Sierra Leone is full of hope following last week's presidential elections, but in a country rife with corruption and inequality, the ghosts of its civil war still stalk the land, reports Mary Fitzgerald.
When the war came to Lalehun, the village was already deserted. The birds that had roosted in a tree in the main clearing for as long as anyone could remember disappeared some days before, and the villagers, taking that as a sign the rebels were near, decided it was time to leave. They didn't have far to go. Lalehun, a small cluster of thatched and wattled houses, straddles Sierra Leone's border. Across the nearby river is Guinea. The people of Lalehun sat out the war in refugee camps, returning to find their village had been razed to the ground.
Today, it is almost back to its pre-war self - homes have been rebuilt, local farming is being resurrected and the village now boasts a school, water pump and soccer field. It's a story replicated in many corners of Sierra Leone, five years after the country emerged from a brutal civil war that resulted in the killing of at least 50,000 people and the rape, mutilation and displacement of countless others. "In parts of the country, so much rebuilding has taken place that sometimes it looks like the war never happened," says Sahr Yambasu, a Methodist minister who grew up in Lalehun but now lives in Galway with his Irish wife and three children.
Those keen to talk up the positive in Sierra Leone point out the few hundred miles of newly tarred roads, the rise in primary-school enrolment or the number of hospitals that have reopened. The relative calm of last weekend's presidential and parliamentary elections, the first since UN peacekeepers left two years ago, was hailed as another milestone for the war-ravaged country.
Peace, however, has not brought prosperity and for every story of painstaking reconstruction, there are many more of bitter disillusionment fuelled by widespread poverty and endemic corruption. Five years and much international aid later, the root problems that triggered the war in the first place are still as much in evidence as ever. "The war is over but many causes of the war, like poverty and unemployment, have not been addressed and that is very worrying," says Sahr. "We have a saying here that a hungry man is an angry man. That is the danger."
Languishing in second-last place - above Niger - in the UN human development index, Sierra Leone remains one of the poorest countries in the world, a place where more children die before they reach the age of five than anywhere else. If you're born in Sierra Leone, your life expectancy is little more than 40 years. Nearly seven in 10 adults live on less than a euro a day. More than 65 percent are illiterate.
MANY SIERRA LEONEANS look back on the country's past and wonder what went wrong. Once known as the Athens of West Africa, this former British colony was home to the region's first university. Apart from its renowned diamonds and gold, Sierra Leone sits on extensive reserves of iron ore, bauxite and other minerals. Since the war ended, hundreds of millions of euro in aid has poured into the country. Last year, $1.6 billion of Sierra Leone's debt was cancelled.
"Given the natural resource base and the level of donor aid, Sierra Leone five years on should not be one of the poorest countries in the world," says Lynda Kerley, country programme manager for Christian Aid. Yet the gulf between Sierra Leone's wealthy elite - those who dominate politics and control the country's diamond fields and other resources - and its impoverished masses is as wide as ever.
Ask Sierra Leoneans why it remains so and the answer will most likely be one word - corruption.
"Endemic corruption was a central factor that produced the dire conditions that made civil war inevitable," the country's Truth and Reconciliation Commission said in its final report, published in 2004.
"Sierra Leone remains in the grip of pervasive corruption, which, if not arrested, will sap the country of its life force and lay the ground for further conflict," it warned.
Three years later, not much has changed. Sierra Leone came 148th out of 163 nations surveyed for the 2006 Corruption Perceptions Index, produced by Berlin-based watchdog Transparency International. It scored 2.2 on a scale of zero to 10 - a rating of less than three indicates that "corruption is perceived as rampant".
In April, a report commissioned by DFID, the British government's Department for International Development, slated the ineffectiveness of Sierra Leone's anti-corruption commission, a British-sponsored body set up to chase high-profile offenders, and recommended funding be suspended.
The report detailed how, last year, the commission filed cases against 12 people, including a primary- school headmaster, the caterer at a psychiatric hospital and the accounts officer of a library. All were accused of embezzling small amounts of government money.
By focusing on such low-level individuals, the commission's work sent out the wrong message about graft, Brussels-based think-tank the International Crisis Group noted in a report published last month.
"Corruption in the public services . . . remains the elephant in the room," it added.
In an interview with The Irish Times, Ernest Bai Koroma - current leader in the race for Sierra Leone's presidency following last weekend's landmark elections - said tackling corruption would be a priority if he becomes president.
"I want to ensure corruption will not be the hindrance it has been up to now," he said, accusing the previous government of misusing funds from international donors. Koroma pledged to review and strengthen anti-corruption legislation. "I want to ensure there will be nobody above the law," he insisted. "There will be no sacred cows, no one will be protected, and I will lead by example."
Such promises may fail to convince those who remember the dubious record of his party, the All People's Congress (APC). In power for much of the last four decades, the APC's excesses were widely considered to have sown the seeds that led to civil war. It was during the APC's time in government that widespread corruption set into the national fabric, popularising the maxim "oosie dem tie cow nar dae ee go eat", which, in the local Krio language, means a cow grazes wherever it is tethered.
THE DRIVE FROM Freetown to Lalehun, a spine-jarring 12 hours spent negotiating cratered roads and flooded dirt tracks, reveals many of the challenges facing Sierra Leone and some of its small victories. In the eastern diamond fields, the town of Kenema, its streets lined with gemstone dealers, gives way to desperately poor villages where unemployed young men spend the day drinking palm wine on the verandahs of muddy houses. Further on, places such as Segbwema, once a thriving town with a renowned hospital and nursing school before the rebels sacked it, are slowly coming back to life. Every mile or so, a sign announcing projects funded by international aid organisations and NGOs - including many leading Irish agencies - comes into view. Sahr points out what has changed since his last visit - a building here, a school there, and a better stretch of road in between.
He is on the board of Christian Aid Ireland, a branch of the international agency that has worked with Sierra Leonean partner organisations since the mid-1980s. Much of the work it does in Sierra Leone is related to encouraging good governance, civil society and development. Sahr believes his country must ultimately help itself.
"This country has enormous natural resources. It is potentially very wealthy. It just needs leadership and initiative, both of which have been missing up to now," he says.
Abu Brima, who works with the Network Movement for Justice and Development (NMJD), a Christian Aid partner organisation, hopes the government that emerges from last Saturday's elections will make a difference.
"It is vital that any new administration finds the vision and political will to change the deep-rooted causes of inequity, exclusion and injustice; it is the only way my country will emerge from the depths of poverty and underdevelopment," Brima says.
Victor Angelo, the UN secretary general's representative in Sierra Leone, believes one of the most troubling issues facing the country is the plight of its youth. More than half the population is under the age of 35, and some 80 per cent of those are unemployed.
"There are thousands of young people who feel their expectations are not being met," he says. "This is a country that could be a model of social and economic organisation because they have the resources and a relatively small population," he says. "It is a country with a future, but it is also a country that can easily go back."