This isn’t a political hit piece. It’s not written to wound the country, because I love this place in the complicated, clear-eyed way you can only love somewhere you’ve actually lived. But love without honesty isn’t love. It’s just comfort. And right now, Sierra Leone doesn’t need comfort. It needs someone to say out loud what half the country already knows in private.
What Life in Sierra Leone Actually Feels Like Right Now
Walk through Freetown on any given morning and the humid air hits you first. It’s a city that’s alive in that particular West African way, chaotic and warm but loud in equal measure. Children in school uniforms threading through gridlocked streets filled with hawkers tapping on car windows to sell their wares. Generators humming from behind compound walls because the grid can’t be trusted and everybody knows it.
That’s the Sierra Leone people still come to find, and in patches it’s still very much there.
But there’s another Sierra Leone sitting right underneath that one, and it’s been getting harder to ignore.
The Kush Crisis Nobody Warned You About
The thing that shocks most visitors who’ve done their research and think they know what to expect is Kush. Not the nickname for cannabis. The local synthetic drug that’s been tearing through Freetown’s poorest neighbourhoods for the past few years with almost no coverage in the international press.
Kush is cheap, devastating and everywhere. It’s made from a horrifying cocktail of synthetic cannabinoids, formalin and, according to some reports, human bones. I know how that sounds. I thought it sounded extreme too, the first time I heard it. Walk through Kroo Bay or parts of the East End at any hour of the day and you’ll stop thinking it sounds extreme fairly quickly.
Young men, teenagers sometimes, lying half-conscious on the ground. Eyes vacant. Limbs at odd angles. The government declared a national health emergency in April 2024, which was the right call, and then seemed to run out of ideas for what to do next. Rehabilitation centres are overwhelmed. The one at Kissy Mental Home is running well beyond capacity. A holding facility in Jui reportedly closed due to lack of government funding around late 2025.
A keke driver told a journalist something that should have been front-page news across the region. He said every family in Sierra Leone now has a son or a daughter who’s a victim of Tramadol or Kush. Every family. He wasn’t exaggerating for effect. He was just describing what he drives past every day.
The Drug Trafficking Problem That Goes Far Higher Than Street Level
Here’s where it gets complicated. And here’s where a lot of people in Sierra Leone have been afraid to speak.
Sierra Leone has been flagged by the US Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs as a trans shipment hub for cocaine moving from South America through West Africa into Europe. That classification isn’t new. What’s new is the scale of the evidence piling up, and how close to the top it seems to go.
In October 2023, Belgian authorities seized ten tonnes of cocaine hidden in soybean flour in a container originating from Sierra Leone. It was, according to Antwerp port officials, the first time large quantities of cocaine had entered Europe via Sierra Leone. Months later, the French navy intercepted a vessel off the Sierra Leonean coast carrying 4.6 tonnes. The Guinean navy caught 1.5 tonnes on a boat flying Sierra Leone’s flag. Seven suitcases of suspected cocaine turned up in a Sierra Leonean embassy vehicle in Guinea in January 2025. A Philippine woman was arrested in Manila trying to smuggle cocaine she’d picked up in Sierra Leone. A Senegalese man was caught in India with cocaine he’d received in a Freetown hotel.
At some point, a pattern is no longer a coincidence.
The Man in the Church Video
And then came the case that blew up internationally and that the Sierra Leonean government has never adequately explained.
Jos Leijdekkers, known in the Netherlands as “Bolle Jos,” is one of Europe’s most wanted criminals. He was sentenced in absentia by a Rotterdam court to 24 years in prison for trafficking more than 7,000 kilograms of cocaine, ordering a murder and carrying out an armed robbery in Finland. He’s on Europol’s most wanted list. Dutch prosecutors describe him as one of the key players in international cocaine trafficking, with an estimated turnover of up to two billion euros a year. The Dutch government placed a reward of €200,000 on his head, the highest bounty they’ve ever offered for a fugitive.
In January 2025, Dutch investigative journalists and Reuters published footage of Leijdekkers sitting two rows behind President Julius Maada Bio at a New Year’s Day church service in Bonthe, the president’s hometown. Next to Leijdekkers, according to multiple sources, sat Agnes Bio, the president’s daughter and Sierra Leone’s diplomatic representative to the United Nations in New York.
Reuters and multiple sources reported that Leijdekkers is married to, or at minimum in a serious relationship with, Agnes Bio. That relationship has not been officially confirmed. It hasn’t been officially denied either, which is arguably more revealing.
The government’s response was that President Bio “attended numerous family events during the festive season” and “has no knowledge about the identity and the issues detailed in the reports.” That sentence has been working hard ever since it was published, because the photographs also showed Leijdekkers at a Freetown restaurant celebrating the birthday of the head of Sierra Leone’s immigration authority, with the head of the country’s anti-drug agency seated at the same table. And separately, embracing the former police chief.
I’d invite you to sit with that for a moment. A man on Europol’s most wanted list. At a birthday party. With the people in charge of immigration and anti-drug enforcement. In Freetown.
The Economist’s deep investigation into the case published in September 2026 is the most thorough account of how Leijdekkers embedded himself in Sierra Leone’s elite, and it makes for grim reading. Leijdekkers had reportedly been frequenting the Lagoonda casino in Freetown since at least August 2022. He wasn’t hiding. He was socialising.
What the Government Has and Hasn’t Done
The Netherlands formally requested his extradition in early 2025. Sierra Leone said it would cooperate. As of the time of writing, Leijdekkers has not been extradited.
Meanwhile, the brother-in-law of Leijdekkers, a man known as “Don Vito” who reportedly held a Sierra Leonean diplomatic passport, was arrested and extradited by the UAE to Turkey in October 2025. Dubai acted on its extradition request. Freetown didn’t.
The Sierra Leone Police have issued a wanted notice for a Sierra Leonean rap artist for drug offences. They have not issued one for a man Europol describes as one of the most dangerous drug traffickers in Europe. That distinction tells you most of what you need to know about where the pressure is coming from.
What This Means If You’re Thinking of Coming Here
I want to be honest with you here, because I know some people reading this are trying to decide whether to visit, work here or build something in this country.
Sierra Leone is not a war zone. It’s not in active conflict. The beaches in the Western Area are genuinely beautiful, the kind of white-sand stillness that makes you understand why people keep coming back. The food, when you find it, is extraordinary. Plasas, groundnut stew, fresh barracuda grilled on the beach at Tokeh. People are warm in a way that feels real rather than performed. The country has things worth coming for.
But it is a place that is being hollowed out, slowly, by the combination of endemic corruption, a drug trade that now reaches into the presidential family’s orbit, and a synthetic drug crisis that nobody is adequately resourced to address. Those aren’t abstract political problems. They affect road quality, power supply, hospital capacity, food prices and the basic safety of everyday life.
If you’re thinking about investment, the reputational risk associated with Sierra Leone right now is real. The US State Department classification as a narcotics trans shipment country affects everything from aid eligibility to banking access for businesses operating there.
Why Sierra Leoneans Deserve More Honesty Than They’re Getting
The thing that frustrates me most isn’t the problems themselves. Problems exist everywhere. It’s the gap between what’s happening and what’s being said about it publicly. A country where the anti-drug agency chief is photographed at a birthday party with a man on Europol’s most wanted list is not a country that’s seriously fighting the drug trade. And saying so loudly matters, because the alternative is silence, and silence is exactly what people like Leijdekkers are counting on.
Sierra Leoneans I’ve spoken to, ordinary people, market traders, teachers, healthcare workers, are not fooled. They know what’s happening. They live with the consequences of it in Freetown’s streets every single day. The young men slumped in doorways in the East End aren’t abstractions. They’re somebody’s brother, somebody’s son.
The Question Nobody in Government Is Answering
One thing I’d genuinely like an answer to, and I’m not expecting one: if the head of immigration and the head of the anti-drug agency both socialised with a man who has a €200,000 bounty on his head from European law enforcement, what does that tell us about how thoroughly the drug trade has penetrated Sierra Leone’s security apparatus? And if it has penetrated that far, who exactly is supposed to be investigating it?
I don’t have the answer. I’m not sure anyone inside the government wants to find it.
What Needs to Happen, Even If It Won’t
The extradition request from the Netherlands needs a direct public response. Not a press statement about family events at the festive season. A direct, legal, transparent answer. The officials photographed alongside Leijdekkers need to be investigated, publicly and independently. The rehabilitation facilities overwhelmed by the Kush crisis need funding, immediately, not pledges. Actual cooperation with DEA and Europol rather than performative statements about willingness to cooperate.
None of this will happen fast. Institutions don’t reform quickly when the people with power to reform them are the ones who benefit from things staying broken. But it needs to be said, repeatedly and on the record, because the alternative is watching Sierra Leone slide from a country with serious problems into something much harder to recover from.
There’s a version of this country that could be something genuinely good. It has the coast, the minerals, the culture, the people who would build it if they were given half a chance. That version isn’t inevitable. It requires the kind of governance that right now is almost entirely absent. Whether it gets there depends partly on whether enough people, inside and outside the country, are willing to say clearly what’s going wrong rather than looking away and hoping someone else deals with it.
That, for what it’s worth, is why I’m still writing.
