Mo Poole in Sierra Leone

The police has been a fundamental part of my life. I stated work in 1966 at Cannock Police Station as a civilian clerk.
One of my friends had just got a job at the police station and said how marvellous it was and I should write in for a job because there were a couple of more going.
So I did, and almost 40 years later I am still working for the police, albeit in a different country.
Just to fill in the gaps: after Cannock in 1969 I went to Rugeley and in 1975 I started in the regulars and retired as an Inspector at the end of 2000.
Just before I retired I saw an advertisement for a position as Local Needs Adviser to the Sierra Leone Police.
The job description said that it was all about putting the bobby back on the beat and it was part of a restructuring/recovery process after years of decline, through war, politics and corruption.
I got the job and stayed there for almost four years. I am now setting up a Non-Government Organisation Uniform Solutions to help the police wives (and others in the military, prisons and fire force) find sustainable work.

Getting started with the Sierra Leone Police was not quite so straight-forward as starting work at Cannock Police Station.
The two-day interview was fixed right in the middle of my last week of my service. Any week is busy, but that was no ordinary week.
First thing on the Monday morning I had a ‘Gender Agenda’ meeting at West Midlands Police Headquarters,
I skipped lunch and drove up to Glasgow for the interview that started at 8 a.m. Tuesday morning. The journey wasn’t too bad, but I had a lot going through my mind.
I arrived at the hotel, checked in, fell asleep and then woke up at 4 a.m. still fully dressed.
I arrived at the interview at 7.30 a.m. and sat reading the newspaper until I was called to start the process. It was the Times Newspaper and there was an article about Sierra Leone on the second page with a few facts and figures.
During the interview someone else must have read that newspaper because it consisted of questions around that same article.

The interviewing panel knew I was retiring that week and they rearranged the schedule to enable me to go through all of the assessments and leave by 7 p.m.
However, from about 4 p.m. that day there had been a very heavy storm (it was the end of November)) and it was still raining heavy by the time I came to leave.
I drove carefully down the motorway, but acute tiredness hit me, by the time I was north of Blackpool. I stopped at the Charnock Richards service station for a coffee and set off again.
I was fortunate that there were not too many vehicles on the road because at some stage I am sure I dozed off and after that I stopped at each of the service stations until I reached Stafford and home, a little after midnight.

Wednesday was my leaving lunch, which was really memorable – I think most of us remember our ‘do’ and mine was no different. I had some wonderful gifts and lots of my colleagues I had met throughout my service were there to say farewell. On the Thursday I handed in my uniform and on Friday there was coffee with the Chief and I was away.

On the Saturday I set off for Bulgaria, I had secured a British Council contract for training senior members of the Bulgarian National Police Service on the multi-agency approach to child protection.
I was away for ten days and the day after I came home I was told I had the job in Sierra Leone. Christmas was a week away and I had to arrange for medicals, jabs and security advice sessions in London. All that was done in record time, considering it was the festive season.
Four years ago, on 1st February, 2001 I set off for Sierra Leone.

I didn’t know what to expect, I knew there was a war going on, I knew it had been terrible. I remember vividly the banner headlines ‘Freetown is Burning’ when the rebels came into the capital city, which is something the people had never expected would happen. Amputations, maiming, torture had been in addition to murder and everyone was scared of the rebels. The police were targets and people had just scattered, but the city is on a peninsular surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean and there weren’t too many places they could hide.

It was with all those thoughts in my mind that I landed in Freetown at 5 a.m. in the morning. The airport was like a huge shed, which since I have been in Africa for such a long time now, I know was pretty normal for an African arrivals hall.
Men in military uniform were everywhere. Our baggage was brought off on wheelbarrows and someone told me to sit down and so I sat down.
Miraculously my baggage arrived at my feet and I went through lots of formalities and by the time it was light I was on board an ex-military M18 helicopter (a big one with crew benches instead of forward facing seats).
Our baggage was underneath a net in the middle of the helicopter and we all clambered over it to find somewhere to sit.
By the time we took off it was daylight and as we crossed the Sierra Leone River and started our descent I could see battle ships in the harbour, a huge built up city centre and a helipad that looked as if it was on the beach.
Landing was just as exciting – people were everywhere wanting to assist me find my suitcase, get a taxi, or buy a mask all for ‘small-small’: welcome to Africa.

Fortunately my colleagues were waiting on the other side of the barrier and we went straight to the office and I had a briefing on the past problems of the police and why the programme was so different from any other of the police restructuring programmes.
Corruption and politics had brought a once proud police force to its knees and the change programme was just starting to achieve results.

Sierra Leone is one of the poorest country in the world but paradoxically it is also one of the richest with regard to its mineral wealth of gold, diamonds, and oil; it has fertile soil and the in-shore fishing is constant all year round, and offshore fishing is a million dollar business.
Their poverty is linked to the corrupt practices amongst the government and senior civil servants. The poor have no choice but to resort to corrupt practices as a survival strategy.
Police officers are lowly paid. They live in squalid barracks and they don’t get enough nutrition in their food to be able to do their job properly. Malaria, cholera, typhoid and now HIV/AIDs are prevalent.
Compared with other workers, they are probably paid a little more than average, and compared with school teachers, they are paid regularly, but if they have a family feed and children to send to school, then they just cannot live without resorting to corruption.

Police officers want to work in places where they can solicit ‘tips’ and take bribes to look the other way.
It is not surprising that many of the motorists willingly hand over money for the police officer to use his or her discretion to look the other way.
The only way of dealing with traffic offences is to arrest the offender, take them to the police station and detain them overnight for appearance at court the next morning.
Cells have never been a nice place, but in Africa, they are like the ‘black hole of Calcutta’ – sometimes there is are two of them. They are always overcrowded.
The up-holding of human rights was never the priority it is now.
I remembered the first cell block I visited I saw a man sitting on a hammock and then I realised he was doing that because there was no floor space below for him to stand, let alone sit.
A few years before the police project started about 35 people suffocated to death in one of the cells.

The work of the police team was to improve the trust the people had in its police.
The President had asked Tony Blair and the Commonwealth to help him put the police in order. He always had hope for them and his belief goes back to the foundation upon which the Sierra Leone Police was built.

In 1808 Sierra Leone became a Crown Colony and the police became part of a paramilitary West African Frontier Force.
In 1898, the police put down a small rebellion, the Hut Tax war, which was over paying a poll tax (remember how we felt when we thought that was going to happen to us).
Towards the end of the Colonial era, two Royal Commissions commended the police for its exemplary performance during the 1955/56 riots and strikes.
Independence came in 1961 and the elections of 1967 were the start of the coups d’Etat that prevented many of the outright winners assuming their rightful place in parliament.

At that time, the winner was a man called Siaka (Shacker) Stevens and it took him almost a year before the military stood down and let him take over.
After that he never really trusted the military and he built up the police around him.
He turned a police service with a proud history into a highly politicised fighting force. He formed a para-military wing within the SLP, which was almost totally illiterate, ill trained, and ill-mannered.
Even so, at the end of 1970’s the police service was still intact, but political interference had started to creep in.
The two-tier entry into the police service still provided the graduates for the higher ranks, but the junior ranks began to fill up with misfits. Bullying, lying and deceit became a way of life.
He managed to gain greater control over the command and control of the police by bringing the IGP and the Chief of Defence Staff into Parliament.
Slowly he assumed absolute executive power of state and within his first ten years in office he had amended the constitution twice and become head of a single party state.

His term of office ended in 1986 and the deterioration continued, the war started in 1991 and the rebels targeted the police. Every village they went into the police station and the barracks were the first place they hit.
In 1992 the present President, Dr. Ahmed Tejan Kabbah, won the election but another coup took place and young military officers took over.
One of the first things they did was arrest the IGP, and dismiss many of his Senior Police Officers and disarm the paramilitary police.
He eventually executed the Inspector-General of Police.

The military remained in power for four years and after the 1996 elections Ahmad Tejan Kabbah was again declared President and another coup took place.
But this time the President and his Ministers fled for their lives and it was during this time (1997) that President lobbied for support to regain his position.
He had a clear idea of what kind of police service he wanted and wrote the Government Policing Charter.
The policing charter became his outline strategy for the restructuring process that was ultimately provided by the Commonwealth Police Development Task Force with financial assistance from Department of International Development.
By the time I arrived the next stage of the police change programme was underway. Keith Biddle, a former ACC from Kent and a DCC at the Home Office was the Inspector-General of Police.
Keith had been appointed because when the President was restored to power none of the senior police officers had the capacity to rebuild the force.

My job was to put the bobby back on the beat. The SLP were originally constructed on the lines of the Metropolitan Police Act, 1923 and their structure was almost identical to the one I met at Cannock in 1966.
There was an occurrence book, a desk diary and a message book. But with the war owing to the lack of paper and other stationery items they fell into disuse. The same applied to pocket note books and their issue.
To determine how many police officers there should be in any area I needed to know the prevalence of criminality.
Crime statistics hadn’t been kept, only the CID kept figures for their serious crimes, the minor offences hadn’t been recorded.
Freetown was overcrowded with refugees and people who had fled from their villages and there hadn’t been a census since 1984.
Using lots of basic techniques I taught a few police officers how to work out where the most criminal activity was taking place and using the information provided by the UN on refugees and internally displaced people I was able to calculate which were the densely populated areas.
After I did that I changed jobs and went to work directly for Keith Biddle, the Inspector General of Police (a retired Deputy Chief Constable), and we worked through all of the strategic processes needed to ensure that the police never slipped back into the political state that contributed to the war.

Peace wasn’t declared for another 12 months and just before the war ended I led a project to encourage the members of the community to hand in their firearms.
Poverty, bad governance, coups d’Etat, and a general state of fear, insecurity and instability are all linked to the trade in illicit small arms.
Cross border crimes are fuelled by access to the weapons and in Sierra Leone, the ‘blood’ diamonds were traded for the weapons.

As part of the demobilisation process, the rebels handed in their weapons, but the civilians needed the same opportunity.
Even now, since 9/11 arms proliferation in West Africa has been linked to trans-national crime and terrorism.

Keith Biddle remained as IGP until 2003 when the leadership of the SLP was returned to a Sierra Leonean, Brima Acha Kamara, and I was asked to stay for one more year to support the new Inspector General of Police.

I became involved with fund raising for the orphans within a very short time of arriving in Sierra Leone.
One of the members of DfID had undertaken an evaluation of one of the projects and came across an orphanage in the poorest part of the city and they were in a small house in appalling conditions.
They had a school and a vocational training centre. It was the progress of the vocational centre that Nancy Stuart had been evaluating, but she couldn’t ignore the plight of the orphans.
The school house roof was very flimsy and the rainy season was about to come and the roof leaked.
The roof leaked because the school was in the eastern part of the city, and that was the first part that the rebels hit when they came to Freetown. The leaks were caused by bullet holes.
I still had most of my compensatory grant intact and Nigel and I immediately paid for the roof to be repaired and that is how we started supporting the children.

Not all of the children are orphans, we tend to use the term social orphans, because in war children get parted from their parents.
This happens because when they are fleeing mums can only carry one child and the rest have to keep up.
It is unfortunate that the little ones get left behind, as well as the elderly and the sick. Some make it, some don’t.
Nancy’s orphans are the ones that made it and we have continued to support them. Now almost four years later there is a proper children’s home, a good school and vibrant vocational centre.
Almost 700 young people a year pass through the school and vocational centre, and the 60 children have remained as one family.
There have been lots of crises but they are starting to grow up and Nancy can’t see a time when they will ever be funded by the state.
The school teachers are rarely paid and the system of boarding schools died out when the missionaries left in the late 1960’s.

In addition to supporting the children, I have also helped to organise the female police officers into their own association.
They are not active in the sense of improving their working conditions, they work together to improve their own social conditions and fundraise for their children’s activities.
Developing on from this they asked me to assist them set up an NGO which means they will be eligible for donor aid.
This was how Uniform Solutions came into being.
It was the Brigadier who asked me to include the military wives as there are more of them, and they have less money.

I am now learning how to set up micro-finance initiatives that enables the women to work as teams and each one supports the other with their repayments.
It works on the Bangladeshi ‘Grameen’ principle which was highly successful in the 1970’s.
Basically, five people form a team and borrow 20,000 leones each, which amounts to 100,000 leones, which is approximately £20. (A loaf costs 200 leones). With that money they can set up little businesses,
or buy seeds and tools to start up small community gardens.
Catering is the most popular service they like to fund.
They have to repay the money over a period and if one person reneges on the repayment, the other four have to find the money to honour the debt.

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