn the ire of the UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres: ‘ Some governments and business leaders are saying one thing – but doing another. Simply put, they are lying. And the results will be catastrophic’
“That sort of temperature rise will see our planet hit by ‘ unprecedented heatwaves, terrifying storms, and widespread water shortages’.
“To avoid that fate, the world must keep the rise in temperatures at or under 1.5 Celsius this century, says researchers.
“The good news is that the latest IPCC summary shows that it can be done, in what Guterres calls ‘a viable and financially sound manner….
” To stay under 1.5 Celsius, according to the IPCC, means that carbon emissions from not only everything that we do, but, also what we use or eat must peak by 2025, and tumble rapidly after that, reaching net-zero by the middle of this century…” (SOURCE: Climate change: IPCC scientists say it’s ‘now or never’ to limit warming – BBC News; Matt McGrath, environment correspondent, 4 April, 2025)
Do you really understand the words of the IPCC, and can you juxtapose those words within the perspective of our First Lady’s use of the word “resilience”?
In Sierra Leone, there have been intensified slash-and-burn farming methods as our population has increased dramatically after the civil war between 1991 to 2002. To grow crops to eat, the subsistence farmers who provide 60% of our GDP continue to chop down the forests, and grow food on soils with less and less nutrients. There have been dramatic increase in deforestation. With forest cover gone, the heavy rainfall in our country, in our region, means dramatically increased soil erosion. The nutrient in our top soils largely lost, our farmers plant crops, but they get smaller and smaller yields; crops less able to resist pests and other plant diseases. Less nutritious foods for the majority. Our soils are rapidly becoming sterile. That is not Climate Change. _That is_ _environmental degradation._
Climate Change would just worsen the effects of environmental degradation. Climate Change would mean heavier rainfall for longer periods – washing away more top soils.
The loss of genetic diversity as we lose our tropical rainforest means that insects and other microorganisms that help nourish the forests and soils would be lost.
Climate Change’s more warming could mean more forest fires; and less water in rivers or even dry river beds. Hungrier women and girls would have to walk miles and miles for food, and water. They would have less time to take care of children at home; girls would be exposed to rapists or sexual predators; and would have less time for academic pursuits. How would they show “resilience” in these contexts? Learn to endure hunger for 12 hours in a day? Fight off males trying to rape them?
How would a country like Sierra Leone where President Bio in his seven years presidency has allowed intense and rampant commercial logging show “resilience” – when irreparable and irreversible damage have been done, is being done, to the tropical rainforests all over the country, especially in districts like Koinadugu and Falaba in northeast Sierra Leone?
“Resilience” means “the ability of a substance to return to its original shape after it had been bent, stretched…”. There would never be resilience for the irreparable loss of genetic materials in our tropical rainforests. Not tree planting.
About 90% of the governing elites as State House officials, ministers, heads of government agencies, parliamentarians, a few corporate leaders, civil society leadership, are crammed in affluent ghettos in the
Westend of Freetown. They have little ecological or environmental sense to appreciate the enormity of environmental degradation in our poverty-stricken country. Or, they care little for the people they were once part of living in the provinces. They live a life of relative luxury in Freetown, enjoying imported goods. It matters little to them that about 70% of Sierra Leoneans live in poverty. And 10% of them are multidimensionaly poor. In Freetown, significant numbers of poor people live in nasty and choked slums that the rich don’t see. Environmental degradation and effects of Climate Change are as abstract to these Freetown-based elite as they are to elites in New York, London, or, Paris. In their greed and insensitivity, they have hastily and recklessly, over the past fifteen years, climbed above the legal Green Belt on the mountains of the Freetown Peninsular and use slash-and-burn methods to clear dense tropical rainforests – _unpardonable ecological_ _crime_ – to construct their $500,000 mansions, often, with monies stolen from the poor masses through government agencies. The result?
The Guma Valley Water Company (GVWA), the only water company supplying pipe borne water to about 30% of the 2 million inhabitants of Freetown, has been raising alarms about accelerated deforestation on the mountains of the Freetown Peninsular, destroying the water catchment area of Freetown. Only last week in September, 2025, Members of Parliament of a parliamentary committee went up the mountains to see the gravity of deforestation, and what it means for reduced water supply, and likely mudslides. The MPs posted on social media video interviews voicing out chilling words on the looming calamities for Freetown. Will they make tougher laws that would be retroactive? I doubt that. Like with the President, the MPs are likely to side with their peers of privileged elite , and ignore the masses who voted for them to become MPs.
Camaraderie of the elites victimising and killing the masses.
On June 23, 2024, the President, Retired Brigadier Maada Bio, during a Townhall Meeting organised by the information ministry at the Bintumani International Conference Centre in Freetown, said he would take inflexibly tough action against those elites who have violated environmental laws to construct their mansions above the Green Belt on the Freetown Peninsular. One year after, the President has woefully failed to take necessary soldierly action on land encroachers violating the environmental laws of Sierra Leone. About a month ago this 2025, the President was shown in a video expressing his disgust about rapid deforestation on the mountains of the Freetown Peninsular, endangering the water catchment areas. The President said he has ordered a multi-agency committee to immediately address the issue. He’s not likely to take tough action again. I speculate that once such a committee realises that the offenders are the powerful political class and senior public officials, the President would not take action. The camaraderie among the political class of Sierra Leone that cuts across political parties is a guarantee that the elites would protect themselves, and rationalise their green devilry, take no action on the green culprits
How would the First Lady’s avowed ‘resilience” programme for women and girls work in Freetown, as Climate Change worsens the effects of environmental degradation? When mudslides and floodings take place, would they compensate the relatives of the dead with thousands of dollars; build houses for those who would lose their homes? During the Dry Season as drinking water becomes pathetically scarce, would the First Lady have a programme to supply drinking water to millions of people in their neighbourhoods? What about the heatwaves? Would the First Lady have a programme to have air-conditioning in thousands of homes to make women and girls “resilient”? Would speeches alone of the First Lady internationally move the needle on positive actions to urge the developed countries to swiftly reduce the use of fossil fuels and minimise global warming to keep global temperatures below 2 degrees Celsius of pre-industrial levels? O, come on!!
At Conference of Parties (COP)-26 of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) one of the most powerful speeches – resonant, articulate, fiesty, appealing to the consciences of the developed countries – was by Mia Mottley, the Prime Minister of Barbados. Let me quote excerpts of her COP-26 speech here:
“”On finance, we are $20 billion short of the $100 billion…($100 billion pledged by the richest nations of the world for Climate Change adaptation and mitigation in ALL the developing countries).
“What excuse should we give for the failure in the words of that Caribbean icon Eddie Grant, ‘ will they mourn us on the frontline?’…
“Are we so blinded and hardened that we can no longer appreciate the cries of humanity?….
“Do some leaders in this world believe they can survive and thrive on their own?….
“Can there be peace and prosperity if one third of the world literally prospers and the other two thirds of the world lives under siege and face calamitous threats to our wellbeing?” Did she stimulate necessary action?
Has the death sentence on poor countries been reversed?
Mia Mottley at COP-26 again: “Earth the COP. That’s what it said. Earth is COP. For those who have eyes to see, for those who have ears to listen, and for those who have hearts to feel, 1.5 is what we need to survive. 2 degrees, yes S-G, is a death sentence for the people of Antigua and Barbuda, for the people of the Maldives, for the people of Dominica and Fiji, for the people of Kenya and Mozambique, for the people of Samoa and Barbados…
“We do not need that dreaded death sentence and we have come here to say, ‘try harder, try harder’, because our people, the climate army, the world, the planet needs our actions now, not next year, not in the next decade'”.
Mia Mottley at COP-26 Glasgow, Scotland, United Kingdom from 31 October to 13 November, 2021 was resonant; a female version of Rev. Martin Luther King II.
There would be other known moral voices, and, famous powerful speakers at COP meetings – like former US President, Barrack Obama, and then Prince Charles (today’s King Charles) of the United Kingdom, former US Vice President, Al Gore. ..have also been speaking at the huge jamboree of international conferences of COP. . There would be rapturous applause for them. But little would change in real terms. In the next COP and the next COP and the next COP, it would be back to more “greenwashing”. There have been more carbon dioxide and methane gases pumped into the atmosphere since the first COP in 1994 than in the previous one hundred years. There is urgent and desperate need for a paradigm shift in how humanity addresses its greatest challenge, its greatest war: Climate Change. I present that hope. Again!
Paradigm shift urgently needed in the Climate Change War
On March 24, 2025, I was taken by the National Security Adviser to the President, Retired Brigadier General Kellie Conteh (Once, National Coordinator of the Office of National Security [ONS] in the SLPP government of President Tejan Kabbah; former defence minister in the SLPP government of President Maada Bio) to meet the First Lady, Mrs Fatima Maada Bio, at her tastily-furnished office in Goderich, Freetown.
The idea is: get a regular luxury cruise ship, and make parts of it for the reenactment of the Great Passage from Africa across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas, when Negroid African slaves who had been kidnapped, and, sold into slavery in Africa during the four hundred years of the Protracted Holocaust of the Atlantic Slave Trade. The nastiness of slaves imbibing each other’s vomit and shit onboard slave ships, and being thrown overboard into the ocean when sick or dead, have been sanitized in history books available to Africans in Africa, and people of African descent in the Americas and Europe. The descendants of the slave owners in Europe and America watch films on the Atlantic Slave Trade only for entertainment purposes. Onboard my proposed SLAVE SHIP-FREEDOM SHIP, the horrors of the Atlantic Slave Trade would be given lease of life. Part of the message would be: man-made Climate Change could be much worse than the Atlantic Slave Trade, much worse than the Second World War; much worse than the dropping of the hydrogen bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end the Second World War in 1945; climate change’s ramifications would be much worse than the genocide on indigenous peoples in the Americas by European conquerors starting the 16th century; climate change would be much worse than all the previous wars of all humanity put together. Climate Change could end all human life – after collapse of civilization, and nightmarish horrors on all humans, especially children, women and girls. I need financing to do video documentaries to get people to put these horrors into film; put Climate Change into perspective.
The slave ship is not for an event; it’s a continuous process
_Again: the SLAVE SHIP-FREEDOM SHIP idea is not an event for just_ _COP-30_ . It would be continuous process to educate billions of humanity on the science, the economics, the history and religion, the racism that undergird where we are today with Climate Change. Inside the SLAVE SHIP-FREEDOM SHIP we would concoct imaginative ways to get Climate Change messages to targeted groups. If the President and First Lady take off their Slave Mentality caps (“Slave Mentality” norto cuss O. Nar diagnosis of the mindsets of nearly all Africans) they would see the gem of my idea, and give it timely support, realising that Kwame Nkrumah’s words in 1963 were prescient, for indeed imperialism has grown “more ruthless and experienced”.
On board the SLAVE SHIP-FREEDOM SHIP will be scientists, astrophysicists, indigenous herbalists, youth and female leaders, political, religious, civil society, business, media, music, film, athletic leaders, etc….being intensely educated on the Climate Change emergency; preparing them to excite popular action; hatching and nurturing those thoughts to stimulate the necessary radical change in global religious, political, economic thoughts.
The SLAVE SHIP-FREEDOM SHIP will sail around the world continually to let people see troubled spots and model areas of sound nature management. not be year-after-year the elites in countries congregating in COP meetings to engage in what Climate Change activist, Greta Thunberg, derides as “blah blah blah”.
In the Climate Change War, there must be no neutrality. There is no Plan B; no planet B to run to – that is echoing former United Nations Secretary General, Ban Ki Moon in 2012
The logic of Kwame Nkrumah’s passionate appeal to Africans to “unite or perish” in 1963 is more demanding today because of the Climate Change Emergency than it was 62 years ago when the Organization of African Unity (OAU) was being inaugurated.
Sierra Leone’s 8 million people with a GDP of about $4 billion is puny compared to Nigeria’s 220 million people with a GDP of almost half trillion dollars. Not to talk of 8 million Sierra Leoneans negotiating with 1.4 billion Chinese on a climate change table.
Message for all Africans; all humanity
Widely circulate this article. This is not a message to only the President and First Lady of Sierra Leone; or, a message only to other African presidents. It is a message for all Sierra Leoneans; all Africans; all humanity. One of the greatest problems we face in the Climate Change War is that majority of people, especially in countries like Sierra Leone, appear to think, and, act, as if the Climate Change Emergency would evaporate when presidents and ministers meet with the global elite in conference halls, and bump into each other at luxury hotels. That is not just sheer idiocy, it’s lunacy – given the precedence of COP-1 to COP-29 not addressing the core issue of reducing carbon emissions.
We must prevent the worst case scenarios that scientists are warning us could happen if radical actions are not taken as regards Climate Change