By Josephine Sesay

In Sierra Leone, the word development is used so often it has almost lost its meaning. Politicians flaunt it at rallies, donors highlight it in glossy reports, and bureaucrats repeat it in every budget speech. Yet, for the average Sierra Leonean, development remains a distant illusion especially when the roads they travel daily are still made of dust, mud, or worse. How can we claim progress as a nation when something as fundamental as road infrastructure remains a colossal failure?

It is 2025, yet countless communities across Sierra Leone are still cut off every rainy season. In districts like Kono, Pujehun, Kailahun, Moyamba, and even parts of the Western Area, residents endure the humiliation of being stranded for weeks simply because their roads are impassable.

In Freetown, the capital city, conditions are hardly better. Neighborhoods such as Rokupa, Allen Town, and Waterloo are plagued by chronic traffic congestion and deteriorating roads, while smaller feeder roads remain little more than glorified footpaths barely fit for kekes, let alone ambulances or delivery trucks.

How can any government speak of attracting investors, boosting agriculture, or improving healthcare when people cannot even reach their farms, markets, or hospitals?

True development is not measured by ribbon-cuttings, grand speeches, or flashy projects shared on social media. Development is about what people can touch, feel, and use. Roads are not symbols they are the most tangible proof of whether governance is working or failing.

When a pregnant woman in a remote village must be carried in a hammock for ten miles before reaching a motorable road, no Sustainable Development Goal rhetoric or donor-funded report can cover that shame. When children miss school because their communities become islands during the rains, education policies are reduced to empty words. When farmers lose half their harvest because trucks cannot access their villages, “food security” becomes nothing more than a slogan.

This is the daily reality that politicians, policymakers, and aid partners often ignore or deliberately forget.

Let’s be clear: Sierra Leone is not too poor to build roads. It is simply too poorly governed to prioritize them. Billions of dollars have been borrowed or received as grants over the years. Where has that money gone? Instead of investing in durable infrastructure, successive governments have poured resources into high-visibility, low-utility mega-projects airports, conference halls, administrative buildings while the real needs of citizens go unmet.

What Sierra Leone needs are tarred, lasting roads, not seasonal gravel patches that vanish with the first heavy downpour.

The state of our roads is not just an economic inconvenience it is a matter of dignity and justice.

For decades, rural communities have been promised better roads in every election cycle. Yet five, ten, even twenty years later, they are still waiting. Their votes matter every five years, but their lives seem to matter little the day after results are declared.

This pattern is not only cruel it is unsustainable. Young people are growing frustrated. Communities are losing trust. And as inequality between urban elites and rural populations deepens, so too does the risk of instability.

Roads connect people to services. Roads create jobs. Roads boost trade. Roads reduce maternal mortality. Roads build trust in government. Above all, roads show citizens that they are valued.

Until a farmer in Koinadugu can transport her rice to market without praying for dry weather, or a schoolchild in Port Loko can attend classes year-round without wading through swamp water, Sierra Leone cannot call itself developed. We are merely decorating poverty with buzzwords.

Copyright –Published in Expo Times News on Wednesday, 24th September, 2025 (ExpoTimes News – Expo Media Group (expomediasl.com)