Sierra Leone’s tragedy

I was depressed to learn yesterday that nineteen people died on a Paramount-operated helicopter in Sierra Leone on Sunday night. They had been travelling to Lunghi airport from Freetown after a football game. Unlike in Europe, where it is usually rich businessmen and football club chairmen who travel back after matches on helicopters, in Sierra Leone everyone has to do it. Lunghi is situated just over the bay from Freetown, so your options are: a car, which can take over six hours on appalling roads; a ferry, which can take longer, with few lifejackets or lifeboats; or the helicopter, which should take about seven minutes. (If Tony Blair had felt inclined to leave Lunghi on his whirlwind trip there last week – ironically to be made an honorary ‘Paramount Chief’ – he too would have had to take a helicopter across the water.) The old Russian Mi-8 helicopter that was carrying these doomed Togolese sports ministers and journalists on Sunday exploded and burst into flame before coming to land. Most of the victims were ‘burnt beyond recognition’, according to Chernor Ojuku Sesay, of the Sierra Leone Football Association.
 
Having travelled on this terrifying contraption myself a few times, I can’t say I’m surprised by this latest (predictable) tragedy, but I am nevertheless horrified – and angry. Why is Paramount, owned by a Nigerian businessman and prominent on a list of airlines banned by the EU, still operating? The UN have tried to ground the service many times, and it was supposed to have been shut down completely after safety fears just a few months ago. Earlier this year, historian Simon Schama was in a helicopter that blew up in the air; he only escaped because the explosion happened early enough in the flight for the plane to make a crash landing (literally, to ‘drop out of the air’). My friends in Freetown tell me that ‘the rumours are, somebody took a significant bribe to put Paramount back in the air… It’s effectively deaths for cash.’ In this beautiful but desperate country, which is struggling so valiantly to get itself back onto its feet after one of Africa’s most brutal civil wars, what a very miserable state of affairs this is.