During Sierra Leone’s war many youth could feed themselves by taking up arms and pillaging. Now, in peace time, with democracy flourishing and a general election set for 11 August, that grim option is less available to them, but few other options have taken its place.

The UN estimates that some 65 percent of Sierra Leoneans are jobless, with unemployment as high as 80 to 90 percent in some areas.

“When you travel around the country you see huge numbers of young men all over the place, just standing idle,” Benedict Sannoh, a UN human rights officer in Sierra Leone, told IRIN before the start of the campaign for the presidential and parliamentary election, the first post-war poll to be held in country without the support of international peacekeepers.

“This issue could detract from the peace because these are some of the same boys out there who were fighters of yesterday,” Sannoh said.

While few observers believe the civil war that decimated Sierra Leone from 1991 to 2002 will break out again, the UN Secretary General report in May said overall poor living conditions along with “high rates of youth unemployment… remain key threats to the country’s fragile stability.”

Big voting bloc, big promises

Given that about 40 percent of the 2.6 million people registered to vote are under age 27, candidates are going all out to their attract support.

On posters for the ruling Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP), Solomon Berewa, 69, looks far younger than his age, as do his main opponents on their campaign banners -- the All People’s Congress Party (APC)’s Ernest Koroma and Charles Margai of the People’s Movement for Democratic Change (PMDC).

Opposition leaders have lambasted the government for failing the country’s youth, the APC saying, “the youth problem has become chronic with a potential for explosion.”

A PMDC youth rally in the capital Freetown on 7 August was set to start in the afternoon but supporters, clad in the party colour orange, had little else to do so many started arriving earlier in the morning.

“I voted for the SLPP twice but now I will try another party,” unemployed 30-year-old Ansu Sano told IRIN.

Meantime, the SLPP party manifesto calls youth issues “a human development and security challenge that must be given appropriate attention to help the country consolidate peace and build a prosperous nation.”

Sierra Leone’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission recommended that “youth questions be viewed as a national emergency.”

Yet five years after war’s end and four years after the creation of government “youth policy,” many rights activists say the issue is largely still ignored, to the country’s peril.