By Hassan I. Conteh
Reports have reached this medium that workers of Sierra Leone Agricultural Research Institute (SLARI) are still wishing government of Sierra Leone to increase their monthly salaries especially under the current economic challenges in the country.
The workers who have served a number of years in the institution have still not been receiving appreciable monthly pay across the country.
While even the senior workers are receiving well below $USD 50 (approximately Le 1m) government of Sierra Leone have yet to improve their status since promised around July 2021.
A senior staff told Africa24 via Whatsapp that they had explored all available means to influencing respective authorities to addressing their plights but all moves have ended up on authorities’ deaf ears.
“My brother, except you, maybe, you have an idea as to what next will be the line of action that you’d advice we should take as workers [SLARI] but for us [senior and junior workers from all SLARI branches, we had held many protests and several meetings and dialogues with key stakeholders of the Ministry of Finance, Artisanal Workers Union SL, SLARI directors, Ministry of Labour, in order to address concerns about our poorly-paid salaries and, in overall, to look into our deplorable conditions of services but we kept being fooled by authorities since then,” says a SLARI senior worker in Freetown.
“All what we had been getting over the past years from authorities were reports and correspondences but with no concrete action.”
SLARI is the government oldest rice research-arm but it has been severally neglected by successive governments over the years. Government of Sierra Leone has failed to improve the institution’s quality and efficiency.
The rice growing department of Sierra Leone’s government which is having branches across the country has not been fully capacitated by the central government.
Workers of SLARI have similarly not been empowered with latest modern farming skills to enable them to be able to produce more food for Sierra Leoneans in the country.
“Since only few of us went to Nigeria to undertake a course in agricultural farming, our salaries have still remained the same and we the old staff have not been promoted to another positions within the sector; instead only new staff who don’t know much about the job are being elevated,” claimed, a SLARI staff at Kambia Rice Research Institute in an interview in one of SLARI’s protests in Freetown in 2021.
Over decades ago, SLARI used to be a viable farm-crop research institute in Sierra Leone and in West Africa. In those days rice was produced in Sierra Leone abundantly by farmers trained by SLARI.
There were available commercialized farming machines such as bulldozers used to plough farm lands and plant crops seeds. A town, Rokupr in Kambia, used to produce plenty rice yields which was capable of feeding a million of Sierra Leoneans. But that is now a long-gone dream, says the male senior worker attached in Kambia district, north of Sierra Leone.
Rice per a bag was not as costly as it is today. Since a sack of locally produced rice which is popularly known as ‘country rice’ was cheaper in those days around in the 1980s, the unit sold in cups was also cheaper to afford by the poor.
The ‘Country rice’ used to be seen in plenty supply in market places in Sierra Leone. Other varieties of seed-crops could be seen sold at a cheaper rate.
Okara, ‘big beans’, corns, millet, soya beans, etc., for example, were in abundant supply as local farmers had the courage then to work in large farms where machines and farm tools are available.
But, these days, the direct opposite operates as lack of motivation and encouragement on peasant farmers and agriculture extension workers seriously dampens the rice growers’ interests. Many peasant farmers in Sierra Leone have abandoned farming.
And, the irony exists nowadays, as SLARI workers don’t eat the local rice they supposed to have grown themselves, instead, they are buying expensively the white grain rice shipped from abroad. A bag of government import rice has gone up, which is almost equal to a worker’s salary of SLARI. A sack of imported rice is now sold at about NLe 800, as of August 2023.
Sierra Leone, like many countries in sub-Sahara Africa and the world over, may be experiencing devastating food shortages, anytime soon, if the government and other governments in the world don’t work hard to produce their own food they eat.
Already, countries like India in Asia, and Republic of Guinea in West Africa, have recently banned their agricultural exports to other countries.
The ban on exporting rice to other nations in the world by India came lately end of July this year, and is said to affect Sierra Leone and many other African nations very badly. This is because most African countries including Sierra Leone aren’t producing the food they eat but these countries are heavily relying on food imports from India, Malaysia, China and Ukraine.
Therefore, any resistance by front line workers of local rice production could represent more severe threats to Sierra Leone’s bread basket on food sufficiency, while particularly; rice scarcity will continue to hit very badly our local markets.