By Dr Doma
When Mayor Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr said on Truth Media that more than 220 bodies had been collected from the streets of Freetown, many were stunned not because it was untrue but because someone finally said it out loud.
And like clockwork, the Ministry of Local Government wrote back not to ask how to stop it but to ask how she came up with the numbers.
In a country where statistics are treated like state secrets and truth comes with a query letter, the Freetown City Council (FCC) response landed like a reality check: pages upon pages of dates and places where corpses were picked up from Lumley Beach to Kissy, from Siaka Stevens Street to Congo Market etc.
The list reads less like an official record and more like a heartbreaking diary of a city in crisis.
The Mayor’s letter was clear and painfully human:
“Freetown City Council cannot continue to collect and bury our youths in silence.”
She reminded the Ministry that since 2022, the Council has been collecting bodies of mostly young men who are victims of a drug that has turned our streets into graveyards and our markets into scenes of sorrow.
In just ten months of 2025, 220 bodies were collected.
Almost all were young.
Almost all were men.
But instead of rushing to respond to a public health nightmare, the Ministry’s letter asked a different question, under what authority does the Council pick up dead bodies?
So, while one arm of government is counting the dead the other is counting signatures.
The Mayor, in her usual calm but cutting tone said the FCC would have no choice but to suspend the collection of corpses if the government continues to look the other way.
“We cannot continue to bury our youths while the system stays silent,” she wrote.
That silence is deafening.
Freetown today tells a sad story: young people dropping lifeless in the same streets where they once hustled for survival. Families vanish into grief. Friends stop asking questions.
The city buries, the government debates and the drug keeps winning.
Critics say the exchange between *Aki and Tamba* is more than bureaucratic back-and-forth it’s a reflection of a system uncomfortable with the truth.
When someone finally says, “There are bodies in our streets,” the response isn’t action, it’s accusation.
The Kush crisis has gone from whispers in corners to bodies in broad daylight. And the question that lingers is not whether the Mayor exaggerated but whether anyone else in power even cares to count.
