By Emma Black
As Sierra Leone battles a worsening kush epidemic that continues to claim the lives of young people across the country, citizens expected unity, compassion, and urgency from their leaders. Instead, they now witness an unsettling dispute between the Ministry of Local Government and Community Affairs and the Freetown City Council (FCC) a confrontation not over prevention or rehabilitation, but over who has the authority to collect the bodies of the dead.
The controversy began on October 9, 2025, when the Ministry’s Permanent Secretary, Bai M. Tharay, issued a formal letter to Mayor Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr, demanding evidence to support her televised statement that as of October 7, the Council had collected 220 bodies linked to kush intake within the city.”
The Ministry described the remark as misleading and injurious to the integrity of national institutions, warning that it could cause public panic and undermine the work of the Presidential Task Force on Substance Abuse. The Ministry requested detailed information, including the identities of the deceased, the locations and dates of discovery, and medical evidence linking the deaths to kush use.
While framed as a call for accountability, the tone of the letter revealed deeper tensions—longstanding institutional friction between the central government and the Freetown City Council over control, recognition, and responsibility.
In a measured but firm response dated October 20, Mayor Aki-Sawyerr provided a detailed spreadsheet of the 220 unclaimed corpses collected by the FCC between January and October 2025, complete with dates, locations, and burial details. She confirmed that photographic documentation exists for each case, though images would only be shared for unclaimed bodies out of respect for grieving families.
Her response also included a stark revelation: between 2020 and 2023, the Council collected fewer than 50 unclaimed corpses per year, but since 2024, the figure had surged to more than 200 the majority being young men believed to have died from kush-related complications.
Mayor Aki-Sawyerr noted that she had already written to the Minister of Internal Affairs, with copies to the Ministry of Local Government, as early as September 2025, warning of the alarming rise in kush-related deaths and calling for coordinated intervention. Those appeals, she said, went largely unanswered.
Her closing statement carried both frustration and gravity, in light of your concerns about the source of our authority, the Freetown City Council will no longer collect corpses sighted on the streets. Please provide contact details of who we should report to when a corpse is found.”
The remark struck a nerve across the nation, exposing how bureaucratic disputes can overshadow human suffering, President Julius Maada Bio declared a national emergency on drug and substance abuse in April 2024, establishing a multi-sectoral task force to combat the crisis. Yet, more than a year later, Sierra Leoneans continue to witness spiraling addiction, rising deaths, and limited visible progress.
While ministries exchange letters and statements, the death toll continues to climb. Families bury their sons in silence, morgues struggle with overcrowding, and communities live in fear, for many, the question now is no longer about policy but about compassion
If the government cannot agree on how to handle the dead, how can it protect the living?
To some observers, the Ministry’s request for verification is understandable institutions must ensure that public information is accurate, yet, others see it as an attempt to control the narrative and avoid political embarrassment over the grim statistics that reveal the true scale of the crisis.
The FCC’s position, meanwhile, underscores the urgency of transparency, empathy, and coordination. As Mayor Aki-Sawyerr put it, the Council “cannot continue to collect and bury our youth in silence.
Beyond the politics lies a larger truth: Sierra Leone’s kush epidemic is not just a public health crisis it is a moral and institutional crisis, the fight against drugs demands unity, urgency, and a shared sense of responsibility. But as long as leaders remain divided, the country risks losing not only a generation of youth but also faith in the systems meant to protect them.
For now, the streets of Freetown continue to tell the story that official letters cannot solve the problem: the quiet tragedy of a nation watching its future slip away while those in power argue over who should pick up the bodies.
Copyright –Published in Expo Times News on Friday, 24 October 2025 (ExpoTimes News – Expo Media Group (expomediasl.com)
