Female genital mutilation remains one of the most contested and consequential issues in West African public life. It sits at the intersection of culture, gender, and power, and it is precisely that intersection that makes it so difficult to address with the clarity it demands.
Two hundred and thirty million women and girls alive today have undergone #FGM. #SierraLeone accounts for some of the highest rates in the world, with 83 per cent of women aged 15 to 49 reported as having been cut in the 2019 Demographic and Health Survey, compared to 90 per cent in 2013. Yet the country still has no national law that explicitly bans the practice.
The way leaders speak about this issue matters enormously. Sierra Leone’s public debate on FGM is paralysed by mixed signals from prominent figures. When power appears to celebrate the practice, even symbolically, it costs lives. That is not hyperbole. It is cause and effect.
Sierra Leone’s ambiguity is written into its own statutes. The 2007 Child Rights Act prohibits harmful traditional practices but never names FGM. Prosecutions must rely on general assault charges, which are difficult to sustain and rarely brought. Meanwhile, Section 12 of the 1991 Constitution protects cultural practices, creating a legal space that soweis and their defenders are not slow to invoke. The result is predictable. Police do not intervene, soweis operate openly, and girls learn before they are old enough to understand what is happening to them that protection is conditional on where they were born and who their elders are. Women and girls should not have to guess whether they are safe under the watch of their own government.
The Gambia’s 2023 near repeal of its FGM ban illustrated exactly how fast backsliding can occur when leaders equivocate. Parliament moved to overturn the ban and reversed course only after sustained domestic and international backlash. The lesson is not a comfortable one. Ambiguity does not hold the line. It surrenders it.
When girls as young as ten are cut during school holidays, often forcibly and without anaesthesia, the debate stops being academic. Data points do not bleed. People do.
It is the ten-year-old in Kailahun who bled out because the sowei had no training and no clinic was nearby. It is the fourteen-year-old in Port Loko who was married at fifteen to conceal the infection that never healed properly. It is the mother who cannot explain to her daughter why pain is a rite, because she was never permitted to ask that question herself. It is in our high maternal mortality rates, deaths tied to complications of FGM that we still refuse to name directly. Every mixed signal from Freetown is a green light in a village. When a public figure parades with soweis but will not say plainly that this must end for girls under eighteen, that photograph becomes permission. The girl cut next month will carry the carelessness of a single public moment for the rest of her life.
The cost is not abstract. It is girls who drop out of school from trauma, who die from sepsis, who learn before age twelve that their bodies are negotiable. When leaders perform ambiguity, it ends lives. Do no harm is not activism speak. It is the floor, the minimum standard from which change must begin.
Rejecting FGM does not mean rejecting your roots. Embracing your community while standing with women and girls is not the same as going against your culture. Culture is dynamic. Development means ensuring that those roots do not choke the next generation. Bondo societies have mediated conflict, transmitted knowledge, taught life skills, and held communities together for centuries. Those functions are valuable and they must survive. What must not survive is the blade.
Progress rooted in ignorance breeds the most dangerous kind of resistance. Change is inevitable, but the resistance to it is guaranteed. The task of responsible leadership is not to avoid resistance but to ensure that change does not abuse the very people it is meant to free. You do not drag people to progress. You lead them, informed, with an intent they can see and trust.
The first requirement is clarity, not ambiguity. A government that protects human rights says so plainly and then legislates it. The 2007 Child Rights Act loophole must be closed. FGM must be named. The safety and dignity of every girl is not a cultural question. It is a constitutional obligation.
The second requirement is humanity over rhetoric. Existing child protection laws must be enforced while broader consensus is built for explicit legislation. Traditional leaders must be engaged as partners in this process, not treated as obstacles or, worse, celebrated as though the status quo were acceptable. Many soweis are mothers first. Supporting their transition through life skills programmes and dignified livelihoods is not charity. It is a conscious social investment.
The third requirement is patience grounded in evidence. Culture moves slowly, but policy sets the pace. Community-led education, funded domestically and designed locally, produces results that foreign-led condemnation cannot. In Kenya, alternative rites that preserved ceremony while abandoning the cut reduced FGM rates in target communities from 97 per cent to under 1 per cent within a generation. That is not a minor footnote. That is proof of what is possible when the approach is led by the people it affects.
Citizens have a role. Ask your Member of Parliament where they stand. Clarity is protection. A politician who will not answer that question plainly has already given you their answer.
Traditional leaders have a role. The 2022 Memorandum from the Council of Bondo Heads showed genuine openness to age limits. That opening is worth building on. The dialogue on safer rites of passage belongs to communities, and it is traditional voices that can lead it most credibly.
Government has the most direct role of all. Publish the roadmap. Tell the country where we are going and why. Progress cannot be sustained without a clear direction that people can follow and hold their leaders accountable to. Flip-flopping agendas do not just stall change. They create casualties.
Isata Bussoh Kabia is a former member of parliament and government minister.