'I felt dizzy... I started to feel like I was going to starve in London'

For Ruba, the decision of whether to leave Sierra Leone and apply for asylum in the UK was on a knife edge.

- DAVID COHEN

On the one hand, he was a disability rights activist who faced harassment and death threats for his continual agitating and links to a political party that had just lost the 2018 general election. On the other, his wife was expecting his fourth child and the last thing he wanted was to leave his family and his highprofile position on the Commission for Persons with Disability. On top of this, Ruba is blind, having lost his sight due to measles aged three, so uprooting would be especially daunting.

The outcome was decided soon after in 2019 when Ruba attended a conference in London and the situation back home spiralled with activists, journalists and politicians arrested, houses burnt down and extrajudicial killings reported. "I had only intended to stay three weeks," said Ruba.

"When it became clear it would be unsafe and unwise for me to return, I applied for asylum. It was a tough decision to make."

Ruba, who had been relatively well off with an influential job in Sierra Leone, had no idea what he was in for: homelessness, hunger, being barred from work, and feelings of deep depression as he struggled to find purpose for his new life in the UK. He had no knowledge back then of the Home Office's "hostile environment" policy that had been in place since 2012 to discourage immigration by making the lives of asylum seekers especially tough. In Ruba's case, despite being blind and so especially vulnerable, it was eight months before the Home Office agreed to house him, seeking to pass responsibility in the interim to local authorities - and there were weeks when they failed to give him his weekly allowance of approximately £39 for essential needs, contrary to their statutory obligation of Section 95 of the Immigration and Asylum Act.