Traditional priests in the northern Sierra Leone town of Kambia on Tuesday carried out a public ritual known locally as “gbom sweh” after the theft of two electricity transformers, local media and community sources said.
The ceremony, held at Kambia Central Park, was reportedly ordered by the area’s Paramount Chief and conducted by a group of traditional medicine men brought into the town to invoke a curse aimed at those responsible for the theft.
Witnesses said the ritual followed repeated incidents of vandalism and theft of electricity infrastructure, which have disrupted power supply in the district. The perpetrators of the transformer theft remain unidentified.
Kambia joins a growing number of towns in northern Sierra Leone turning to traditional practices to deter crime amid public frustration over infrastructure theft. A similar ritual was recently reported in Lungi, where authorities and traditional leaders also sanctioned a curse following the loss of power equipment.
Transformer theft has become a persistent challenge for Sierra Leone’s electricity sector, contributing to outages and financial losses for the state-owned power utility.
Neither the police nor the Ministry of Energy immediately commented on the ritual or on progress in investigating the theft.
By Abdallah Bangura
