KUSH!
SIERRA LEONE TURNS YOUTHS’ GRAVEYARD
By Ibrahim Alusine Kamara (Kamalo)
The drug trade and use has transformed Sierra Leone into a graveyard for youths— the leaders of tomorrow. They are dying like flies everyday, picked up in corners of streets and everywhere across the board. In the capital city of Freetown alone, 220 corpses have reportedly been picked up from various streets since January to October 2025. The country is not just painfully losing its development contemporary foot soldiers, and human wealth—it is silently losing its very soul.
Amid this tragedy exists a sad reality: the lack of a political will in the fight against the proliferation of drugs and its rampant use in the country even as the state is losing its credibility globally. The abuse of kush, a synthetic drug, has sent numerous able-bodied youths early to their graves. Yet, though President Julius Maada Bio’s government has been touting about human capital development, it appears his government has lost sight on the fact that youths are the cornerstone and steady path to nation’s prosperity, and protecting them from deadly synthetic substances must be a priority. Where would the human capital development optimism lie when the youths are exposed to drug addiction and its devastating consequences?
Sierra Leone is in deep quagmire, an occurrence that has left forward-thinking Sierra Leoneans pondering without end. Every household now feels the brunt of the widespread use of kush directly or indirectly. Victims of the deadly substance are swarming rehabilitation centers daily, hospitals crammed, and graveyards constantly flooded with corpses—gone not as a result of natural diseases—but as a result of drug abuse stemming from objectionable human behaviours.
However, even as such a tragedy has crept in and stayed with us for a considerable period of time now, and even as the nation bleeds, and mothers and fathers are wailing over the man-made national catastrophe that is aggressively killing their sons and daughters—the nation’s wealth— and calling upon the authorities to act decisively, the fight against kush appears to be duplicitous. On one face, the drug magnates and their immediate allies are highly protected, and on the other face, petty dealers, and the users are harassed with police raids and brought to book.
Over the time bound, troubling allegations abound and growing about people within the circles of governance, including those close to the First Family, being the drug trade magnates. Allegations about a Jos Leijddekers or Bolle Jos, or a Umaru Sheriff, enjoying high political protection in Sierra Leone, and allegedly the son-in-law of the president are not strange. Even a close relative of the president, Admire Bio, has since been rumoured to be one of the kush kingpins in the country. Opposition leaders have called for the extradition of the alleged Umaru Sheriff to save the country from the global embarrassment it has been plunged into, but this is yet to be seen. Growing calls by the public for Admire Bio’s activities to be scrutinized by the Police also resulted in laughable circumstances. The police command would do all but notified Admire Bio of their plan to search her residence in a future date, and when it came to pass, the very Police said it could not find anything of interest.
“How nonsensical was it! Would she not arrange her home well before the police search after that notification? Admire was to be considered a cursed moron had the police found anything of interest during their search,” a citizen commented.
Today, Admire Bio has been emboldened to become an arrogant brat that could freely throw invectives at a distinguished journalist, and threatening to beat him for speaking truth to the Police over their bias approach when it came to searching her home as compared to others in respect of the same allegations.
The seeming lack of political will to combat the drug trade and abuse appears to have been extended to the very national anti-drug agency. The National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA) has fared no better, though established to enforce laws against the cultivation, processing, sale, trafficking, and use of hard drugs in Sierra Leone, investigate suspected drug offenders, enforce drug laws, collaborate with international partners, and global organizations like the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) to combat transnational drug crimes, and implement treatment and rehabilitation programs. The agency cannot well execute these all-important mandates and tackle Sierra Leone’s growing drug crisis—the increasing use of synthetic drugs like kush, in particular, not as a result of official unwillingness, but because it is understaffed, starved of the required budget, lack of the means of mobility and other administrative amenities.
The lose of youthful lives to kush is huge, but there still remains a choice for the authorities. They can choose to take a decisive action to stamp down the proliferation of drugs into the country by launching a manhunt for the drug magnates and the implementation of hash measures against them, or choose to forgo Sierra Leone’s development by not taking a more robust action and leaving its youth population preys to the killer drug.