Varney

Open Letter to my President Dear President @julius_maadabio, As a concerned citizen and someone who voted you in, I bring to you a concern that has been feeding my generation. I come from a fishing family and have survived through that trade for so long. Mr. President, in 2012, you weren’t in State House, but @ebklegacy was, and he made a choice that changed coastal Sierra Leone. He banned illegal trawling. He built the Joint Maritime Committee with satellite tracking. Coastal catches rose 30% by 2014, adding roughly 16 million dollars to fishing communities. He put two hundred outboard boats into seventy villages through the Youth in Fishing project. People had work. Markets had fish. The sector was moving. Today the picture is reversed. Boat registration fees jumped from 100 thousand to 500 thousand Leones, up to 1 million for some vessels, with a proposed 1.5 million annual fee. Fishermen at Shella Water, Goderich, and Portee have threatened strikes. The Fishermen’s Union says member catches are down about 40%. A 2023 survey found a 60% decline in catches since 2017, and 70% of women fish processors saw profits fall by more than half. UNICEF linked rising child malnutrition to protein deficiency. Illegal fishing still costs this country an estimated 50 to 100 million dollars a year, more than three times what the legal industry returns to the treasury. And while that happens, 55 million dollars in Chinese-funded construction is going into the Julius Maada Bio Industrial Fishing Port, a facility for industrial fleets. The Industrial Fishing Company Association itself says over sixty tuna purse seiners licensed by Sierra Leone don’t even offload here because there’s no harbor that meets their standards. The good fish, tuna, mackerel, shrimp, gets shipped to Guinea, Liberia, and Senegal for dollar sales. Fisheries employ around half a million Sierra Leoneans and supply eighty percent of the population’s protein. This is not a side sector. It is the country’s dinner table. Mr. President, you have made agriculture your priority, and that matters. But the sea feeds this nation too, and it is being taxed into silence while the money flows out. We are not asking you to abandon the port. We are asking you to look at the people who cannot afford the license to fish in their own waters, and to ask what Koroma’s era understood that this one has forgotten: that a fishing industry only works when the fishers can still afford to go to sea.