Despite the ethno-regional divisions that shape Sierra Leonean politics, citizens continue to reach across social, religious, familial, and political lines. Beneath party allegiances—and the hostility often displayed on political platforms—our lives remain deeply intertwined.

The SLPP partisan who attacks the APC from a podium may have a brother, cousin, childhood friend, or business partner in the APC. The same is true of the fiercest APC partisan, whose spouse, relative, or closest friend may belong to the other side.

Our politics may speak the language of division, but our daily lives often contradict it.

That contradiction tells us something important: Sierra Leone is held together by bonds older and deeper than political parties—family, marriage, friendship, faith, community, commerce, and shared history. Yet we have allowed political competition to harden into divisions that threaten those very bonds.

The danger is not political disagreement. Democracy requires disagreement. The danger begins when party identity becomes a test of loyalty, belonging, opportunity, and even personal worth.

This becomes especially apparent when political power changes hands.

A new government may establish commissions of inquiry, conduct audits, or investigate former officials’ conduct. Accountability is essential. Yet after the public accusations and political theatre, something revealing often happens: private relationships re-emerge.

Friends call friends. Relatives intervene for relatives. Former schoolmates appeal to one another. Religious leaders, business associates and political acquaintances quietly seek leniency, reconciliation or protection for people they know on the other side.

Some who publicly condemn political opponents may privately advocate for them when the consequences become personal.

Sometimes that may be hypocrisy. But it also reveals a deeper truth: our human relationships often matter more than the political identities we perform publicly.

The tragedy is that we recognize this truth in private but rarely build our public politics around it.

If relationships across party lines are strong enough to foster reconciliation after conflict, why not use them to prevent conflict in the first place? Why should friendship across the political divide become useful only when someone is in trouble?

Why can it not become useful when the country is in trouble?

This is where leadership becomes critical.

National consensus does not form on its own. Institutions matter. Civil society matters. Political parties matter. Citizens matter. But in a political culture heavily shaped by those at the top, meaningful change may require a leader willing to initiate it.

Sierra Leone needs leaders prepared to place the national interest above the immediate appetites of party politics.

That is easier said than done.

Every governing party develops constituencies that expect victory to bring rewards: appointments, access, contracts, influence and recognition. Supporters who have worked for years to bring their party to power may believe it is finally their turn to benefit. They may then interpret cooperation with opponents as weakness or betrayal.

A president who genuinely attempts to govern beyond party lines may therefore discover that the fiercest resistance comes not from the opposition, but from within the governing party.

That is where leadership becomes more than occupying office.

Leadership means being willing to endure partisan anger to defend a national purpose. A transformational leader must sometimes be prepared to disappoint the party to serve the country.

That does not mean abandoning the political organization that brought a leader to power. It means recognizing that once a person assumes the presidency, that office’s constituency becomes larger than the governing party.

A party may win an election.

It cannot own the presidency.

The presidency belongs to the republic.

A leader committed to national transformation should be willing to continue a successful program launched by a previous government; appoint capable Sierra Leoneans regardless of party affiliation; protect competent professionals from partisan purges; and ensure that investigations of opponents meet the same standards applied to allies.

But decisive leadership must never become unchecked leadership. Sierra Leone does not need a president who substitutes personal will for institutions. Courageous leadership should strengthen institutions so national progress no longer depends on a single individual’s courage—or restraint.

That is the paradox of democratic leadership: a leader may begin a transformation, but institutions must preserve it.

This is why Sierra Leone needs greater continuity at the national level.

Every change of government should not become an opportunity to reinvent the country. Democracy requires political competition, but development requires continuity. A country cannot afford to abandon useful policies, infrastructure projects, educational reforms, health programs or agricultural investments simply because a rival administration initiated them.

Sierra Leone does not need political uniformity.

It needs a shared national floor.

One way forward would be a National Development Compact: a long-term, cross-party agreement on a limited set of national priorities that should endure across electoral cycles. Such a framework could include education, healthcare, agriculture, energy, infrastructure, youth employment, judicial reform, institutional independence, and responsible management of natural resources.

Political parties would still disagree—and they should. They could debate methods, financing, timelines, and priorities. But they would no longer have to debate the country’s basic destination every five years.

If the national compact says we are heading for Leicester Peak, no government should be free to turn the country toward the pits of Samba Gutter merely to prove it chose a different road.

A genuine national compact cannot belong to the SLPP.

It cannot belong to the APC.

It must belong to Sierra Leone.

Development partners and international financial institutions could support such a framework where appropriate. Still, its legitimacy must ultimately come from Sierra Leoneans themselves—political parties, Parliament, civil society, professional bodies, traditional and religious leaders, the private sector, and citizens.

Such a compact would require sacrifice on all sides. A governing party would have to resist the temptation to monopolize credit. Opposition parties would have to resist rejecting useful ideas simply because the government proposed them.

Most importantly, citizens must begin to see national achievements as national property.

A good school built under an APC government belongs to Sierra Leone. A functioning hospital improved under an SLPP government belongs to Sierra Leone. A sound agricultural policy should not be partisan. A productive infrastructure project should not become politically tainted because of who commissioned it.

The same principle must apply to public institutions. The judiciary, anti-corruption agencies, police, civil service, electoral bodies, and audit institutions must command public trust regardless of who governs.

A national compact would not solve every political problem. Nor should it eliminate legitimate ideological disagreement. But it could provide guardrails against the destructive partisan impulse to dismantle, rename, or discredit worthwhile national initiatives simply because they are associated with a political rival.

Our private relationships already show us that another Sierra Leone is possible.

We marry across political lines. We worship together. We trade together. We attend one another’s weddings and funerals. We help friends whose politics we may strongly oppose.

The challenge is to move that spirit from private life into public institutions.

Someone will have to begin.

Someone in national leadership will have to decide that the cycle has gone on long enough. Someone will have to retain a good program from a previous administration despite partisan criticism. Someone will have to appoint people based on competence rather than loyalty. Someone will have to tell supporters that winning an election does not mean inheriting the country as political property.

And someone will have to uphold processes and institutions even when doing so carries a political cost.

That person may be the current president or a future one. But someone must begin the national conversation required to build a genuine compact across party lines.

The alternative is to keep erasing and demonizing one another’s achievements after every electoral cycle until, in trying to erase the other side’s legacy, we weaken the nation itself.

Such a leader may pay a political price.

But leadership is not merely doing what is applauded. Sometimes it means doing what the country needs before the political culture is ready to reward it.

Governments are temporary.

Parties are temporary.

Presidents are temporary.

The nation is permanent.

Perhaps the greatest legacy any Sierra Leonean leader can leave is not a monument or a slogan, but a country where the next government inherits stronger institutions, deeper public trust, and a national direction that cannot easily be reversed.

About The Author

Oumar Farouk Sesay is a poet, playwright and novelist. He is also the President of Pen Sierra Leone, Chapter.

There is a thing the old people say when a person makes a promise and the wind carries it off before nightfall: Wɔd na mɔt, noto lod na ɛd. A word in the mouth is not a load on the head. It is folk wisdom with a tired smile behind it — the knowledge, earned over generations of watching, that talk costs nothing and a man or woman can set his or her words down the moment he or she turns from the crowd. The proverb does not scold. It simply warns you not to confuse the saying with the doing.

I want to take one word out of it.

Wɔd na mɔt, na lod na ɛd. A word in the mouth is a load on the head. You said it — now carry it.

On October 12, in Geneva, President Julius Maada Bio made a word, and it was a good one. Speaking to the inaugural Geneva Peace Forum under the theme Choose Peace, he told the world’s leaders what any honest observer already knows: it is cheaper and wiser to prevent a conflict than to clean up after one. He named the things that rot a nation from the inside before any gun is fired — political exclusion, inequality, weak institutions, the slow leak of public trust. He called for credible elections, fair courts, real accountability, and dialogue that begins before grievance hardens into violence.

From the president of a country that buried its dead by the thousand in a war within living memory, it was not an empty word. It carried weight. Which is exactly the problem.

Because near the end of that same speech, Bio proposed something concrete. He suggested that governments and international bodies publish an annual account — the early warnings they received, and the actions they took in answer. Keep a ledger, in other words. Put the warnings and the responses side by side where the public can read them. Let the record speak.

It is a fine idea. So let us open the ledger here at home, where the president lives, and see what has been posted against the warnings this government has already received.

Start with the elections, since Bio did. In Geneva he called credible polls a foundation of peace. In June 2023, Sierra Leone held an election that remains the sharpest test of that very claim. The European Union’s observation mission, in its final report that October, set down serious failings in transparency and offered twenty-one reforms — among them the publication of results broken down to the polling station, cleaner tabulation, protection for candidates, and accountability for election-season violence.

Let me be plain about what that report was and was not. It was not a court overturning a result; no judge has unmade the declared outcome. It was a careful finding that the process had holes wide enough to warrant real repair. The distinction matters, because the legitimacy of a winner does not rest on the announcement alone. It rests on whether an ordinary citizen can trace, for herself, the road from her ballot to the final tally. In 2023, too much of that road was closed to her.

To its credit, the government did not simply shrug. A reform process followed, and the Tripartite Committee was born of it; some of its recommendations have since moved from paper toward practice, and that deserves acknowledgment. But a committee is a promise written down, and a promise written down is still a word in the mouth. The entry that belongs in the ledger is not we convened — it is we published the station-level results, we closed the gaps the mission named. That entry is not yet filled in.

Turn the page to the Constitution, where the ink is barely dry. On August 10, 2026, Parliament fell into open dispute over the Constitution of Sierra Leone (Amendment) Bill, 2025 — specifically, whether the proceedings needed only a simple majority under Section 91, or the two-thirds threshold that Section 108 demands of constitutional change. The opposition challenged the Speaker’s reading. The quarrel climbed, as such quarrels do, toward the Supreme Court.

And here the calendar does something I could not have arranged if I tried. On October 13 — the very morning after Geneva, while the applause had scarcely cooled — the Supreme Court resumed hearing three consolidated cases born of that disputed process. I will not tell you how the court should rule; that is its work, not mine, and the substantive questions are genuinely open. But understand what the two-thirds rule is. It is not decoration. It is a lock, placed deliberately on the nation’s founding document, so that no single season’s majority can remake the whole on a whim. A government that spends the morning of the 12th urging the world to guard its institutions, and faces a question about its own constitutional lock on the 13th, is being handed a mirror. The honourable thing is not merely to wait for the verdict. It is to be seen respecting the lock, and the court, while the question is live.

Now the heaviest entry, and I will not rush past it. In Geneva the president reached back to Sierra Leone’s own healing — the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the Special Court — as proof that justice and reconciliation can hold hands. Then let that handshake reach everyone.

On August 10, 2022, protesters died. Bystanders died. Police officers died. The government stood up a Special Investigation Committee, but its work and the accountability that followed drew hard criticism. Amnesty International pressed for credible investigation into the deaths of civilians and of officers alike. The United States, in its own reporting, recorded concerns about how security forces conducted themselves and whether anyone answered for the blood.

None of that convicts the president, or any official, of anything; guilt is a matter for evidence, independent inquiry, and due process, and I claim no shortcut around them. But a people is entitled to a simpler accounting than a verdict. They are entitled to know that when the state’s own hand is in question, the state investigates with the same seriousness it brings when the accused is an opponent. Justice that checks a man’s party before it checks his wound is not justice; it is sorting. And a ledger with some deaths entered and others left blank is not a record of peace. It is a record of whose peace.

I could go further — dialogue that is counted in meetings convened rather than agreements kept is its own kind of empty entry — but the shape is clear enough now. Across every line, the pattern repeats: the word was made, and the load has not yet been carried.

I want to be careful here, because the easy version of this piece is alarmist, and alarmism is a lie of its own. Sierra Leone is not on the lip of another war. There is nothing in front of us that says so. But the absence of gunfire is not the presence of health. A country can be quiet while faith in its elections thins, while constitutional quarrels deepen, while ordinary people stop believing the referee is blind. Those are not the drums of war. They are the warnings Bio himself said a wise government should read early — and reading them at home is not something separate from the peacebuilding he preached abroad. It is the peacebuilding.

So I will take him at his own word, which is all a griot ever really does. He asked the world to keep a ledger of warnings received and actions taken. Let Freetown keep it first. Publish the honest accounting of the electoral reforms — done, pending, and whose hand is on each. Publish what became of the investigations into August 2022, within what due process allows. Show, in the current constitutional case, a plain respect for the court and the lock it guards.

None of this would cost the president his standing in Geneva. It would be the thing that earns it.

The old people are usually right, and their proverb is honest about men: the word is not a load on the head. Most words aren’t. They blow away. But the president stood on a world stage and chose peace out loud, and a word chosen that publicly, in front of that many witnesses, is heavier than the proverb allows. He made it a load. Now the only question Sierra Leoneans need ask is whether he will carry it home.

Wɔd na mɔt. Na lod na ɛd.

About the Author

J. Amadu Massally is a Sierra Leonean author, independent researcher, and cultural historian whose work connects African and diasporic histories through documentary evidence and historical inquiry. He writes on governance, public accountability, and the enduring connections between Africa and its diaspora.

Publication sources

The article is grounded in the following sources:

1. Geneva Peace Forum, October 12 keynote programme

2. EU Election Observation Mission, Final report and 21 recommendations

3. Supreme Court constitutional proceedings, October 13, 2026

4. Institute for Legal Research and Advocacy for Justice, Analysis of constitutional voting requirements

5. Amnesty International, August 2022 accountability concerns

Arguably, the politics of revenge—colloquially captured in Sierra Leonean parlance as “you do me, ah do you,” or more universally as tit for tat—has become a defining feature of the political contest between the two parties that have dominated the country’s political landscape since independence. At times, each appears to view the other’s actions not merely as events to be judged on their own merits, but as grievances to be answered, wrongs to be righted, and scores to be settled.

The danger is that politics, which ought to be the art of negotiating competing interests and managing differences in a plural society, becomes a perpetual cycle of retaliation. Yesterday’s victim becomes today’s avenger, and yesterday’s perpetrator becomes tomorrow’s aggrieved party. Each side justifies itself by the other’s past conduct, while the country itself bears the cumulative consequences.

Like any game, this one needs rules. But unlike an ordinary game, its stakes are neither trivial nor limited to the players. They touch lives, livelihoods, institutions, national cohesion, and ultimately, the fragile peace of Sierra Leone. If this lethal political game continues, the urgent question is not merely who struck first, but where we choose to start counting the blows—and whether that count can ever meaningfully end.

Where, then, do we begin?

Do we begin in 1960, with the Lancaster House constitutional discussions, when Siaka Stevens opposed the arrangements under consideration and returned home to pursue his political campaign ahead of independence, helping lay the foundations for the All People’s Congress (APC)? If that is our starting point, what was the corresponding political “tat”? Was it the detention of Stevens at Pademba Road Prison on the eve of independence under Milton Margai’s government? If so, should we understand that detention as a response to Stevens’s political opposition, an exercise of state authority, or an episode in the larger struggle for political power? The distinction matters because how an event is interpreted often becomes the justification for the next act of retaliation.

Or should we begin with the disputed political transition surrounding the 1967 general elections and the subsequent struggle over who had the right to govern? What was the first “tit,” and what “tat” followed? Was the answer found in the political instability and coercion that accompanied the struggle for power, or in the subsequent consolidation of authority under one-party rule? In its opponents’ eyes, did establishing the one-party state represent the ultimate political retaliation? And what of the succession of exclusions, grievances, and abuses that accumulated over the years, deepening the divisions that eventually contributed to the country’s descent into an eleven-year civil war? Or are we seeking to bring back a de facto one-party system by “un-limbing” the constitution to avenge the one party of yesteryear, even though we have seen its fatal consequences for the country?

These are not merely historical questions. They go to the heart of how a nation remembers its past, assigns responsibility, and decides whether one generation’s mistakes must become the next generation’s grievances.

Perhaps, however, we should have drawn a line at the end of the war to mark the end of the tit-for-tat game. Perhaps we drew the line, but somehow the aggrieved among us are furiously erasing it to restart the game of death. Sierra Leone endured immense suffering, and the subsequent peacebuilding process, including the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s work, offered an opportunity to confront the past, acknowledge victims, establish responsibility, and begin the difficult work of national healing. If that period is our starting point, what was the first political “tit,” and what “tat” followed? Rather, who started this spiral to doom again after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission?

Was it the overthrow of the Tejan Kabba government? Was it the mob violence, controversial prosecutions, and severe punishments that some perceived as disproportionately targeting suspected or actual opposition figures? Were these actions justified as necessary accountability measures, or did their manner, selectivity, or perceived unfairness create new grievances? Where the evidence supported prosecution, justice was necessary. But when justice was perceived as selective, politicized, or driven by vengeance, did the process risk reproducing the very divisions it was meant to heal?

If these episodes were the postbellum first “tit,” what was the corresponding “tat” when the APC again had the chance to exercise power? Did it retaliate, refrain, or seek its own form of political redress? These questions deserve careful examination, not convenient assumptions. The answers should rest on evidence, not partisan memory or a desire to vindicate one side at the other’s expense.

More troubling still is the apparent acceleration of this tit-for-tat politics in what many regard as Sierra Leone’s Second Republic. After the war, the peace process, and repeated democratic transitions, why does the country still seem vulnerable to the temptation to settle political scores? Why does each shift in political fortune risk being seen as an opportunity to reverse the other side’s fortunes?

Could elements within the current government be looking backward rather than forward—driven by personal grievance, partisan loyalty, or a misguided sense of historical justice? Could the machinery of the state be vulnerable to people who see political office as a chance to settle old scores? Why extend this “tit for tat” cycle, potentially prompting a similar response when power changes hands and leaving citizens to endure a mournful refrain? These are serious questions, not established conclusions. They call for transparent investigation, institutional safeguards, and evidence-based scrutiny—not blanket accusations against an entire government or political party.

The opposition faces an equally important question. Is the ultimate objective of political contestation to defeat the governing party through democratic means, or is there a temptation to pursue a political reversal in which yesterday’s exclusion is answered by tomorrow’s? Where does legitimate accountability end and collective punishment begin? At what point does the desire to correct past injustices become an excuse for creating new ones?

A democracy cannot function on the assumption that every political victory grants the victor an unrestricted mandate to punish the vanquished. Nor can national reconciliation survive if every change of government creates the expectation that the incoming administration must avenge its predecessors’ perceived wrongs. Accountability is indispensable, but it must be grounded in evidence, due process, equal treatment under the law, and respect for fundamental rights. It cannot be reduced to the arithmetic of political revenge.

The central problem with tit-for-tat politics is that it has no natural endpoint.

If one party insists its actions are justified by the other’s, and the other responds in kind, who decides when the account is settled? If retaliation must always be proportionate to a prior wrong, who sets the original measure? Do we count from independence, the disputed 1967 elections, the years of one-party rule, the civil war, or the political grievances that emerged after the war?

The deeper we delve into history, the more complex the ledger grows. Each side can identify its own injuries, choose its own starting point, and construct its own moral justification. There is always another grievance to cite, another historical episode to revisit, and another perceived injustice to redress. The result is not closure but an expanding inheritance of bitterness.

Perhaps the question is not where the first “tit” occurred, but whether Sierra Leone can agree that the cycle must end at some point. Historical accountability must not be confused with inherited guilt. Those responsible for specific wrongdoing should be held accountable through lawful and impartial processes. But present-day citizens and political actors should not be condemned to perpetual retaliation for grievances accumulated over decades.

The rules of this political game must be clear. No government should use state institutions to settle partisan scores. No opposition should be intimidated, arbitrarily punished, or collectively blamed. Allegations of wrongdoing must be investigated impartially, prosecutions must follow due process, and the courts must remain independent. Political competition must be protected, peaceful dissent respected, and citizens’ rights upheld regardless of party affiliation.

Equally important, political leaders must resist the temptation to mobilize historical grievances when it serves their immediate interests. The past must be examined honestly, but it must not become an inexhaustible license for revenge. Remembering history should help the country understand how it arrived at its present circumstances and avoid repeating its mistakes—not keep the nation perpetually at war with itself.

Ultimately, Sierra Leone must decide whether the rule of law will govern its political future or the unwritten law of “you do me, ah do you.” It must decide whether justice will be an impartial principle or a weapon wielded by whoever holds power. It must also decide whether democracy is a shared national enterprise or merely a temporary opportunity for one party to settle accounts with another.

The tragedy of tit-for-tat politics is that players may believe they are winning even as the country loses. Political parties may trade power, punishments, and accusations, but ordinary Sierra Leoneans pay the price when institutions weaken, trust erodes, and old divisions deepen.

Whatever the original intentions, this game must have rules. Better still, the country must summon the courage to end it. Sierra Leone cannot afford another descent into the abyss simply because its political leaders have failed to distinguish justice from vengeance.

The ultimate test of political leadership is not how effectively one settles scores, but how courageously one breaks the cycle. Are you the one to break the cycle, or the one who will perpetuate it until doom descends again in this land?

About the Author

Oumar Farouk Sesay is a renowned Sierra Leonean poet, playwright and novelist. He is also the President of Pen, Sierra Leone Chapter.

The Swiss National Museum and a group of historians have documented and are working to raise awareness about Switzerland’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade, slavery, and colonialism—topics long absent from discussions about the country’s development and role in the global order.

At the political level, Switzerland’s success is often linked to its high level of decentralisation, its practice of direct democracy, and its age-old policy of neutrality in foreign affairs. Lacking raw materials and abundant labour, its economic transformation and incredibly high standard of living have been associated with its specialisation in high-margin, precision-engineered exports, such as pharmaceuticals, medical devices, luxury watchmaking, and specialised machinery. The role of the Swiss franc as a global safe-haven currency, backed by low inflation, prudent fiscal policies, and a robust, secret banking system which hides the riches of the wealthy from all corners of the world, also often enters the debate on the Swiss miracle.

Switzerland’s involvement in the violent and exploitative foundations of the modern global economy—from the 16th to the 19th century—often escapes scrutiny. Conventional wisdom holds that the country was not a frontline state in the creation of that order—it had no colonies compared to Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, and Germany, and lacked the resources and power to buy, raid, and export enslaved people from Africa or establish settler slave-owning colonies in the Americas. As a small nation, it largely benefited from world trade after the system was established by practicing an open trade policy. The guilty states were largely the great powers.

This rosy picture of Switzerland’s benign participation in the global order has been put under the microscope in an engrossing exhibition titled Colonialisme: Une Suisse Impliquée (Colonialism: Switzerland’s Involvement) at the Château de Prangins in Prangins, about two kilometres from where we live in Nyon. The collection of artifacts—photos, paintings, letters, books, historical testimonies, regalia, objects of torture, currencies, carvings, agricultural products, etc.—as well as numerous background illustrations, is extraordinarily rich. The use of audio recordings, short videos, and video lectures by experts further enriches the experience. We spent more than four hours at the museum over two visits. It was an eye-opener, and simply irresistible.

The museum does a great job of providing texts in Switzerland’s three official languages—German, French, and Italian—and English. Opportunities for feedback are also available, asking viewers to answer four vital questions: ‘What does colonialism have to do with me?’, ‘What things in my surroundings remind me of colonialism?’, ‘What forms of racism do I encounter?’, and ‘What should not be forgotten?’ There is also a panel discussion of experts on lessons learned and how to move the project forward.

Refreshingly, the organisers do not compromise on moral clarity or defend what is clearly the greatest crime against humanity—as the UN General Assembly recently described that horrible chapter in world history. We were left with a clear impression that the organisers are committed to exposing the truth about slavery and colonialism, and encouraging the public to reflect deeply on this aspect of Swiss history and end racism. The exhibition seems well attended—there were many organised group visits, including schoolchildren, on the two occasions we visited.

Profiting from the Slave Trade and Slavery

The exhibition highlights four main ways the Swiss participated in the slave trade and slavery: as actual traders and financiers; as land-grabbers who created highly repressive slave colonies in Brazil, the Caribbean, and America; as founders of textile and financial companies that benefited greatly from slave labour; and as opponents of demands for reparations. Swiss historian Hans Fasslër estimates that in per capita terms, Switzerland was more involved in slavery than France, a much bigger colonial power.

The slave trade, spanning over 360 years, involved the violent deportation of 12 million Africans to the Americas, with 10 to 15 percent perishing during the journey. Together, the slave trade and slavery represented the cruellest form of the capitalisation of the human body in world history. Swiss individuals and companies were heavily involved in this trade. Enslaved Africans were sold like commodities and forced to endure grossly inhuman conditions as slave labour in the Americas, producing sugarcane, cotton, cocoa, tobacco, and rice, which were then shipped to Europe to boost local demand and industrialisation.

Swiss financial institutions, city treasuries, and private merchant banks were deeply involved in financing and profiting from the trade and the slave-based plantation economy. Historians estimate that Swiss capital helped finance the forced transportation of over 170,000 enslaved Africans. During the 18th century, private Swiss banks, wealthy aristocratic families, and city governments purchased significant equity stakes and sovereign bonds in European trading companies. Zurich’s oldest private bank (Bank Leu), founded in 1755, held substantial shares in the French Compagnie des Indes, which operated slave-trading ships across the Atlantic. In addition, city governments in Bern and Zurich invested substantial sums of money into Britain’s South Sea Company, which held a Spanish Crown monopoly to supply tens of thousands of enslaved Africans to South America.

In the exhibition, we followed the stories of two prominent Swiss figures who established slave colonies in Brazil and America, as well as a textile magnate whose products were used as barter in the slave trade, making him the richest man in Europe.

The first individual was Christoph von Graffenried. Born into a wealthy family in Bern and holding degrees in law, history, and mathematics, he became a member of the Bernese Grand Council and subsequently asked the British crown to support his plans to establish a settler colony in North America. With the help of John Lawson, a surveyor working for the British colonial government, he laid claim to Tuscarora (Skarure) lands in present-day North Carolina, where he established New Bern and settled hundreds of Swiss and German colonists. Swiss settlers emigrated to the Americas to escape poverty. However, most never became rich in their new homeland, but shared the same racist attitudes towards enslaved Africans as their wealthy compatriots. A breakthrough to prosperity usually occurred with the second or third generation. The indigenous people resisted the colonisation project, capturing von Graffenried and killing Lawson along with sixty settlers in a conflict historians refer to as the Tuscarora War. With the intervention of the Lieutenant Governor of Virginia, von Graffenried was released after six weeks of captivity. The main Skarure settlement, Nooherooka, was subsequently destroyed, and the survivors were sold into slavery or fled north to New York. Today, New Bern has an estimated population of over 31,000.

Swiss colonists also established a slave-based colony in the north-east of Brazil: the village of Helvécia (formerly known as Leopoldina), which specialised in coffee production. Many enslaved people worked on its plantations, including one named Helvétia, owned by the Swiss national Johann Martin Flach. Following the abolition of slavery in Brazil in 1888, it is estimated that approximately 2,000 enslaved people gained their freedom in Helvécia.

The story of Johann Ulrich Zellweger, a 19th-century Swiss merchant and banker from Appenzell, further sheds light on Switzerland’s historical connections to slavery. Living in Cuba for a decade, Zellweger held a management role at Drake Brothers & Co., where he issued credit to plantation owners relying on enslaved labour for sugar and coffee. By trading and exporting these commodities, he accumulated substantial capital. This wealth enabled him to establish the private bank Ulrich Zellweger & Cie in 1848 and later find the Bank für Appenzell Ausserrhoden in 1866—institutions that formed part of the historical roots of modern Swiss banking, including UBS. Later, he founded the Basel Mission Trading Company (Basler Missions-Handlungs-Gesellschaft) to support the financial and commercial operations of the Basel Mission, an organisation dedicated to spreading Christianity in India and West Africa.

Perhaps the most compelling story of Switzerland’s links with slavery is told through the activities of Jacques-Louis de Pourtalès, an industrialist who lived in the 18th and early 19th centuries and earned the reputation as Europe’s richest man. Pourtalès was born in Neuchâtel in the early 18th century and established a huge business empire that specialised in chintz—a widely popular fabric across Europe for interior upholstery, curtains, and apparel that traditionally featured detailed flowers, trailing vines, exotic birds, or botanical motifs printed on light backgrounds. Chintz is believed to have revolutionised global trade and technological breakthroughs in the Industrial Revolution. Switzerland played a central role in the chintz trade during the 17th and 18th centuries when thousands of skilled French Huguenot textile workers and printers fled to Switzerland after France banned the fabric. The fabric served as one of the primary commercial currencies used to buy and enslave humans. European ships loaded with the product sailed to West Africa and used it as barter currency to purchase enslaved Africans from local traders. Apart from his chintz trade, Pourtalès bought plantations in the Antilles, including several hundred enslaved persons, and grew coffee, cacao, and cotton crops. He used part of his fortune to build a hospital in Neuchâtel.

A timeline on the museum’s wall of the section dealing with the anti-slavery resistance demonstrates how long it took for slavery to be proscribed and declared a crime against humanity. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was made in France after a bloody revolution for equality, freedom, and justice in 1789. That declaration, which stipulated that “all Men are born and remain free and equal in rights,” sat oddly with the fact of slavery operating at the time in the American colonies. Even the Haitian Revolution of 1791—the first sustained resistance against slavery and subsequent founding of a black republic—did not end slavery in the Americas, as Napoleon Bonaparte sent troops to Haiti to put down the rebellion and reintroduce slavery in the French colonies.

Even when the greatest power at the time, Britain, banned the slave trade in 1807, and the U.S. followed suit in 1808, it was not until 1948 that a universal declaration was made stating that “No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.” Furthermore, it took another 53 years—in 2001—before the United Nations recognised slavery and the slave trade as a crime against humanity. What is more, it was only in March 2026 that the United Nations summoned the courage to declare that the transatlantic slave trade and slavery constituted the greatest crime against humanity. The U.S., Israel, and Argentina voted against the resolution, and 52 countries, mostly from Europe, including Switzerland, abstained.

In one of the short video lectures provided by the museum, Swiss historian Hans Fässler exposed the shocking declaration of the Swiss Federal Council in the 1860s that attempts to force Swiss slaveowners in Brazil to free enslaved Africans were a violent crime against the slaveowners. He also noted that when the slaveowners failed to have their way, the authorities paid reparations to them rather than the victims. The legal and humanitarian ramifications of slavery also played out in Switzerland when an enslaved woman in Haiti, Pauline Buisson, was exported to Yverdon to serve the household of a rich Swiss couple who had lived in Haiti. She gave birth to a son, Samuel Hyppolite Buisson, but the Bern authorities rejected his application for citizenship because of his colour and died stateless.

Profiting from Colonialism, Scientific Racism, and Missionary Work

While slavery was dismantled in the 19th century, it was immediately followed by an era of aggressive European territorial domination across Africa and Asia—a system of colonialism that relied on systemic economic coercion, forced labour, and resource extraction. Swiss individuals and companies played significant roles in this new order, despite Switzerland holding no colonies of its own. This involvement took four primary forms: participating in unequal trade relations that extracted raw materials from Africa at extremely low prices in exchange for highly priced manufactured goods; propounding pseudo-scientific theories on race that denigrated Africans as genetically inferior to Europeans; providing mercenaries to help colonial powers impose their will on African and Asian peoples; and spreading Christianity, which categorised African belief systems as heathen.

Swiss private enterprises, trading houses, banks, and technical specialists deeply integrated themselves into European colonial structures. They participated in an unequal economic system focused on raw material extraction, cash-crop dominance, and financial flight. Trading houses in Basel and Geneva and private banks acted as the clearinghouses for colonial wealth. This laid the groundwork for Switzerland’s current dominance in global commodity trading. In what has been referred to as “colonialism without colonies”, Swiss and other European businesses integrated African smallholders into European industrial supply chains by converting subsistence farmland into cash-crop plantations (predominantly cocoa and palm oil).

African farmers grew the commodities under pressure from colonial structures, while Swiss and other European trading firms controlled the purchasing prices, shipping logistics, and resale values on world markets. Furthermore, Swiss engineers, agronomists, and geologists were hired by major colonial powers (Britain, France, Belgium) because of Switzerland’s technical reputation. These specialists mapped mineral deposits and built railways to transport raw materials from the interior to coastal ports. The museum recounts the horrors of Belgium’s King Leopold in Congo and the role of Swiss workers in that brutal enterprise. It is estimated that about 200 Swiss nationals—geologists, engineers, military officers, and administrators—worked directly in King Leopold II’s brutal private colony, the Congo Free State (1885–1908). They surveyed land, mapped resources, and managed colonial infrastructure that facilitated the violent rubber and ivory extraction regimes. The picture of the son born out of a mixed relationship between a Swiss officer and a Congolese mother, Albert Béguin, is displayed in the exhibition. His father brought him to Switzerland, but without his mother. He became the first Black or mixed-race person to serve in the Swiss army.

Swiss mercenaries also served European powers and commercial trading companies, waging war against native populations in Africa and Asia. Starting in the late 16th century, thousands of young Swiss men turned to colonial soldiering to escape poverty and pursue adventure. Many joined the French Foreign Legion and the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army, becoming complicit in colonial atrocities. Between 1815 and 1914 alone, roughly 7,600 Swiss mercenaries served the Dutch in the Malay Archipelago. Others were central to French imperial expansions—garrisoning outposts, suppressing indigenous revolts across North Africa, especially in Morocco, and aiding in the conquest of Algeria and Madagascar.

The exhibition also throws considerable light on the heavy involvement of Swiss nationals in missionary work, which, as historical research has shown, worked in tandem with colonialism—with colonial powers conquering and administering territories, colonial companies extracting resources, and missionaries preaching the Bible, building schools and hospitals, and pacifying the natives. The biggest and most famous of the Swiss missions was the Basel Mission, which was founded in 1815 and started sending missionaries to present-day Ghana in 1828 and to India in 1834. As the exhibition points out, although they occasionally initiated positive social change, missionaries saw the cultures and belief systems of their converts as inferior to those of Europeans. One of the museum walls features a large photo of a smiling female missionary carried in a wooden chair by African men, escorted by others carrying heavy loads on their heads.

A defining feature of the work of the Basel Mission was its involvement not only in missionary work but also, like colonial trading companies, in colonial trade and other businesses, blurring the line between religion and colonial extraction of surplus. In West Africa, Basel missionaries established cash-crop agriculture, promoting cocoa, coffee, and palm oil cultivation. The Mission established a trading and manufacturing company, the Basler Handelsgesellschaft, which generated massive profits while integrating local economies into global trade routes controlled by European empires. Christian paternalism and colonial extraction became inextricably intertwined. Profits were systematically transferred to Switzerland to fund its mission operations and pay capped annual dividends to investors. Between 1916 and 1928, it evolved into an independent trading company, which further metamorphosed in the mid-20th century into a major Swiss multinational, generating billions in revenue.

Perhaps the most damaging effect of the colonial enterprise—in which Swiss individuals played a frontline role—was the propagation of pseudo-scientific theories asserting African racial inferiority. During the 19th and early 20th centuries, scientific racism, polygenism, and physical anthropology were widely accepted in Western universities. Researchers measured human bodies and skulls, claiming physical metrics correlated with intelligence, morality, and civilisational potential. These studies fuelled notions of racial purity, Social Darwinism, and species survival that demanded the elimination of “inferior” groups—ultimately spawning eugenics, structural racism, and genocide.

The world’s leading scholar in scientific racism was Louis Agassiz, who was a professor of glaciology, paleontology, and natural history at Neuchâtel, but later moved to Harvard in the US. The Universities of Zurich and Geneva were leading centres in the study of scientific racism. Aggasiz denounced Darwin’s theory of evolution, asserting that Africans and Europeans were different species, in which Africans occupied the lowest rung in his hierarchy of races. He commissioned slave daguerreotypes—15 photographs of seven enslaved individuals in 1850–identifued as Renty, Delia, Hack, Drama, Fassens, Alfred, and Jena—on plantations in South Carolina. These individuals were photographed bare-chested or completely stripped, viewed from the front, profile, and back. They were, cruelly, reduced to biological specimens, stripping away their personal identity and dignity for the purpose of racial classification.

In 1896, local event organisers and scientists at a Swiss National Exhibition constructed a massive Village Noir (Black Village) in the heart of the city of Geneva. More than 200 Senegalese men, women, and children were brought to Geneva and put in a gated enclosure like animals, and more than two million people paid to observe them perform daily tasks. Swiss physical anthropologists used the Village Noir as a living laboratory to conduct physiological and cranial studies on the Senegalese participants.

The exhibition has a special wall, which can be described as a Wall of Infamy, displaying the faces of the twelve most prominent Swiss scholars who propagated the obscene theories of scientific racism. These are Louis Agassiz, Paul Eugen Bleuler, Carl Vogt, Émile Yung, Ernst Rüdin, Otto Schlaginhaufen, George Montandon, Julius Klaus, Auguste Forel, and Marc Rodolphe Sauter.

Conclusion

The Prangins exhibition on Switzerland’s role in the slave trade, slavery, and colonialism is a masterpiece. I’m aware that the biggest museum on the slave trade and slavery (the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture), which I have yet to visit, is in Washington. However, this is the first museum we’ve visited in which the spotlight is put on a country’s role in the trifecta of the slave trade, slavery, and colonialism. It’s different from museums we’ve visited in Africa that address the tragic experience of Africans in the Euro-American global order. The Anti-Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg tells a powerful and profound story of apartheid and the courageous resistance against it. The National Museum in Namibia offers gripping insights into the horrors of colonialism, the world’s first genocide by German colonists, and the heroic struggle for independence. Kenya’s National Museum in Nairobi also does a great job of documenting the evils of colonialism, land appropriation, and the struggle for freedom. The historic defeat of a European power, Italy, in Africa—the Battle of Adwa in 1896—is also heroically celebrated in an imposing museum with rich illustrations in Addis Ababa.

These initiatives, including the Prangins exhibition on the slave trade, slavery, and colonialism, challenge and stand in stark contrast to recent efforts by the U.S. government under Donald Trump to roll back public education and critical reflection on slavery and racism. This comes in a country long considered a heartland of racial prejudice, institutional racism, and violence.

This article was first published in the Yusuf Bangura Substack.

The question behind the interview

On September 9, 2026, Sierra Leone’s Chief Minister, Dr. Moinina David Sengeh, appeared on AYV Television’s State of the Nation, interviewed by Umaru Fofana. According to later reports, he said he did not know exactly how much he earned because he had not paid attention to the amount. The exchange generated public debate. Some saw it as detachment from the circumstances of ordinary Sierra Leoneans; others saw the controversy as a distraction from his office.

In a subsequent Radio Democracy interview, Sengeh reportedly explained that he opened the account that receives his earnings during his student years at Harvard and that another person has managed it since he was 19. That explanation may account for his limited attention to bank deposits. It does not establish the remuneration attached to his appointment, which falls under public financial administration rather than personal banking arrangements.

Nothing in the records reviewed for this article establishes that Sengeh received unauthorized compensation or concealed earnings. The inquiry is about the documentary record of an office funded through public resources.

Who is responsible for public remuneration?

Sierra Leone has several institutions with roles in government compensation. The Human Resource Management Office manages civil-service personnel and payroll functions; the Accountant-General’s Department handles central government accounting and payments; and the Ministry of Finance budgets and reports expenditure. Their responsibilities should not be presumed identical across civil servants, political appointees and other public officers.

The Wages and Compensation Commission Act, 2023, raises a particularly important question. The Commission’s statutory mandate concerns the structure and certification of public-sector salaries, allowances and other benefits. The Commission must establish its precise operational coverage and implementation for political officeholders, rather than inferring it merely from the law’s broad language.

At a government press conference in February 2026, the Commission’s chairman reportedly said its mandate extends to the President and members of the Executive, and outlined a pay-harmonization exercise. That makes the Commission an appropriate institution to ask whether the Chief Minister’s compensation has been certified, or whether an earlier arrangement remains in force.

What the Ministry of Finance draft records

A publicly accessible draft of the Government of Sierra Leone’s Budget Execution Report for January–June 2025, hosted in the Ministry of Finance’s October 2025 website directory, records a political-class wage bill of NLe13.8 million in January and NLe89.5 million in February. The draft attributes the increase principally to a one-off rent allowance payment. The difference is NLe75.7 million. These are aggregate category-wide figures, not the Chief Minister’s individual earnings.

The cover of the Ministry-hosted copy is visibly watermarked “DRAFT.” A separately published, non-draft edition has not been established in this investigation. The figures are therefore attributed to the official draft and are not presented as final audited expenditure. The October 2025 website directory indicates the location of the file, not its precise drafting or approval date.

The reported allowance payment illustrates why a basic monthly salary alone may not describe an official’s total remuneration. A complete accounting should distinguish base salary, periodic allowances and other authorized benefits. It would be incorrect to treat the entire February increase as an allowance amount for any one officeholder.

What the Auditor-General found

The Auditor-General’s 2023 report, as summarized in contemporaneous reporting, raised concerns about personnel verification in the Office of the Chief Minister. Fourteen employees initially failed to present themselves for verification, and relevant personnel files were not available at the time. Subsequent follow-up reportedly verified 13, leaving one case unresolved at that stage. The initial observation and the subsequent corrective action must be read together.

These findings concern historical payroll documentation and internal controls. They do not demonstrate that the Chief Minister’s personal remuneration was improper. Their relevance here is narrower: reliable personnel and payment records are necessary to verify public expenditure independently.

The published Auditor-General’s report is a legitimate source for examining these matters. The article does not infer corruption from an audit observation, nor does it overlook management responses and the auditors’ final status assessments.

The public-access question

Sierra Leone’s Right to Access Information Act, 2013, establishes a formal route for requesting records held by public authorities, subject to statutory procedures and exemptions. A request for an approved salary scale, official allowances, the instrument authorizing them, and the responsible accounting institution differs from a request for a person’s private bank account or unrelated personal financial information.

The responsible authorities should be asked to identify the Chief Minister’s approved basic salary; all recurring and periodic allowances and benefits; the legal or administrative authority for each; the relevant payroll category; and the extent to which the Wages and Compensation Commission has certified the package. They should also explain how a citizen can inspect the applicable records.

The fact that government maintains payroll records does not by itself prove those records are published or disclosable in every detail. Equally, the absence of an immediately accessible figure does not prove unlawful withholding. The proper test is to request the records and assess the response against the applicable law.

A straightforward test of accountability

The documents examined here do not yet establish a verified individual breakdown of the Chief Minister’s current salary, allowances and other benefits. That limitation is material and should not be filled by conjecture.

The Chief Minister may not know the figure. The institutions responsible for authorizing, recording and paying it should. The question now is whether the public can obtain that figure, and it requires an official answer.

About the Author

J. Amadu Massally is a Sierra Leonean author, independent researcher, and cultural historian whose work connects African and diasporic histories through documentary evidence and historical inquiry. He writes on governance, public accountability, and the enduring connections between Africa and its diaspora.

Documentary sources and verification notes

1. Government of Sierra Leone, Ministry of Finance, Budget Execution Report, First Half, January–June 2025 (officially hosted DRAFT; cover watermark confirmed). https://mof.gov.sl/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/First-Half-Fiscal-Report-for-FY2025.pdf

2. Wages and Compensation Commission Act, 2023. https://sierralii.gov.sl/akn/sl/act/2023/19/eng%402023-06-08/source.pdf

3. Auditor-General’s Report on the Accounts of Sierra Leone, 2023. https://website.auditservice.gov.sl/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/2023-AGs-REPORT-Final-2-12-24.pdf

4. Right to Access Information Act, 2013. https://www.wipo.int/wipolex/en/legislation/details/14563

5. Sierra Leone News Agency, February 2026, reporting on the Wages and Compensation Commission’s pay-harmonization mandate. https://www.slena.gov.sl/post/wages-and-compensation-commission-takes-full-control-of-public-sector-pay-structure

6. Sierraloaded, September 15, 2026, account of Sengeh’s Radio Democracy explanation. https://sierraloaded.sl/news/david-sengeh-reason-behind-salary-disclosure/

Verification note:

Interview descriptions are attributed to published accounts rather than a verbatim transcript. The Ministry of Finance report is visibly marked DRAFT. The Chief Minister’s individual remuneration schedule and institutional responses have not been obtained.

I was just 17 years old, in a WhatsApp group with peers discussing sexual and gender-based violence when I first heard that Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) was violence. I remember being agitated by the turn the discussion took. Though much of that conversation is murky now, I remember repeating the same lines: ‘FGM is culture; if we can advocate for abortion, then surely we could allow others to practise their culture in peace’. A colleague then insinuated that such statements were why more girls and women were being harmed – that I was, in fact, supporting violence against women and girls.

Teenage me had just started her activism journey, but carried the authority of someone who thought she knew it all. For her, FGM was a normal part of existence. My mother, aunties, cousins and almost every woman I knew had gone through it. I had heard stories of older women travelling for days to be cut. Being cut was an honour. Families paid the woman who performed the cutting. There was no way, teenage me would think, that love and violence could coexist. So being called a perpetrator on that platform did not sit well with her.

I left pressed to prove someone wrong. I decided to learn more about FGM, hoping to win the next argument. I dove into its history, beyond what I had absorbed socially.

Why were women cut? How had it become part of our history? As I travelled from one district to another, I heard stories about female chiefs, hints from the Sunnah, and other explanations. Whatever argument I would make next had to be concise. It had to convince others – and, by this point, myself – that FGM was not violence.

But the more I learned and met the women in different locations, the more my need to prove a point faded. The research kept returning me to the same message: FGM is violence. Teenage me found stories of women discovering they had been cut as children. Older sisters fighting to protect younger sisters. Communities and countries organising against the practice. Women whose genitalia had been sewn together until marriage. Girls being forced into marriages, with FGM part of a much larger system of control over their bodies and futures.

Facing the fear of naming as a survivor

FGM was the first issue I was ever truly scared to write about. There have always been stories of women being kidnapped, physically assaulted, and even killed for advocating against FGM. And the women who sold dresses, the men who sponsored the cutting, these were people I had loved and admired all my life. Talking negatively about a practice they held dear felt like a betrayal of their trust. And, to be honest, I also thought ”I am okay for now. So, what I experienced was not great harm, right?”

Then one day, on a trip travelling back from Waterloo, eastern…Freetown, I saw girls as young as six walking along the streets. Something shifted in me. Suddenly, this was no longer a debate about culture, history or what I had been taught to believe. These were children. Girls who, like me, had yet to understand the lifelong implications of what could be done to their bodies. If I remained silent, this violence would continue to be meted out upon young girls and women across the country.

I went straight to Facebook and wrote, “I’m a cut woman; I once believed that this was an African thing. It never was”, and there I named t the harm that FGM is. I was surprised by how many people agreed with me. Of course, some people told me to stop. Was it the first time to publicly say that? And really, to look at this as a personal experience that connected to millions of other girls and women, and it needed to be named. Not faceless statistics.

Since then, I have kept writing. I kept sharing my story and other advocacy work across social media platforms. The first post opened a conversation with my cousin, who had also been cut. We talked about the harm and absurdity of it and promised that our daughters, if we had them, would not be subjected to the same harm.

For many of us, going through FGM was not a choice; it was family enacting culture. It was what we knew and what we were taught to accept. But knowing what we know now, we had to speak up. When I wrote that Facebook post, I was also, for the first time, claiming my place among those survivors who were saying that this violence must end with them.

Tackling socialisation and policy on social media

For decades, the global movement to end FGM has relied heavily on data what the numbers say. Prevalence rates. Health complications. Economic costs. All of these are real, and they matter greatly. But they are only one part of the story, and alone, rarely change the social meaning of a practice. But survivor testimonies like mine do things differently. They take something made normal and challenge us to see it differently. Survivor testimony is not new to the movement. It has long been one of the strongest forms of community-level resistance. What has changed is its reach, organisation and power.

Across Africa, survivors like me are increasingly moving from the margins into positions where policy is made, and we can shape it. And through social media, we have seen the rise of the “anti-FGM influencer” as part of this shift. More survivors are sharing their experiences on their platforms to help end the practice. Through first-person storytelling on social media, as well as music and documentary film, we are amplifying work that has been happening in communities for generations, while placing FGM more directly within conversations about bodily autonomy, violence, child abuse and patriarchal control. Gambian women and girls for the last two years have been fighting efforts to overturn the FGM ban, a fight now before the Supreme Court.

Social media has also brought us collaborators and partners in the fight against FGM. It has disrupted the distance between individual testimony and collective action. A woman in Dakar can reach a girl in Conakry. A campaign launched in Freetown can be amplified by a diaspora in London, Oslo and Minneapolis within hours. A survivor can tell her story and, within the same space, find another woman who recognises it, an organisation willing to support her, or thousands of people willing to act with her.

Testimonies like that of Shamsa Araweelo similarly reached millions online, prompting outrage, solidarity and recognition among women who had experienced FGM themselves. Social media has changed not simply who can speak, but who can find each other. Survivors who once told their stories in isolation to researchers, journalists or therapists can now recognise one another, build communities and organise together.

Disrupt economies and knowledge systems

This also matters for how knowledge is produced. For too long, survivors have been treated as data sources rather than authorities on their own experiences. Testimony disrupts that hierarchy. It names what statistics cannot: the particular betrayal of being harmed by someone who also raised you, fed you and loved you. It forces us to hold several truths at once: a community can love you deeply, and the same community can participate in practices that harm you. In the end, one must choose to protect generations of girls who are being born every day.

Survivors persist in this work, knowing there are real, often imminent risks, both in the community and online. Those of us who speak publicly can face ostracism, family fractures, harassment and physical threats. In places where religious leaders, political actors and organised anti-rights movements are working to reverse protections, the cost of testimony can be high. We need to disrupt economies that have for generations been constructed around the practice of FGM. FGM sits at the intersection of economic, social, and political power. Challenging the practice itself makes one a threat to the authority and systems that sustain it. Survivors can face grave backlash as a result. For some, speaking out means relocation; for others, it can even mean losing their lives. So safety work is important.

The movement has an obligation to protect the women who carry their stories forward.

I think about that 17-year-old girl sometimes. She was wrong about FGM, but she was not stupid. She was trying to make sense of a contradiction she had never been given the language to name: that the people who love us can also participate in systems that harm us, but also that culture is not an excuse to continue a harmful practice. Culture is not abstract; it serves everyone equally and can be reformed, disrupted, and dismantled so new ways of being can emerge, ways that advance dignity and freedom.

Being a survivor does not automatically mean knowing you are one. Today, survivors are naming that contradiction for ourselves. We are telling our own stories and changing what the world understands about FGM.

This article was first published by African Feminism website

The confrontation between Sierra Leone’s Chief Justice, Justice Komba Kamanda, and Joseph Fitzgerald Kamara—widely known as JFK—during Supreme Court proceedings was, on its surface, a procedural dispute.

But the episode quickly became about something larger.

It became about advocacy and authority; about the point at which persistence is perceived as defiance; about the immense power a judge holds to control proceedings; and, ultimately, about what power owes itself when it is publicly challenged.

Lawyers distinguish themselves not only by their knowledge of substantive law but also by their command of procedure: how cases are commenced, how objections are raised, how arguments are preserved, and how the machinery of justice is expected to operate.

Yet experienced advocates also acquire another form of knowledge—the knowledge of power. Law governs the courtroom, and hierarchy structures it. The judge controls the proceedings, determines who speaks, rules on objections, and holds extraordinary powers to maintain the court’s authority and dignity. The experienced lawyer therefore reads two things at once: the law and the room.

That dual obligation appears central to what transpired between JFK and the Chief Justice.

JFK raised a preliminary objection to the State’s participation in the proceedings, arguing that the required documents, including a Statement of Case, had not been filed. The Court overruled the objection and permitted the matter to proceed.

Later, however, the Court directed the Attorney-General and the Minister of Justice to file and serve a Statement of Case.

That later direction did not retroactively validate JFK’s objection. The Court had rejected his legal argument, but it did show that the underlying procedural deficiency he identified was real.

This is where the episode becomes more complicated than simply asking who was right. JFK may have lost the objection while still identifying a procedural omission that ultimately required correction. But advocacy is not merely the art of being right. It is also the art of knowing when the point has been made.

A seasoned lawyer must understand when persistence advances the client’s cause and when it begins to change the character of the encounter. At one point in litigation, another sentence sharpens the argument. At another, it merely prolongs the confrontation.

A lawyer with JFK’s experience should recognize the difference. He did not need to withdraw his objection. He could state it forcefully, preserve it on the record, and allow the Court to rule. After that, further insistence risked shifting the dispute from procedure to something more personal: the bench’s perceived authority.

And that is where the danger begins.When a lawyer repeatedly challenges a position in open court—particularly before the country’s highest judicial officer—the exchange can take on a second meaning. What begins as disagreement over the law can start to look like a contest over who commands the room.

That perception may be unfair. It may even be unintended.

But appearances partly sustain courtroom power, and the experienced advocate ignores that reality at his peril. This is the strongest case for saying JFK should have known better. Not necessarily because his concern lacked substance, but because experience should have taught him how quickly a legal dispute can escalate into a struggle over authority.

Yet that cannot be the final lesson.

For the title of this article could easily have been “JFK Ought to Have Known Better.” The more important question is this: what should power know about itself? If lawyers must understand the sensitivities of authority, authority must understand the dangers of being sensitive.

A constitutional court cannot demand deference merely because it can enforce it. Its legitimacy depends on something more demanding: the capacity to distinguish disrespect from disagreement, defiance from persistence, and contempt from vigorous advocacy.

The rule of law requires respect for the bench.

But it also requires a bench confident enough to tolerate challenge. Sam Kargbo, SAN, locates that tension within the judicial process itself. In his view, the lawyer and the judicial officer are “equal partners in the administration of justice,” although they bear distinct responsibilities: “The lawyer advocates; the judge adjudicates.”

That distinction matters. The adversarial system assumes that counsel must be free to advance arguments, challenge propositions, and interrogate their legal basis without legitimate advocacy being treated as an affront to judicial authority. As Kargbo puts it, “the judge’s authority lies not in suppressing advocacy but in the disciplined, impartial, and lawful determination of the issues presented.”

Disagreement, then, is not necessarily disorder. Where advocacy and adjudication meet in good faith, some friction is inevitable; when iron sharpens iron, sparks may fly.

A lawyer should know when persistence becomes provocation. A judge should know the difference between provocation and contempt. The distinction is critical because the power relationship is profoundly unequal.

The lawyer can argue.

The judge can punish.

That asymmetry imposes obligations on both parties, but the greater power necessarily bears the heavier burden. Judicial authority is strongest when it does not need to display its strength. A judge loses nothing by allowing counsel to advance an uncomfortable argument. Nor is judicial dignity diminished when a court revises, qualifies, or supplements a procedural position after hearing submissions.

Indeed, one of the clearest demonstrations of authority is the confidence to accept correction without feeling humiliated. Judges may question counsel, test arguments, clarify procedure, and control their courts. These are essential judicial functions.

But the bench must also guard against letting disagreement with a judicial position become indistinguishable from disagreement with the judge as a person. When those two things collapse into each other, a procedural dispute can become a contest of personalities.

That is dangerous for everyone involved, but especially for the institution. The confrontation eventually culminated in JFK being committed to custody for contempt.

At that moment, the stakes changed.

Contempt powers exist for compelling reasons. Courts cannot function if lawyers, litigants, or members of the public can obstruct proceedings or openly defy lawful judicial authority.

But precisely because contempt powers are so formidable, they must be exercised with particular care.

When punishment follows directly from a heated exchange between counsel and the judge with authority to punish counsel, the court bears a heightened responsibility to make the boundary unmistakable: where advocacy ended, where contempt began, and why coercive power became necessary.

That clarity protects more than the lawyer.

It protects the court.

Judicial authority depends not merely on power, but on public confidence that it is exercised for institutional rather than personal purposes.

The appearance of justice therefore matters as much as its administration. If the public cannot distinguish punishment imposed to protect the integrity of proceedings from punishment perceived as a response to a personal affront, confidence in the institution is unnecessarily strained.

The irony in JFK’s case remains difficult to ignore. His objection was overruled. Yet the State later had to file the Statement of Case, which he had complained was missing. That does not mean he was legally vindicated in the objection itself.

It means something subtler.

He could be wrong about the legal consequence of the omission while still being right that an omission existed. And that distinction matters because it highlights the danger of reducing the entire episode to the personality or conduct of a single lawyer.

JFK’s behavior deserves scrutiny.

So does the exercise of authority in response. A mature legal system should be able to hold both thoughts at once. Counsel has obligations to the court. He must advocate firmly without turning litigation into theatre, preserve his client’s position without mistaking repetition for courage, and know when to stop.

But judicial power carries its own discipline.

A judge must not only command the courtroom. He must command himself. That is restraint’s deeper meaning. Restraint is not a weakness in the face of challenge. It is evidence that authority does not require emotional reinforcement. The same principle becomes even more important once a person is detained.

Whatever one thinks of JFK’s courtroom conduct, once an individual is deprived of liberty, the authorities largely bear responsibility for that person’s physical safety.

A detainee cannot freely leave his surroundings, remove himself from danger, or independently secure his own protection.

Custody therefore creates not only control, but obligation.

Concern for JFK’s safety while detained is not an argument about whether he was right or wrong in court. Nor does it require speculation about what may happen to him.

It is a simple principle of state responsibility.

Once the authorities take custody of a person, they assume a corresponding duty to take reasonable measures to protect his well-being.

Whatever consequences the law imposes, detention should not expose a person to dangers beyond those the court lawfully contemplates.

And here the different threads of the episode finally converge.

The lawyer must know how to challenge power without recklessness.

The judge must know how to exercise power without personalizing challenge.

And the State must know that custody transforms power into responsibility.

These are not competing principles.

They are parts of the same constitutional discipline. What happened between JFK and the Chief Justice therefore matters beyond the personalities involved. It raises an enduring question about the relationship between advocacy and authority. How forcefully may a lawyer challenge the bench before persistence becomes contempt?How confidently may a judge respond to challenge before authority begins to appear personal?

There will rarely be a clear answer.

That is precisely why restraint matters.

The lawyer who stands before the court must understand the limits of advocacy.

But those who command the court must understand something more fundamental:

Power is never tested merely by its ability to prevail.

It is tested by what it does when it can.

The law demands respect from those who stand before the court.

Justice demands self-command from those who possess the power to command others

About the Author:

Oumar Farouk Sesay is a Sierra Leonean poet, playwright and novelist. He is also the President of Pen, Sierra Leone Chapter.

At a moment when the international system is marked by profound vacuums of trust and mediation, Africa appears content to accept the role of non-entity. The escalating confrontation between the United States and Israel on one side and Iran on the other has opened a rare diplomatic space. Yet the African Union and its member states remain largely spectators, as though the continent has internalised the hierarchical logic first imposed upon it at the Berlin Conference of 1884–85.

The vacuum in global mediation is unmistakable. Traditional Western interlocutors are widely perceived as partisan. Gulf states carry their own regional rivalries. China and Russia pursue distinct strategic interests that limit their credibility as honest brokers. Into this breach, Africa could step with a degree of relative neutrality that few other regions can claim. Instead, the continent watches from the sidelines.

Nowhere is African vulnerability more evident than in the ongoing energy crisis. Successive shocks—from the Russia-Ukraine war to disruptions in the Red Sea and heightened tensions in the Middle East—have driven up the cost of imported refined petroleum products across much of the continent. Landlocked nations and coastal economies alike feel the squeeze as transport costs soar, food prices climb, and fiscal space shrinks.

Many African states possess significant hydrocarbon reserves, yet infrastructure deficits, regulatory uncertainty, and limited refining capacity leave them dependent on global markets they do not control. The energy crisis is therefore not an abstract geopolitical concern; it is a daily lived reality that undermines development plans, exacerbates inflation, and fuels social discontent. Precisely because Africa suffers disproportionately, it has both the moral authority and the practical incentive to seek de-escalation.

A peace ambassador role between Washington, Jerusalem, and Tehran is not an exercise in sentimental idealism. It is a calculated recognition of national and continental interest. Several African countries maintain functional diplomatic and commercial ties with Iran, including technical cooperation and energy-related partnerships. Others enjoy longstanding security, developmental, and investment relationships with the United States and, in selected cases, with Israel.

This dual connectivity, combined with the absence of deep historical entanglement in the core Arab-Israeli or Persian Gulf rivalries, positions African diplomacy uniquely. An African-led initiative would not be burdened by the same legacy of suspicion that often attaches to Western or certain regional mediators. That comparative advantage remains largely unused.

The African Union has so far declined to occupy this space with any sustained or imaginative effort. Periodic statements of concern are issued. Resolutions are adopted. High-level visits occur. Yet no coherent diplomatic strategy has emerged to position the continent as a consistent interlocutor capable of facilitating dialogue or confidence-building measures. The organisation that once projected itself as the institutional expression of African agency appears content with reactive diplomacy.

By remaining largely absent, the AU risks confirming the very marginalisation it claims to resist. The parallel with Berlin is not merely rhetorical. Then, Africa was physically divided by external powers. Today the partitioning is subtler: spheres of influence, preferential financing, military access agreements, and critical mineral deals continue to be negotiated with limited continental coordination. Silence in the most consequential security and energy disputes of the moment reinforces the pattern.

Critics will inevitably argue that Africa lacks the hard power, the internal coherence, and the diplomatic bandwidth to play such a role. Governance challenges, competing national interests, and institutional weaknesses within the AU itself are real and cannot be dismissed. Coherence, however, is rarely a precondition for action; it is more often forged through purposeful collective engagement.

Africa today possesses leverage that previous generations did not. Its demographic weight is rising. Its share of global critical minerals essential to the energy transition is substantial. Its markets are expanding. These assets, if strategically deployed, can translate into diplomatic influence. Refusing to use them in pursuit of de-escalation is not strategic restraint; it is a form of collective abdication.

Concrete initiatives need not aim to resolve the entire Israeli-Iranian or American-Iranian confrontation in one stroke. More modest but meaningful steps are available: facilitating technical discussions on maritime security along the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden corridors; proposing confidence-building measures around energy infrastructure protection; or hosting Track II dialogues that keep informal channels open when official ones freeze. Such efforts would signal seriousness and capability.

The emerging world order remains fluid. It is still contested and not yet fully institutionalised. Those who claim seats at the table will help shape the rules that govern energy security, trade routes, and conflict management. Those who remain silent will continue to live under arrangements designed primarily by others. Africa’s demographic and resource profile means the continent will be deeply affected by these rules regardless of whether it participates in writing them.

History rarely rewards prolonged hesitation. The diplomatic vacuum exists now. The energy costs are being paid now. The question confronting African leaders and the institutions that speak in their name is straightforward: will the continent once again allow itself to be mapped by external powers, or will it finally insist on drawing its own coordinates on the international stage? The choice is still available, but it will not remain so indefinitely.

About the Author

Cyril Jengo Snr holds an M.Phil. in Political Economy from the University of Sierra Leone. He is a business professional working in marketing and sales within the telecommunications industry.

On 16 September, an Extraordinary issue of The Sierra Leone Gazette, the official record in which new laws take effect, redrew the country’s map. It created two new districts (Bandajuma and Kpanguima), a second Freetown city council, a new Lungi City Council, three new rural councils in the Western Area and another wave of chiefdoms. On paper, Sierra Leone now has 18 districts instead of 16. Officials say this will bring the state closer to the people. Yet the money and the appointments, along with the final say over anything that matters, remain in Freetown.

In my earlier piece in The Afroscope Media on September 28, I argued that Sierra Leone’s failures have less to do with which party governs than with how the state is built: a country of provinces run as though it were one city, with nearly every decision and budget line of consequence waiting on Freetown. The new map is that design made bigger. By multiplying administrative units while keeping control at the centre, the state is expanding a system built to fail its citizens, one that serves instead to insulate the political elite.

The APC’s Blueprint

To be fair, the SLPP did not invent this playbook. It is perfecting one the APC wrote. In 2017, months before a general election, the APC government of Ernest Bai Koroma used the same language of correcting historical wrongs and deepening decentralization to create Karene and Falaba districts, both in its northern heartland, carve a new North West Province out of the old Northern Province, and split colonial-era chiefdoms until the national count rose from 149 to 190. Nearly a decade later, the promised prosperity has not arrived. Karene and Falaba remain remote and badly served, and Chief Minister, David Sengeh, has himself admitted that splitting the chiefdoms set neighbouring paramount chiefs, the hereditary rulers who administer them, against one another over boundaries and land. The APC proved that multiplying territories does not multiply wealth. It only multiplies government payrolls.

The SLPP has not reversed any of this. It has kept it and enlarged it, and independent counts now put the number of chiefdoms around 190.

The Government’s Best Case

The government’s argument deserves to be heard at full strength. In the telling of Tamba Lamina, the Minister of Local Government, the problem is reach. A farmer in a remote corner of the south or east can lose a day’s income travelling to a district office for a service that should be on his doorstep, and a new district headquarters shortens that journey. The capital has its own version of the problem: a city that has grown well past a million people cannot, he argues, be run by one council, and Lungi, with the international airport and a planned economic zone, has earned the standing of a city. The arrangements written in 2004, for a country just out of war, no longer fit. These are real problems, and anyone who has travelled a rainy-season road in Pujehun knows it.

Political Mapmaking

But if the problem in Pujehun is distance, why does each new district arrive with its own council, its own administrators and its own official vehicles, but no new money for clinics or schools? On paper, Sierra Leone’s 22 local councils already hold 78 functions devolved from 17 ministries, and the World Bank found that the money they receive to perform them falls far short of what the work requires. A new council in Bandajuma will wait on the same delayed grants from the same Ministry of Finance as every council before it, and each new chiefdom brings its own fight over who becomes chief, along with another set of officials with claims on land and taxes. Moving the building closer to the people achieves nothing if the building has no budget and no authority. Karene and Falaba prove this point entirely. On paper, the residents of Kamakwie and Mongo finally got their own local governments; in practice, they inherited empty bureaucratic shells.

The location of the new districts tells its own story. Both are carved from Bo, Pujehun, Kenema and Kailahun, the SLPP’s southern and eastern heartland, in the same way Karene and Falaba were carved from the APC’s north. The timing matters, because on 10 August Parliament declared passed a constitutional amendment, after 49 APC MPs walked out and with one key clause winning 96 votes where the Constitution requires 100. If it survives the Supreme Court, which began hearing the challenges on 7 October and has yet to rule, a presidential candidate could win outright with 50 percent plus one, provided she also takes 20 percent of the vote in two-thirds of the districts. So a government that adds two districts inside its own stronghold, at the same moment it changes that rule, has rewritten the arithmetic of the next election in its own favour.

Then there is Freetown. Ministers insist the capital is not being split. If that is true, why does the Gazette give it a second city council, Freetown West, without settling who collects which taxes or who clears which drains? The city’s tax base is narrow and concentrated: the council’s own reform found that the top quarter of properties hold 70 percent of revenue potential. Divide the city without a legislated equalization formula and the crowded, flood-prone East End is left to fund itself. The same Gazette also creates new rural councils at Mountain, Waterloo and York, inside the territory of the Western Area Rural District Council. Both Freetown City Council, led since 2018 by mayor Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr, and the rural council, under chairman Kasho Holland-Cole, are run by the APC. The peninsula has two local councils, the opposition governs both, and the government is breaking up both. Is that a coincidence?

The data behind all this is no better. The Lawyers’ Society of Sierra Leone warned that creating localities ahead of the scheduled 2026 census conflicts with the Constitution and with the Local Government Act’s own requirement that population inform new boundaries. The only recent count, the 2021 Mid-Term Census, recorded Freetown’s population falling by more than 40 percent while the ruling party’s regions grew, a result the mayor called a significant undercount. Redrawing the map first and counting the people later is backwards for a reform that claims to serve them.

Put all of this together and it is hard to call it decentralization. It is an expensive form of political mapmaking, partisan and unilateral, imposed by presidential order without a referendum, an independent boundary commission or a credible census. The APC did it in 2017, and the SLPP is doing it on a bigger scale in 2026. Neither did it for the farmer in Pujehun or Falaba.

Move the Money, Not the Lines

The alternative is districts that actually govern, and a far smaller centre. Halt the 18-district expansion and return to the map that existed before 2017: twelve provincial districts in three provinces, which means folding Karene and Falaba back into their parent districts and the North West Province back into the Northern Province, with the Western Area governed as a single unit.

The Western Area needs to be a single unit because Freetown long ago spilled past its official boundary into Waterloo, Grafton and the hills, all of them classified as rural; even the contested 2021 census counted more people in Western Area Rural than in the city itself. Waste, drainage, water, flooding, land use planning and transport do not stop at that line, and the Ministry of Health already runs the whole peninsula as a single health district. One metropolitan council for the entire Western Area, with guaranteed ward budgets so that York, Tokeh and the mountain villages are not swallowed by the city, would pool the tax base and end the bureaucracy of blame. Some will call this a gerrymander of my own. It is hard to see how, since the APC already runs both councils and party control would stay exactly where it is.

Then apply one rule across the country: everything that can be run locally should be. The centre keeps the short list of things only a national government can do: defence, foreign affairs, the currency, national standards and regulation, the policing of corruption, the equalization formula that protects poorer districts, and the national infrastructure that binds the country together, from the trunk roads and railways that connect one region to another to the ports and national power lines. Everything else moves.

When a function moves, its budget, its staff and its payroll must move with it, and the ministry that used to run it should shrink or close. This is the step every government since 2004 has avoided. Councils were handed functions while Freetown kept the money and the people, which is why a country with 78 functions devolved on paper still runs on the old machine. If the minister, the deputy ministers, the permanent secretary, the directors and the vehicles all stay in Freetown, what exactly has been devolved? Nothing, except a second bureaucracy to supervise the first.

Start with the services people feel every day:

• Primary health care. Councils receive health grants and nominally oversee district services, but the Ministry of Health’s own 2017–2021 strategic plan concedes they have little control over staff, whose payroll is held centrally, above even the ministry itself. The result borders on the absurd: in the districts surveyed, just over half of clinical staff in primary health units work without any salary at all. The council should hire, pay and discipline its own clinic staff, and answer for an empty dispensary at the ballot box.

• Basic education. Primary and junior secondary schooling were among the first functions devolved to councils, yet the Teaching Service Commission, a central body created in 2011, still recruits, deploys, transfers and promotes every teacher. Put school maintenance and teacher deployment under the council, so that a leaking roof finally has an owner.

• Feeder roads and water. The roads that carry a district’s harvest and the small systems that carry its water belong with the people who use them, not with national agencies that schedule repairs from the capital.

• Power. A district should be able to commission, own and maintain its own mini-grids and solar systems, rather than wait for a national utility to reach it, and answer for whether the market and the clinic have light after dark.

Then fund those councils by law, not by favour. Kenya’s constitution guarantees its counties at least 15 percent of national revenue, shared by a formula weighted toward poorer, more populous and larger counties. A decade on, skilled birth attendance had risen from 48 to 89 percent. Not all of that is devolution’s doing, and Kenyan counties still complain of late transfers. But predictable money, paid by formula and on schedule, is what allows a council to plan instead of waiting on Freetown.

Critics will say the districts lack the capacity, and some do. But how is capacity ever built if the money and the authority never arrive? Freetown built its own when it overhauled its property tax and raised its revenue potential five-fold. And to stop each government from redrawing the map to suit itself, no boundary, including the ones I propose, should move again except by an independent commission applying a published formula to verified census figures, and no district should be created or dissolved without a referendum in the areas affected and a two-thirds vote of all members of parliament.

The way forward: move the money and the authority, not just the lines on the map

The fundamental danger of this architecture, as I argued before, is that it makes every national election existential. Whoever wins State House wins every clinic, contract and appointment in the country, so losing feels like dispossession and every government is tempted to redraw the map before the next vote. That is how a country of seven and a half million people ends up with 18 districts, more than 185 chiefdoms and the same broken roads. Councils that were properly funded and answerable to their own voters would lower those stakes, and make local elections the ones that decide whether services actually work.

The new map gives Sierra Leone two more districts, a second council for its capital and more chiefdoms than ever. It gives no district a single power it did not already have. Until a government is willing to move the money and the authority, and not just the lines, the map will keep changing while the roads in Kono and the schools in Kailahun stay exactly as they are.

About the Author

Kelfala Lebbie is a Sierra Leonean who has worked in international development for over a decade, focusing on governance and public-sector reform.

When the Sierra Leone Law School was established in the late 1980s, amid opposition from some members of the legal profession who had received their legal education abroad, few could have imagined that its graduates would one day stand at the centre of the nation’s most consequential constitutional conversations.

At the time, questions were raised about whether Sierra Leone’s own legal training institutions could produce lawyers capable of carrying the weight of a modern justice system. Those doubts, however, have been answered by history. Decades later, the very institutions whose legitimacy was once debated have produced a generation of lawyers, judges, and legal scholars who are now shaping the interpretation, defence, and future direction of Sierra Leone’s Constitution.

Today, Sierra Leone stands at a defining constitutional crossroads.

The constitutional amendment debate of 2026 emerged following a ruling by the Speaker of Parliament, a lawyer trained at Fourah Bay College. The legal basis, constitutional implications, and consequences of that decision are now being scrutinised before the Supreme Court by judges and legal practitioners—many of whom themselves represent the evolution and success of Sierra Leone’s own legal education system.

This is the moment for Sierra Leonean-trained legal practitioners.

The current constitutional dispute is not merely a contest of legal arguments. It is a test of professional responsibility, institutional maturity, and national ownership of the law. It presents an opportunity for Sierra Leone’s legal community to demonstrate that the country’s homegrown legal institutions have produced practitioners capable of addressing the most complex constitutional questions facing the nation.

The journey of Sierra Leone’s legal education has therefore come full circle.

The Attorney General responsible for drafting the amendment bill received his legal training in Sierra Leone. The Speaker who presided over its passage was trained at Fourah Bay College. The judges and lawyers now examining the constitutional issues before the Court are products of Sierra Leone’s own legal and academic institutions.

The responsibility before them is historic.

The constitutional case currently before the Supreme Court is, in many respects, a generational test. Its outcome may influence how Sierra Leone understands parliamentary authority, constitutional interpretation, judicial independence, and the rule of law for decades to come.

For this reason, the nation must look beyond the personalities involved and focus on the constitutional questions at stake.

The ongoing exchanges between the Chief Justice and lawyer Joseph Fitzgerald Kamara have understandably attracted public attention. Yet the personalities, disagreements, and courtroom dynamics should not overshadow the central issue before the Supreme Court: what does the Constitution require, and how should its provisions be interpreted in the interest of preserving democratic governance and constitutional order?

The legal profession must rise above the immediate drama and confront the deeper responsibility before it.

The Constitution of Sierra Leone is, metaphorically speaking, on the operating table. The legal profession now holds the surgical instruments. The skill, independence, and integrity with which those instruments are used will determine whether this constitutional moment strengthens the nation’s democratic foundations or creates wounds that future generations will inherit.

This is not simply another legal dispute. It is a defining moment in the history of Sierra Leone’s constitutional development and in the maturation of its legal profession.

Dear Sierra Leonean-trained legal practitioners, this is your opportunity to demonstrate the value of the institutions that trained you. This is your opportunity to show that the investment in Sierra Leone’s legal education system has produced professionals capable of protecting the nation’s highest law with courage, fairness, and intellectual independence.

The country is not asking for loyalty to personalities, political interests, or institutional convenience. It is asking for loyalty to constitutional principles, the rule of law, and the enduring interests of Sierra Leone.

The legal profession that was once doubted is now being called upon to provide answers to the most important constitutional questions of our time.

Sierra Leone is watching. And history will ultimately judge not only the individuals who participated in this constitutional moment, but also the principles they chose to defend.

In 2002, shortly after Sierra Leone emerged from a devastating civil war and began the difficult work of rebuilding its democracy, 494 registered civil society organizations formed the National Election Watch (NEW). Its mission was both ambitious and essential: to monitor, evaluate, and support electoral processes nationwide, thereby strengthening public confidence in elections and, ultimately, the democracy those elections were meant to sustain.

More than two decades later, NEW has become one of the most recognizable guardians of Sierra Leone’s electoral process. During election periods, households across the country wait to hear assessments from its observers and leaders, including Marcella Samba-Sesay, and to hear the familiar “Mama en Papa” signature tune associated with its public messaging. Over the years, NEW’s willingness to speak forthrightly, together with the breadth of its nationwide membership and observer network, has helped establish it as one of Sierra Leone’s most consequential civil society institutions for electoral accountability.

That reputation makes its present predicament especially alarming. In April, NEW held elections to select new leadership and subsequently announced the officials expected to take over the organization. However, the process became the subject of an internal dispute. An aggrieved party sought judicial intervention, and the matter ultimately led to an injunction that restricted the organization from carrying out its traditional functions.

The silence that has followed is more than an internal organizational problem. Its consequences could reverberate across Sierra Leone’s democratic landscape. The country is still grappling with the political and institutional fallout from the disputed 2023 elections. Questions about transparency, public confidence, electoral administration, and the credibility of the announced results have not simply disappeared with time. If anything, they have made serious reflection more urgent. Sierra Leone must examine what went wrong, identify the institutional weaknesses exposed by that election, and recommit itself to a process in which citizens across political divides can have confidence.

At precisely such a moment, one of the country’s most important independent electoral watchdogs is fighting for its institutional survival.

Preparations for the 2028 elections will not begin in 2028. Credible elections are built years in advance. They depend on voter education, legal reform, oversight of electoral institutions, scrutiny of voter registration, engagement with political parties, monitoring of campaign conditions, assessment of electoral technologies and procedures, and sustained civic participation. An organization such as NEW cannot simply reappear a few months before polling day and be expected to perform these functions effectively.

Its work should already be gathering momentum. But NEW’s paralysis is not the only cloud hanging over Sierra Leone’s democratic future. In August 2026, Parliament approved the Constitution of Sierra Leone (Amendment) Bill, 2025, which contains sweeping changes to the country’s electoral architecture. The government presents these changes as democratic reforms designed to modernize the electoral system, broaden inclusion, reduce the cost and tension of presidential runoffs, and address weaknesses identified in earlier constitutional and electoral reviews. The opposition, however, has challenged both key provisions of the amendment and the process by which it advanced.

That disagreement is not merely procedural trivia. It raises a fundamental democratic question: how should the rules governing political power be changed?

The dispute has since moved beyond Parliament. The APC has taken the matter to the Supreme Court, challenging the Speaker’s interpretation and the procedure used in passing the amendment. A separate legal intervention from a Freetown law firm has similarly questioned whether the constitutionally required threshold was met. The president is also seeking clarification from the Supreme Court.

Whatever the eventual judicial interpretation, the political implications are serious. Electoral rules derive much of their legitimacy not merely from formal enactment, but from broad confidence that the process used to create them was lawful, transparent, and sufficiently inclusive. When the rules of the next election are themselves disputed before that election has even begun, another layer of mistrust is added to an already fragile democratic environment.

The question becomes even more urgent when placed alongside the crisis engulfing NEW. If NEW remains immobilized for a prolonged period, Sierra Leone risks entering the next electoral cycle without one of its most experienced independent monitoring institutions operating at full strength. At the same time, the constitutional framework governing that election is itself the subject of political and legal contestation.

The combination is potentially combustible: disputed electoral rules, weakened independent monitoring, unresolved distrust from the 2023 election, and legal difficulties confronting major political actors.

The situation becomes still more troubling when considered alongside developments within the country’s main opposition. With a major opposition party facing legal and internal challenges of its own, the country’s leading election-monitoring coalition restrained by judicial action, and major changes to the electoral system contested before the courts, concerns about the broader democratic environment are inevitable.

None of these developments, individually or collectively, proves a coordinated attempt to manipulate the 2028 elections. Such a conclusion would require evidence, and suspicion should never replace fact. But democracies are sustained not only by the technical legality of individual actions. They also depend on institutional credibility, political restraint, transparency, and citizens' confidence that the rules are not being rearranged for partisan advantage.

When an opposition party is engaged in legal battles, an independent election watchdog is prevented from functioning, and the constitutional rules governing the next election are themselves the subject of litigation, citizens are entitled to ask difficult questions. The danger is not merely that one institution may fail. It is that several pillars of electoral credibility may be weakened simultaneously.

That is why the crisis within NEW must be resolved transparently, lawfully, and urgently. It is also why the constitutional-amendment dispute requires authoritative resolution well before the country enters the final stages of the 2028 electoral cycle. Leaving either matter unresolved would invite precisely the mistrust Sierra Leone should be working to overcome.

The courts must, of course, be allowed to fulfill their constitutional role without political pressure. Equally, all political and institutional actors should recognize that something larger than individual victories is at stake.

NEW is not merely another civil society organization fighting over internal offices. Over more than two decades, Sierra Leoneans have placed their confidence in it as an institution of electoral accountability. Its credibility is therefore a national democratic asset.

The Constitution is likewise more than a collection of legal provisions. It is the compact that sets the rules for acquiring, exercising, and transferring political power. Changes to those rules must therefore inspire confidence not only among those who support the government of the day but also among citizens who may strongly oppose it.

Sierra Leone cannot afford to approach 2028 carrying unresolved wounds from 2023 while simultaneously entering the election with a weakened observer institution and a contested constitutional framework.

A credible election requires more than ballots, polling stations, and official declarations. It requires electoral rules that citizens broadly recognize as legitimate, institutions that can apply those rules impartially, and independent organizations that can observe the process, speak without fear, identify irregularities, and reassure citizens when procedures are properly followed.

For more than twenty years, NEW has attempted to provide part of that democratic safeguard.

The constitutional reform process now presents another test.

How Sierra Leone resolves both questions—the fate of its most prominent domestic election-monitoring coalition and the legitimacy of the rules under which the next election will be conducted—may determine whether 2028 begins as an opportunity to restore democratic confidence or as another election burdened by suspicion before the first ballot is cast.

On 29 September, President Julius Maada Bio gave the keynote at Harvard Kennedy School’s JFK Jr. Forum. His theme was leadership and democratic resilience in Africa. Two days later, the European Commission froze €18 million in budget support to his government, because Sierra Leone will not hand over the Netherlands’ most wanted criminal.

This is not an argument against diplomacy. A small country deserves a voice, and the child-marriage campaign rests on a real achievement: the 2024 law banning marriage under 18. The problem is that standing abroad has been treated as a substitute for results at home, rather than a product of them.

A fugitive near the front pew

Jos Leijdekkers, known as “Bolle Jos,” has been sentenced to around 80 years in total in the Netherlands and Belgium for cocaine trafficking. In January 2025, Reuters verified footage of him at a New Year’s Mass, sitting two rows behind President Bio. The head of immigration was later fired after a video showed him with Leijdekkers. The Netherlands handed over a formal extradition request in February 2025. Almost 20 months on, he has not been arrested.

On 11 September, Chief Minister David Sengeh called the Dutch pressure “neo-colonialism” and said the security services did not know where Leijdekkers was. Sierra Leone has no extradition treaty with the Netherlands, and sovereignty is a legitimate concern. But a government cannot lecture on democratic resilience while saying it cannot find a convicted trafficker who was filmed at Mass two rows behind its president.

An economy that never recovered

Inflation peaked at about 55% in October 2023. The government brought it down to around 4% by December 2025, and deserves credit for that. But it has risen every month this year, reaching 15.66% in August. Food makes up roughly 40% of the consumer price basket, so the poorest households feel it first.

The fiscal discipline praised in Washington was paid for at home. The World Bank notes that the deficit fell partly through cuts to capital spending and a build-up of arrears. The IMF’s latest review records that the government missed its targets on domestic arrears, school feeding and social spending. Suppliers, schoolchildren and the poor absorbed the adjustment. The political class did not. The Finance Ministry’s own fiscal report shows that in 2024 Parliament, where both the SLPP and the APC sit, spent NLe15.6 million on overseas travel, nearly three times its NLe5.6 million budget. Austerity, it turns out, is something that happens to other people.

Drugs emergency declared, but not funded

Kush, a cheap synthetic drug, has torn through a generation with few jobs. In 2023, 1,865 of the 2,955 people admitted for drug abuse to the country’s only psychiatric hospital were Kush cases. Bio declared a national emergency in April 2024 and promised treatment centres in every district. Researchers have since found that the response relies largely on arrests and detention, with rehabilitation facilities running at three times capacity.

The Shrinking civic space

On 10 August 2022, cost-of-living protests turned violent and six police officers were killed. The US State Department reported that police shot and killed 30 protesters, mostly unarmed young people. The government’s own inquiry called the events an insurrection, and Amnesty International found, more than a year later, that none of the civilian deaths had been investigated.

The pattern has continued. In August 2026, police banned a peaceful march to State House over constitutional amendments, using powers under the 1965 Public Order Act. That law’s protest restrictions were written under an SLPP government, kept by every APC government that followed, and are enforced today by an SLPP government again. In 2022, Andrew Lavali of the Institute for Governance Reform told CIVICUS that police had refused permission to protest for 15 years, a span covering both parties in power. Neither side has earned the right to complain about the other.

Meanwhile, 11 civilians and 24 soldiers are serving long sentences over the November 2023 attack the government calls a coup attempt, in which about 21 people died. Former president Ernest Bai Koroma, charged with treason over the same events, was never tried. In July, the Attorney-General dropped the case without giving reasons; the information minister later cited his health. Some accused will serve decades. An activist is serving years for a speech. The most senior accused goes free on a one-line reference to his health. That is not the rule of law. It is justice by political convenience, selective and opaque.

On the same day as the Harvard speech, CIVICUS, a global civil-society alliance, and three partner groups including Sierra Leone’s Campaign for Good Governance told the UN Human Rights Council that Sierra Leone had partially implemented just one of 17 civic-space recommendations from its last review. This time, it accepted none on the harassment of activists and journalists.

Reform on paper

After the disputed 2023 election, the government and opposition agreed on 80 electoral reforms, with ECOWAS, the UN and the Commonwealth as guarantors. Abroad, that process is cited as proof of good faith. At home, Parliament struck out the recommendation allowing independent presidential candidates, and the commitment to restructure the Electoral Commission by 31 December 2026 is three months from its deadline.

The way forward

The government’s defenders have a serious case, and it deserves to be heard in full. Much of the 2022–23 inflation was imported, as fuel and food prices spiked worldwide and the dollar strengthened. Starting from 55%, the government brought inflation under control within two years and posted the country’s first-ever primary budget surplus. In June, the IMF completed its third programme review and approved a new resilience arrangement alongside it. The 2024 child-marriage law and the 2020 repeal of criminal libel are genuine liberal reforms that the previous APC government never delivered. And for a small, aid-dependent state, a seat at every table is not vanity. It is how you attract investment and allies.

All of that is true, and none of it answers the charge. Global shocks explain why prices rose. They do not explain why, when the bill came, schoolchildren and local contractors paid it while Parliament spent nearly three times its travel budget. An IMF review measures whether the books balance, not whether citizens stand equal before the law. And a government that repealed criminal libel in 2020 has no excuse for jailing an activist over a rally speech in 2026. The reforms show what this government can do when it chooses. The rest of the record shows what it chooses not to do.

Four steps would start to close the gap. Publish domestic arrears and the full cost of foreign travel and summits. Investigate every death from August 2022, and apply the law evenly. Pass the electoral reforms as agreed. And let Sierra Leone’s own courts decide on Leijdekkers, in public.

None of this requires a summit or an award. What is at stake is concrete. In 2028, Sierra Leoneans will vote again. Unless the Electoral Commission is rebuilt as both parties promised, they will vote under rules the vast majority of Sierra Leoneans never agreed on, and the country risks reliving the dispute that followed 2023. A generation is being lost to Kush while treatment centres remain a promise. Sierra Leone can still become the country its government officials describe. But that country has to be built in Freetown and the districts, not announced in London, Boston and New York.

About the author: Kelfala Lebbie is a Sierra Leonean who has worked in international development for over a decade, focusing on governance and public-sector reform.

Sierra Leone has never lacked brilliant people. Our deeper failure has been our inability to build institutions that can multiply that brilliance.

For generations, Sierra Leoneans have distinguished themselves abroad—in universities, medicine, diplomacy, engineering, literature, international organizations, and the professions. Yet when those same talents are brought together within the machinery of our own state, the arithmetic often becomes bewildering.

One plus one does not always become two.

Sometimes two plus two appears to become minus two.

It is our strange national arithmetic: the sum of errors.

Consider the Sierra Leonean professional who thrives in London, Washington, Accra, Abuja, or Geneva. When that person comes home, his intelligence doesn’t disappear at Lungi. His qualifications don’t evaporate, and Immigration doesn’t confiscate his experience.

What changes upon his arrival in Sierra Leone is the environment and the architecture of governance he is now bound to operate within, despite all his sterling credentials. That distinction takes us closer to the heart of our national predicament.

In The Social Conquest of Earth, evolutionary biologist E. O. Wilson explored a central paradox of human society: individuals often compete selfishly within groups, yet cooperative groups can outperform those torn by internal rivalry.

That insight holds up an uncomfortable mirror to Sierra Leone.

Perhaps our problem is not a shortage of intelligence but a failure to organize it. Perhaps we do not lack cooperation. Perhaps our cooperation is too often confined to circles smaller than the nation.

A country is not developed merely by assembling gifted people. A football team of eleven brilliant players can still lose to a less talented side that understands positioning, discipline, and teamwork. An orchestra of virtuosos can still produce noise if each insists on playing a different score. National development is similarly orchestral: talent may reside in individuals, but development depends on the capacity to coordinate that talent toward a common purpose.

One excellent doctor may save many lives. However, a functioning health system requires doctors, nurses, technicians, administrators, procurement officers, cleaners, drivers, and regulators working within institutions that enable competence to reinforce competence.

The same is true of public service. One honest official may resist corruption, expose wrongdoing, or defend principle at considerable personal cost. Such courage matters. But a functioning state cannot depend on the perpetual appearance of exceptional individuals willing to become martyrs for ordinary standards of integrity.

Sierra Leone’s governance narrative is crowded with stories of lone Odysseuses—figures navigating sirens, cyclopes, hostile seas, and treacherous currents in search of an institutional Ithaca that always seems to recede beyond the horizon. We celebrate their courage, their refusals, and their lonely battles against compromised systems. Yet their individual odysseys have rarely coalesced into a shared national epic of institutional triumph.

And perhaps that is precisely the problem.
A republic should not demand heroism for routine competence or exceptional courage for ordinary honesty. Its institutions should make integrity survivable, professionalism normal, and competence reproducible. Individual excellence remains necessary, but it becomes transformative only when institutions can preserve, multiply, and transmit it beyond the individual.

What Sierra Leone needs, therefore, is not the disappearance of heroes but a state that does not depend on them: not merely exceptional people doing exceptional things, but durable institutions that make good performance ordinary.

Our problem may be less that Sierra Leoneans cannot cooperate than that too many of our institutions reward narrower loyalties more generously than they reward commitment to the larger national good.

Where competence is rewarded, competence multiplies.
Where loyalty is rewarded above ability, loyalty becomes currency.
Where proximity to power determines opportunity, people invest in being near power.
People learn the pulse of the systems in which they must survive.
If advancement depends upon patronage, cultivate patrons.
If appointments depend upon political allegiance, demonstrate allegiance.
If opportunity depends upon ethnicity, family, region, or friendship, strengthen those networks.

One person behaving this way may prosper.
A thousand people behaving this way may impoverish a republic.

The irony is that Sierra Leoneans demonstrate impressive cooperation every day. Families pool resources to educate their children. Communities build mosques, churches, and schools. Osusu groups sustain informal economies through trust and reciprocity. Hometown associations and diaspora organizations mobilize resources for their communities.

We know how to cooperate.
The harder question is how large the circle of cooperation becomes.
The family cooperates.
The community cooperates.
The political faction cooperates.
But can the nation cooperate?

Our difficulty is not a lack of loyalty.
Sierra Leone does not need less loyalty. It needs larger loyalty.
We do not need people to stop loving their families, communities, regions, ethnic groups, or political parties. We need institutions strong enough to ensure that these identities do not determine who receives justice, employment, protection, or opportunity.

Beyond every legitimate "us" there must be a larger "us."
Recent Afrobarometer findings capture part of this contradiction. Sierra Leoneans report high levels of tolerance toward people from other ethnic and political groups, while trust across some of those boundaries remains weaker.

Tolerance and trust are not the same.
Tolerance says: You may live beside me.
Trust says: I am prepared to build with you.
Nationhood requires the second.

A republic cannot mature if public institutions are seen as prizes captured by whichever political network happens to be in power.
Governments are temporary.
Citizenship is permanent.

I should expect justice from the courts regardless of who occupies the State House. I should believe the police will protect me without first asking about my political affiliation. I should be able to enter a government ministry without searching for someone from my district, ethnic group, family, or party.

And no competent Sierra Leonean should have to change political clothing every five years to remain useful to his country.

Strong institutions are not strong because they favour us
They are strong because we can trust them when they do not favour us.

This is where Wilson's insight becomes a lesson in institutional design.

A society cannot rely upon goodness alone. Good institutions do not abolish self-interest. They civilise it. They make competence rewarding. They make honesty worthwhile. They make cooperation rational.
They make fairness toward strangers a principle rather than a favour.
Fairness, in this sense, is not merely altruism. It is enlightened self-preservation.

I defend judicial independence today because I may need an independent judge tomorrow. I support merit-based recruitment because government incompetence eventually reaches everyone's doorstep. I oppose discrimination against another region because I am defending a rule that may one day protect mine.

Some things no citizen can purchase privately.
No family, however wealthy, can buy a trustworthy national judiciary.
No ethnic group can privately own macroeconomic stability.
No political party can permanently monopolize peace.
No household can privatize institutional legitimacy.

Some goods exist only because we possess them together.

That is the republic.

Where institutions fail, countries waste talent without visibly destroying it.
No bonfire is required.
You place the wrong person above the right one. You frustrate competence until it withdraws. You politicize professionalism. You make independent thought expensive and patronage profitable. Eventually, some talented people leave.

Some remain and become silent. Others adapt. And the nation loses without ever calculating what it has lost.

No line in the national budget is headed Wasted Genius.

For decades, we have celebrated Sierra Leone's diamonds, gold, rutile, bauxite, iron ore, fertile land, and fisheries.

But geology does not create prosperity.
Institutions do.

Perhaps the greatest mineral Sierra Leone has never properly mined is the Sierra Leonean mind.

We export it, celebrate it abroad, invite it home, and decorate it with titles—yet too often we insert it into systems that demand accommodation rather than transformation.

The problem therefore cannot be solved simply by changing governments.

Governments must change. That is democracy.
Institutions must endure. That is nationhood.

Three years ago, I asked how a country with so many brilliant people could produce outcomes so far below the sum of their talents.

I would frame the question differently today.

Perhaps the problem was never the numbers. Perhaps it was the equation into which we kept plugging them.

Sierra Leone does not need to manufacture brilliant people; it has produced them for generations. What it has failed to produce with the same consistency are institutions that allow brilliance to recognize brilliance, competence to reward competence, and citizenship to rise above faction.

That is the unfinished work.
Not less loyalty, but larger loyalty.
Not fewer ambitious people, but institutions that make ambition answerable to the public good.
Not more heroes, but a state in which honesty does not require heroism and competence does not require political permission.

Change the incentives. Reward excellence. Protect institutional independence. Make fairness predictable. Build enough trust so that talent no longer has to belong to the right family, region, party, or patron to serve the country.

Then our national arithmetic begins to change.
Two plus two will no longer become minus two.
Because the final tragedy of Sierra Leone is not that we lack the numbers.
It is that we keep placing good numbers inside a bad equation.

Until we change the equation, we will keep exporting brilliance, importing disappointment, and calling the result fate.
It is not fate.
It is design.

And what has been badly designed can be redesigned.
That is how we begin correcting the sum of errors.

Every few years we choose between two parties, and the choice changes almost nothing for an ordinary Sierra Leonean. The school still has no roof. The clinic still has no power. The road to the district headquarters still washes away with the rains. We read this as a failure of personnel and return to the ballot expecting different men to produce a different country.

It is not a failure of personnel. It is a failure of architecture. Since before independence we have governed a country of provinces as though it were one city. Every budget line and decision of consequence routes through Freetown, where it is slowed, politicized and quietly consumed. That is the design. Corruption is what the design produces, not an accident that befalls it.

The Ministry of Finance does not need a Deputy Minister 1, a Deputy Minister 2 and eight more behind them. Freetown does not need to approve a classroom in Pujehun or a borehole in Koinadugu. Education, planning, healthcare, water and electricity belong to district authorities, funded and answerable directly. What remains does the work the centre alone can do: setting the national agenda and the standards every council must meet, policing corruption, mobilizing and distributing resources, and building the highways, railway and power lines that let Kono’s farmers and Bo’s markets share one economy. It also publishes each district’s results against those standards, so voters can compare their council with the next. Such a centre employs fewer people and asks more of them.

Return Sierra Leone to its twelve provincial districts plus the Western Area, in place of the sixteen we have and the eighteen now proposed, and end the boundary-drawing that manufactures safe seats and the disputes that follow. The APC began it and the SLPP is finishing it, and their agreement is not the country’s consensus. No district should be created or dissolved, including under this proposal, without a referendum in the districts affected and a two-thirds vote of all members of parliament. No boundary should be drawn except by an independent commission applying a published formula to verified census figures.

The same applies to policing corruption. The Anti-Corruption Commission will tell you it convicts over ninety percent of those it charges. That answers the wrong question. The question is who gets charged. The president appoints the commissioner and can remove him, the commission sits under the Ministry of Justice, and since 2019 officials may settle out of court, repaying what they took on undisclosed terms.

Then there is the detail that settles it. Two former commissioners appointed under the last APC government now compete to be that party’s 2028 candidate, one of them now serving as its lawyer, and the sitting commissioner has not ruled out seeking the SLPP nomination. Nor is it hidden: the Commission’s own newsletter records the President, the First Lady and the SLPP’s then national chairman standing as godparents to the commissioner and his wife in 2024. The office meant to investigate both parties is now a staging ground for leading them. None of this requires improper conduct. It requires only an office where the question can always be asked and no honest occupant can answer it.

District councils cannot do this: an office reporting to local politicians is captured. The answer is a national body built so that nobody with power over a career has power over a case. A commissioner nominated by an independent panel and confirmed by two-thirds of all members of parliament. One fixed, non-renewable seven-year term, removable only on cause proven before a tribunal. A budget charged first on the Consolidated Fund. Independent prosecutorial authority, and a five-year bar on party office for the commissioner and senior staff. A public register of cases opened, dropped and charged, so selectivity becomes arguable rather than whispered. Put an office in every district, but recruit, pay and rotate investigators nationally, so whoever audits a budget is not the cousin of the man who wrote it.

None of this shrinks the state’s ambitions. A national jobs program should hire Sierra Leoneans to build what their districts need; government creates jobs. Foreign investment alone has delivered a mining enclave and an import bill.

Four objections deserve answers. Our councils are not ready: true, which argues for sequencing, not inaction. Move functions in stages, tie transfers to audited results, and spend three years building capacity with the deputy ministers’ money. Capacity is built by carrying responsibility, not before it.

Devolution will entrench inequality: Kono has diamonds and Freetown a tax base; Falaba and Koinadugu have neither. So the transfer formula must be law before functions move, weighted by population and need, beyond ministerial reach.

Parliament will never pass it: much of this needs constitutional amendment, so it must be a citizens’ demand, not a party’s favour. Consider what happened in August 2026. The government put a constitutional amendment bill to a vote short of the hundred affirmative votes that two-thirds of the membership requires, the Speaker ruled a simple majority sufficient, the opposition walked out, and whether the constitution was lawfully amended now sits with the Supreme Court. That is the architecture defending itself, and it is the clearest argument yet for taking power out of its hands. Yet transfers, staffing and published accounts can begin under ordinary law. Prove it in four districts and amendment gets easier.

We have spent sixty-five years changing the occupants of a building designed to fail. The next election will not fix a school in Kailahun. Moving the power to fix it out of Freetown will.

About the Author:

Kelfala Lebbie is a Sierra Leonean who has worked in international development for over a decade, focusing on governance and public-sector reform.

Since the beginning of time, human beings have told stories not merely to remember who they were, but to decide who they belonged to. Around fires, within clans, and eventually across kingdoms and civilizations, communities crafted narratives of origin, ancestry, triumph, suffering, and destiny. These stories gave people more than memory. They gave them identity, obligation, and a sense of their place in the world.

As societies grew more complex, their stories evolved alongside them. The myths of the clan became the histories of peoples; the histories of peoples became the political narratives of states. Religion, economics, conquest, culture, ideology, and collective memory were gradually woven into broader explanations of who “we” are and what future “we” ought to pursue.

Nation-building, in this sense, has never been merely the construction of institutions, the drawing of borders, or the writing of constitutions. It is also an act of imagination. A nation must develop a story powerful enough to persuade people with different histories, languages, regions, and loyalties that they belong to a common moral and political community.

That remains one of Sierra Leone’s most important unfinished tasks.

The country unmistakably exists as a state. It has borders, institutions, laws, elections, ministries, political parties, a capital, a flag, and international recognition. But statehood and nationhood are not identical.

A state can be constructed administratively.

A nation must be imagined collectively.

That distinction may explain much of Sierra Leone’s ongoing political difficulty. More than six decades after independence, we have inherited and maintained the machinery of statehood without fully developing a national narrative that can transcend older, often stronger loyalties to ethnicity, region, family, community, and political party.

The problem arises when these identities become the outer boundary of political obligation—when the village matters more than the republic, when the region matters more than the country, and when political loyalty becomes an extension of communal belonging rather than a judgment on competing visions of the national interest.

A nation cannot be built by erasing difference.

But it cannot endure when difference becomes the principal language through which citizens understand political power.

This deeper crisis underlies many of Sierra Leone’s recurring political tensions. What appears on the surface as an electoral problem may, in fact, be a narrative problem. We have not yet constructed a sufficiently compelling story of Sierra Leonean belonging to rival the smaller stories that preceded the nation and often command deeper emotional loyalty.

The question, therefore, is not simply why Sierra Leoneans divide politically.

It is why the idea of Sierra Leone has not yet become strong enough to overcome those divisions consistently.

Nowhere is the weakness of a shared national narrative more visible than in electoral politics.

Elections should ordinarily offer citizens competing programs for governing the same country. Political parties should disagree on taxation, development, education, agriculture, infrastructure, foreign policy, decentralization, employment, and the distribution of public resources.

Yet when political identity overlaps heavily with region, ethnicity, history, and patronage, an election can become more than a contest over policy.

It can become a referendum on belonging.

Understandably, Sierra Leoneans searching for a way beyond political division should turn toward institutional reform.

No democratic model—liberal, deliberative, consensual, parliamentary, presidential, or otherwise—can permanently stabilize a society in which citizens have not developed a sufficiently strong sense of common belonging.

Every durable nation develops what might be called a national narrative: an evolving account of where its people have come from, what they have endured, what they value, and what they hope to become.

The strongest national narratives are capacious enough to hold contradiction. They acknowledge triumph and failure, dignity and shame, unity and conflict. They create belonging not by pretending that everyone has experienced history the same way, but by persuading people that their different experiences nonetheless belong within a common story.

Sierra Leone urgently needs such a narrative.

Our history contains extraordinary material from which to build: indigenous societies with long political and cultural histories; encounters among communities through migration, commerce, marriage, religion, and conflict; the rise of Freetown; the histories of liberated Africans and the Krio community; colonial expansion into the interior; resistance and accommodation; independence; political upheaval; civil war; peacebuilding; epidemics; democratic experimentation; cultural creativity; economic struggle; and the everyday resilience of ordinary people.

Yet these histories too often remain fragmented.

Different communities remember different wounds.

Different regions possess different heroes.

Different political traditions tell different versions of the republic.

What is missing is not history itself, but a sufficiently shared interpretation of that history.

We possess many Sierra Leonean stories.

We have not yet fully woven them into a Sierra Leonean story.

The project of nationhood must therefore become, in part, a project of narrative construction.

If we cannot answer these questions, our children will inherit a country but not necessarily a nation.

The central challenge facing Sierra Leone, then, is not merely managing diversity.

It is how to convert diversity into solidarity.

That requires a national narrative powerful enough to make a Temne child, a Mende farmer, a Limba trader, a Krio professional, a Kono miner, a Fulani entrepreneur, a Sherbro fisherman, and every other citizen understand that no one can build a secure future in permanent isolation from the others.

Their histories need not become identical.

Their futures already are interconnected.

This is the civic truth upon which a durable Sierra Leone must be built.

The country’s next national project should therefore be larger than another electoral cycle, another manifesto, another constitutional review, or another struggle for political succession.

It should be the deliberate construction of a civic nation.

Such a project would ask schools to teach belonging.

It would ask political parties to compete nationally rather than retreat into regional certainties.

It would ask institutions to demonstrate that citizenship matters more than affiliation.

It would ask artists and writers to enlarge our collective imagination.

It would ask citizens to defend justice even when injustice benefits their own side.

And it would ask leaders to treat the republic as something borrowed from generations yet unborn.

That may sound idealistic.

But every nation is, at some level, an act of collective imagination.

The danger lies not in imagining too much.

It lies in imagining too little.

For too long, Sierra Leone’s political imagination has been confined to the immediate: the next election, the next appointment, the next party victory, the next regional grievance, the next distribution of state resources.

Nationhood demands a longer horizon.

It asks what kind of country should exist fifty years from now.

It asks whether a child born in 2075 will inherit the same political suspicions we inherited, or whether we will have bequeathed something larger.

It asks whether our descendants will still experience Sierra Leone as a fragile arrangement among competing communities or as a mature civic nation in which diversity has ceased to be a threat to belonging.

That is ultimately why national narrative matters.

Human beings organize their political worlds through the stories they believe.

If our dominant stories tell us that politics is tribal competition, we will reproduce tribal competition.

If our stories tell us that the state belongs to whichever party captures it, we will continue fighting to possess it.

If our stories tell us that some regions are permanent winners and others permanent losers, every election will reopen the same wound.

But if we begin telling a larger story—one in which Sierra Leone belongs equally to all its citizens, in which public office is stewardship, in which difference does not cancel fraternity, and in which national success requires the flourishing of communities beyond our own—we may gradually create the political culture such a story describes.

The great unfinished work of Sierra Leone may therefore be neither purely constitutional nor electoral.

It may be narrative.

We must weave our memories, wounds, migrations, achievements, languages, failures, aspirations, and identities into a sufficiently compelling vision of a common destiny.

We do not need to become the same people.

We need to become people capable of imagining the same country. Perhaps that is what Lamina Sankoh meant when he said one country, one people, or what Siaka Stevens intended when he proposed a congress of all people. Both visions were truncated for ephemeral gains.

The decisive question of this century, then, may not be which political party governs Sierra Leone, nor even which political system we ultimately perfect.

It may be something more fundamental:

What national narrative can persuade us that Sierra Leone’s future belongs to all of us—and that none of us can inherit it securely without the others?

Until we answer that question, we may continue to possess a state without fully becoming a nation.

Answer it well, and we may finally begin writing the country we have yet to become

A colleague, Karim Bah, recently published an op-ed proposing a two-year transitional government beginning in 2028, after which Sierra Leone would return to constitutional rule under a new social contract.

It is an ambitious proposition, and I think it deserves to be debated seriously rather than dismissed as political fantasy.

My difficulty begins with the transition itself. Who organises the transitional government and agrees its terms? Who selects the people who run it? Who supervises them? What happens to Parliament, political parties and the existing constitutional order? Would the current political establishment voluntarily hand over such an important process to an independent civic movement?

These questions do not necessarily invalidate Karim’s proposal. They actually expose the difficult mechanics of getting there.

That should tell us something that probably our problem is not how well we conduct the next elections. Maybe we need to examine the political structure within which every election takes place.

There is another reason Karim’s proposal is particularly interesting at this moment. Sierra Leone is already engaged in a constitutional conversation, although that process has become entangled in the politics and legal questions surrounding the current amendment process.

Parliament passed the Constitutional Amendment Bill on 10 August 2026, but the process has since been challenged over the constitutional voting threshold and other legal questions. The APC has taken the matter to the Supreme Court, while President Bio has also referred a related constitutional matter to the Court rather than immediately assenting to the legislation. The Supreme Court has scheduled the constitutional amendment matters for October 7.

Beyond those legalities lies the critical issue of the kind of political system we are trying to sustain or build.

The current constitutional debate includes important questions about elections and political representation. The proposed reforms include proportional representation, which the Government has argued would broaden participation in Parliament and create opportunities for women, young people and other groups. Those are important issues, but they cannot be the end of the conversation.

Do we continue changing electoral rules while leaving untouched the deeper architecture that makes winning the presidency such a consequential prize?

When so much power and so many resources sit in Freetown, the presidency becomes an enormous prize. And when the presidency becomes an enormous prize, politics becomes a fight over who controls the centre.

Dr. Jones believed, and I subscribe to that view, that much of this power should move closer to the people and communities where the country’s resources are found and where development is supposed to happen.

His earlier work on confederalism envisaged stronger district-level economic capacity, including a development financing mechanism through which districts could pursue infrastructure and development projects.

I remember that conversation because we may have spent too much time arguing about the occupants of the political house and too little time examining the house itself.

Karim is asking whether we need a two-year transition to negotiate a new social contract.

I am asking whether the reset should also include a conversation about where power actually lives.

If the presidency controls enormous political influence, access to national resources and the direction of the state, every presidential election will carry enormous stakes. Politics then becomes a struggle for control of the centre. The higher the stakes, the harder compromise becomes.

This may also explain something about our civic life. Karim’s historical references to 1977, the NPRC and AFRC reminded me of the very different environment in which civic mobilisation once took place. I would add another moment from our more recent history, the civic mobilisation around the march to Spur Road that helped turn public sentiment against Foday Sankoh and the RUF.

We may disagree profoundly about those periods and what they represented, but there was often a clearly identifiable common adversary around which people could organise. That environment has changed.

Today, there is an elected government and an opposition. There is SLPP and there is APC. There are people who identify strongly with one side or the other. There are also citizens who genuinely want to stand outside party politics.

Try to organise a major national civic movement around constitutional reform today and, before the first meeting is over, somebody will probably tell you who is behind it and what their motive is.

If the government dislikes it, it can be labelled opposition. If the opposition is suspicious about it, it can be labelled government propaganda. If neither side knows what to make of it, social media will probably decide for them.

That is one of the great difficulties of building civic solidarity in a deeply polarised democratic environment. It is also why I remain cautious about Karim’s transitional government proposal.

I can see the attraction of pressing the reset button. What I cannot yet see is the mechanism for getting Sierra Leone there without the reset itself becoming another political contest.

Suppose, somehow, Sierra Leone agrees to a two-year transition beginning in 2028. What happens after those two years?

If we return to precisely the same political architecture, with the same concentration of power at the centre, the same winner-takes-all incentives and the same rewards attached to controlling State House, we may simply be postponing the next confrontation. The calendar would have changed, but the architecture would not.

That is why I think Karim’s proposal opens a conversation that could be more important than the proposal itself.

It is not just about whether Sierra Leone needs a transition; it is about what we are transitioning to.

Once the Supreme Court has spoken and the current constitutional process is concluded, Sierra Leoneans will still have to live with whatever political system emerges. Will those changes alter the concentration of political and economic power that makes the presidency such a prized possession in the first place?

It is as if we have been looking at our political crisis from the wrong end. We focus on who should govern us instead of asking how much power any government should have in the first place. We keep debating which party should win instead of asking whether losing an election should really mean losing access to so much political and economic influence.

I think we should spend the period between now and 2028 deciding what we want 2028 to produce.

I do not know whether a two-year transitional government is the answer. Karim has made a case for it, and I think it deserves serious debate. My concern is that we may be trying to solve a structural problem with a political arrangement whose own structure has not yet been sufficiently explained.

Maybe Karim has started the right conversation with the wrong proposition.

The more important choice could be whether we move the 2028 election to 2030, or whether we use the period before 2028 to change what happens after every election. Moving the election date may only move the problem if we keep the same political architecture. If we change the architecture, 2028 itself could become the beginning of something different for the Moherland.

For me, the current political context gives us a unique opportunity to seriously engage in the conversation about who gets to exercise power, where that power should sit, and how our national wealth should be shared across the regions.

It should also be about whether the person or party that wins an election should inherit such enormous control over the political and economic life of the country.

Karim has opened a conversation that I believe we need to take further. The real task now is to use that conversation to decide what we want Sierra Leone to look like after 2028.

Ahmed Sahid Nasralla (De Monk) is the lmmediate past president of the Sierra Leone Association of Journalists (SLAJ).

Last week, I wrote Surviving Freetown: A City That Refuses to Grow Up. People read it, nodded seriously, complained passionately, shared it, and then returned to business as usual.

Perhaps that is the most Sierra Leonean response possible.

So this week, let us examine ourselves, a nation where we pray like saints on Friday and Sunday, then return on Monday to the unofficial national profession of chap, chap.

Friday and Sunday Saints, Monday Sinners

Friday arrives. The mosques are full. White gowns everywhere. Foreheads touch prayer mats. Ameen!

Sunday comes. Churches overflow. Suits and dresses are sharp. The choir is singing, and somebody is receiving a breakthrough. Hallelujah!

Then Monday arrives.

The same man who prayed passionately on Friday is approving a suspicious contract. The woman who danced for Jesus on Sunday is explaining how money meant for schoolbooks somehow developed four wheels and became a Land Cruiser.

We are deeply religious, yet remarkably talented at separating religion from behaviour. The mental gymnastics required to praise God on your knees and rob the state on your feet deserve an Olympic medal. Although somebody might steal the medal too.

Ayi Kwei Armah captured something similar in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. Honest people can appear foolish while those eating from the system prosper. Decades later, the joke remains painfully familiar.

The Honest Ones

Not everyone is corrupt. There are lecturers who teach without selling grades or demanding sex. Nurses who care without demanding “encouragement.” Police officers who serve without requesting “transport.” Customs officers who clear legitimate goods without waiting for “something small.” Civil servants who process files without “consideration.” Journalists who report without brown envelopes. These are Sierra Leone’s quiet heroes.

The tragedy is that honesty can look like a bad financial decision. The honest worker watches someone on the same salary acquire three houses, two cars and a lifestyle sponsored by mathematics that refuses to add up.

Then society asks, “You sef, you nor sabi?”

We have made integrity look like foolishness and corruption look like ambition.

We Pray. Others Build.

We pray. We fast. We post Bible verses on Facebook and Islamic quotations on WhatsApp. Then we wake up and do exactly what those quotations warned us not to do.

Meanwhile, countries we sometimes describe as less religious somehow keep the electricity running, the water flowing and the roads functioning.

Perhaps prayer was never supposed to replace competence. Amen is not an infrastructure policy. Hallelujah cannot fill a pothole.

God may provide the blessing, but somebody still has to buy the cement, preferably without invoicing the government for ten bags and delivering three.

Our problems are not always witchcraft, curses or colonialism. Sometimes the uncomfortable answer is us.

The Patriotism We Left At The Airport

Many who return to lead Sierra Leone have lived and studied abroad. They have seen good roads, functioning hospitals, reliable electricity and institutions where “the system is down” is not a national anthem.

While abroad, they were Facebook professors of good governance.

“Salone must change!”

“We need accountability!”

Then the appointment letter arrives.

They land at Lungi with three suitcases, two degrees and enough ideas to transform Africa.

The suitcases reach Freetown.

The ideas do not.

Suddenly, the Facebook revolutionary becomes a government philosopher:

“My brother, these things take time.”

Corruption becomes “an allegation.” Bad roads become “ongoing projects.” Electricity becomes “a national challenge.” But the salary and allowances remain remarkably reliable.

Meanwhile, the wife and children stay abroad enjoying the schools, hospitals and electricity Papa once praised.

Papa comes home to manage the darkness.

And if Salone becomes too difficult, the return ticket is safely kept.

They have seen development, lived in it and enjoyed it.

They simply left the patriotism at Lungi Airport and remembered to collect the luggage.

The Holy Game of Rice Bags

Ramadan arrives, and suddenly the big men discover generosity.

Thirty bags of rice. Fifty bags. One hundred bags.

Before the rice reaches the people, the party bloggers and party pikins are already posting:

“Our Honourable has done it again! A true man of the people!”

Facebook catches fire. WhatsApp celebrates.

Christmas comes. Same movie, different costume.

But nobody asks, Where did the money come from?

You cannot take the people’s goat, return one sausage and expect a standing ovation.

But who has time for accountability when there is free rice?

The politician gives. The religious leader blesses. The party blogger posts. The party pikin shares.

Even the rice is asking:

“Wait. Na whose money buy me?”

Brown Envelopes and Watchdogs

Journalists are supposed to watch power, and civil society is supposed to challenge it. But sometimes a brown envelope arrives and the watchdog suddenly forgets how to bark.

The headline roars. The article develops manners.

Some activists perform even greater miracles. When the other party governs, they shout, “Accountability! Justice! Transparency!”

Then their own party takes office and suddenly they discover meditation.

You wonder whether the microphone is broken.

Then comes the government appointment or consultancy.

Mystery solved.

The microphone was never broken. It was waiting for employment.

The Society That Sold Its Soul

But blaming politicians alone is too easy.

The lecturer sells grades or demands sex. The customs officer suddenly becomes the Minister of Finance:

“The system made the charges, not me. Give me this. Go pay the balance into the government account. Ar don hep you.”

The market trader cheats the customer. The nurse asks for “something small.” The police officer requests “transport.” The immigration officer wants “greetings” before stamping your passport.

Everybody has a name for it.

Just do not call it corruption.

When the powerful steal millions, we call them thieves. When ordinary people steal small amounts, we call it survival. When someone buys a vote with rice, we call it politics.

We cannot build a nation where everyone waits for their turn to take something, then goes to mosque or church and says:

God bless Sierra Leone.

The Two Party Tango

When one party governs, the other suddenly discovers corruption, nepotism and the Constitution. Meanwhile, Alhaji sits at party headquarters, unemployed but politically employed, posting “My government, my president,” while waiting for his turn at the national cake.

His party wins.

Suddenly, Alhaji is Special Adviser to the Minister of Something Important. Six months later, Prado. One year later, mansion in Leicester. Salary, twenty something million. Lifestyle, fifty something million.

Even the calculator says, “Nor put me inside dis.”

Then power changes. Yesterday’s government discovers accountability, yesterday’s opposition forgets it, and another Alhaji starts polishing his spoon.

New party. Same appetite. The national cake just changes tables.

So What Now?

Sierra Leone does not lack prayers. We have enough Ameens and Hallelujahs to reach heaven twice.

What we lack is turning those prayers into honesty, accountability and service.

God may be listening, but the people are still waiting for electricity, water, medicine, jobs and roads.

Until our actions match our prayers, we will remain a nation that knows exactly how to pray like saints and steal like professionals.

Have a blessed week.

The US-Israeli war against Iran is entering a critical stage, which might lead to an unimaginable catastrophe. A logic of existential threat has consumed Iran, Israel, and the U.S., pushing them up the escalation ladder. This has terrifying implications for the Gulf States, which had calculated that investing in the U.S. security umbrella would protect them from external attacks.

If the Iranian regime survives, this will be the greatest defeat of the US in its post-World War Two history, signalling a definitive end of the US empire in the Middle East and likely hastening its demise in the world at large. It seems unlikely that the US will accept this outcome. Same for Israel, which has always regarded Iran as a mortal enemy—it may be unwilling to live with an Islamic Republic that in all probability will seek revenge for the damage it has suffered from American-Israeli bombardment. And Iran has made it clear that any pain it suffers will be proportionately distributed to other countries in the region.

The Fairy-Tale Development Model of the Gulf States

The Gulf States often conjure images of stupendous wealth, luxurious lifestyles, and stability. They serve as a hub for global energy trade, finance, air travel, and real estate. They are places where the rich go to hide their wealth and seek extravagant entertainment, and the poor or not-so-rich from all corners of the world eke out a living and improve their lives.

Although oil was discovered in the Gulf in the 1930s, it was the Arab oil embargo of 1973, quadrupling the price of oil, that fuelled the great transformation. The six Gulf States—Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Oman—rapidly transitioned from sparsely populated, poor desert states of tents, camel life and pearl diving into stupendously rich petrostates. With a combined GDP of approximately $2.3 trillion, these states—home to fewer than 30 million citizens—collectively rank as the world’s ninth-largest economy.

It’s not surprising that the Gulf States are often perceived as rentier states par excellence. Viewed as a bloc, oil and gas account for roughly 40% of their GDP, 75% of their export revenues, and 70% of their budget revenues. While dependence varies among the six states, with the UAE (particularly Dubai) and Bahrain having diversified significantly into sectors such as tourism, financial services, and manufacturing, these states remain rentier because their primary link to the global economy is still the extraction of a resource that is not significantly ‘produced’ through domestic labour but rather ‘rented’ out from the ground.

The labour market dynamics of these economies present a surreal or fairly-tale developmental landscape. Foreign residents, largely devoid of citizenship rights, account for the vast majority of the population in Qatar (90%), the UAE (88%), and Kuwait (70%). Even in Saudi Arabia and Oman, where indigenous populations remain the majority, foreign workers still comprise roughly 45% of the total population, performing the bulk of private-sector work. The absence of citizenship rights to foreign residents allows the tiny indigenous population to protect their ‘rent’ without sharing it.

What is more, the vast majority of the indigenous workforce is concentrated in the public sector—supported by inflated remuneration and benefits—leaving the private sector almost entirely to foreigners. Despite attempts to redress this imbalance, foreign labour still accounts for over 90% of the private-sector workforce in Qatar and the UAE, and between 75% and 80% in Kuwait, Bahrain, and Oman. Only Saudi Arabia’s aggressive ‘Saudisation’ policy has significantly made a difference; yet, even there, approximately 60% of the private-sector labour force remains foreign.

Ensnared in the US Financial and Security Complex

Awash with unearned wealth or resource rents, the Gulf States have, over the years, built a network of relationships that tether them firmly within the US’s financial and security architecture, effectively rendering them outposts of US power or vassal states in the Middle East. The building blocks were laid in the 1970s when the dollar holdings of the Gulf States rose exponentially, following the quadrupling of oil prices.

A deal was struck with the US to funnel the large amount of dollars held by these states back into US Treasury bonds. Led by Saudi Arabia, these states also agreed to conduct all oil transactions in US dollars, effectively forcing countries around the world to demand dollars. This petrodollar recycling system gave the US ‘exorbitant privilege’: it could print dollars to meet high foreign demand without the risk of domestic inflation, and it could rely on the Gulf States to buy US Treasury bonds—effectively financing America’s national debt and freeing it of the need to impose heavy taxation on its population.

The Gulf States have become major players in the US financial system. Through their massive sovereign wealth funds, they collectively own over USD 5 trillion in global assets, with a significant percentage—estimated in several trillions—invested in US Treasuries, listed equities, and private equity firms.

The Gulf States have invested heavily in the new US growth engine—data centres—with commitments estimated between USD 35 billion and USD 50 billion. Furthermore, they have significantly backed businesses associated with the Trump family. The UAE-based Aryam Investment 1 reportedly acquired a 49% equity stake in World Liberty Financial (WLF), the Trump family’s cryptocurrency venture. Additionally, MGX, another UAE-backed firm, reportedly used USD 2 billion worth of WLF’s USD1 stablecoin to invest in the crypto exchange Binance. This move effectively transformed the Trump-linked stablecoin into a major player in the global cryptocurrency market.

The deepening of economic ties with the US is underpinned by a raft of security arrangements that tether the Gulf States to the US global sphere of influence and security interests in the Middle East. These involve large-scale, expensive purchases of arms from the US, allowing Washington to use Gulf territories as military bases to deter Iran, other regional powers, and non-state actors. Furthermore, these arrangements encourage a lean towards the US policy of normalising relations with Israel.

Collectively, the Gulf States spend about USD 120 billion annually on their militaries. The US is the biggest beneficiary of this expenditure, reportedly receiving tens of billions of dollars annually as payment for defence equipment and services every year—a figure that rises sharply when major deals are signed. For instance, in 2025, the Trump administration announced a massive defence agreement with Saudi Arabia valued at USD 142 billion. These arms deals benefit major US contractors in the military-industrial complex, such as Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Boeing.

In addition to these deals, the US maintains a formidable footprint of 13 major bases across the Gulf, hosting between 40,000 and 50,000 troops—a figure that surged following the 2026 war with Iran. Qatar serves as the regional command centre at Al Udeid, while Kuwait acts as the primary logistics and airlift hub. Naval power is centred in Bahrain, home to the US Fifth Fleet, and supplemented by the UAE’s Al Dhafra Air Base and Jebel Ali Port, which host advanced strike groups and surveillance units. To counter regional threats, Saudi Arabia hosts critical Patriot and THAAD missile defence batteries, while Oman provides vital access to deep-water ports outside the partially closed Strait of Hormuz. In short, the Gulf States function as a vital base for forward operations to project American power and military dominance in the region. They are, thus, likely to become sitting ducks or hostages if the US security umbrella fails to protect them.

It’s important to address one other issue (rapprochement between Israel and the Gulf States) before discussing the serious miscalculations the Gulf States have made in entrusting their security to the hands of a superpower that is addicted to war and joined at the hip with a Middle Eastern power (Israel) that seeks unfettered hegemony in the region.

The US has gone to great lengths to encourage Arab countries, particularly the Gulf States, to normalise relations with Israel. The Abraham Accords of 2020–21, initiated by the first Trump administration, departed from the traditional framework that required the establishment of a Palestinian state as a prerequisite for normalisation. Alongside other Muslim-majority nations such as Morocco, Sudan, Somaliland, and Kazakhstan, the UAE and Bahrain signed the agreement in 2020. This shift was incentivised by the prospect of accessing advanced US weaponry, most notably the F-35 fighter jet.

Even though negotiations with Saudi Arabia stalled when war broke out between Israel and Hamas in 2023, the US has been able to woo Saudi Arabia and Qatar into a unified military command (CENTCOM) that allows Israeli and Arab military officers to discuss radar data and missile defence systems against Iranian drones and ballistic missiles. This effectively makes the Gulf States an integral part of the US-Israeli strategic alliance and military operations against Iran.

Hostages in the US Security Umbrella

The Gulf States may have reasoned that operating within the US security umbrella was a safe bet because of the US’s unrivalled global military power and the belief that such power would be used only defensively on matters that affect their interests. This reasoning is seriously flawed for three reasons.

First, even before the digitisation of asymmetric warfare—exemplified by the use of drones and pinpoint missiles—the US has historically struggled against weaker states and non-state actors. The wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan serve as prime examples of where overwhelming conventional might failed to translate into strategic victory.

Second, as a global power, US interests are unlikely to be always aligned with those of the Gulf States. The US has a strong and disturbing record of initiating wars or military interventions in foreign countries even when it is unprovoked. Reports indicate that the U.S. conducted 251 military interventions around the world between 1991 and 2022.

Indeed, there is an obvious patron-client problem in US-Gulf relations. The Gulf States (the clients) want the US (the patron) to act as a shield, but the US often acts as a sword for its own independent objectives. Besides, as a global power, the US is prone to transactional diplomacy—it might sacrifice a Gulf interest to gain an advantage in a conflict with other global powers.

Third, several realist scholars argue that US policy in the Middle East is heavily influenced by the domestic pro-Israel lobby. Unlike the primarily transactional and commercial nature of US-Gulf relations, US support for Israel is characterised by unparalleled institutional and military aid. Historically, the US has maintained this support even when Israeli actions conflict with broader US strategic goals. Because the Gulf States lack comparable influence within the US Congress and media—and because their interests often diverge from Israel’s on the Palestinian issue—the ‘security umbrella’ remains inherently biased and unreliable for Gulf partners. Furthermore, Trump doesn’t respect Arab leaders. He referred to the Saudi Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman, as “kissing his ass” now that he’s actually attacked Iran—something MBS doubted he’d ever do—a phrase he’s unlikely to use against Netanyahu.

Despite reports that the Gulf States warned the US against attacking Iran, it’s clear they lacked a definitive say in the ultimate decision to go to war. Following the failure of the US-Israeli decapitation strategy to achieve regime change, the Gulf States became the primary targets for Iran’s retaliatory asymmetric operations. Whenever the US and Israel strike Iranian military targets or civilian infrastructure, Iran promptly retaliates not only against Israel but also against US military bases and civilian infrastructure within the Gulf States.

The Al-Dhafra Air Base in the UAE, the Al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar, the logistical hubs in Kuwait, and the US Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain have all come under fire. Iran has also targeted the Ras Tanura oil facilities in Saudi Arabia, the Dubai and Abu Dhabi airports, the Jebel Ali port, and a water desalination plant in Bahrain. Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Oman depend on desalination plants for 86-99% of their water, and Saudi Arabia for 70%.

In a single week in March 2026, the UAE alone detected over 800 drones and 180 missiles—an onslaught that the ‘US security umbrella’ has been unable to effectively prevent or fully mitigate.

In this era of low-cost drone and missile warfare, the Gulf States have become hostages in the US security umbrella. They absorb the punitive retaliation the US inflicts on Iran, yet the US proves unable to shield them from the blowback. ‘Purchased security’ has become not only worthless but a threat to the very existence of these states as functioning societies. Without a diplomatic settlement, their future remains utterly bleak.

Apocalytic Scenarios

Iran has demonstrated in this conflict that Israel remains highly vulnerable to retaliatory strikes. The much-vaunted Iron Dome and multi-layered defence systems have proved inadequate against relentless, large-scale drone and missile attacks. The Israeli regime may be calculating, therefore, that if the Iranian government survives this war, it will pose an even greater long-term threat as it seeks to avenge the casualties and infrastructure damage inflicted by Israel and the United States. Such an apocalyptic fear may drive it to commit mas atrocities as it has done in Gaza.

While the Iran war does not pose a physical existential threat to the U.S.—given Iran’s lack of ICBMs—a defeat would be more than just humiliating. It would signal a profound inability to project power in the Middle East, prompting allies to seek alternative security arrangements. While the U.S. has previously withdrawn from Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, walking away from this conflict could represent an existential collapse of its status as the world’s leading superpower. Given Trump’s impulsive character and inability to engage in serious reflection, the US may be tempted to commit war crimes by engaging in carpet bombing across Iran in a bid to force rapid capitulation.

The Gulf States are thus caught in a strategic bind. Despite the heavy infrastructure damage they have sustained over the last four weeks, they view a clear US-Israeli victory as the only opportunity to rebuild without the lingering threat of Iranian retaliation. Their massive sovereign wealth funds provide the means to rapidly restore these states as global hubs for finance and tourism. This economic necessity explains why Saudi Arabia and the UAE have reportedly become increasingly hawkish, privately urging the Trump administration to ‘finish the job’ rather than accept a premature ceasefire.

This war has shown, however, that even though the US is far superior to Iran in all dimensions of conventional warfare, Iran has an incredible ability to hit back at US, Israeli, and Gulf assets. Its mountainous geography, tunnel networks, and firm grip on the Strait of Hormuz --where 20% of the world’s oil, gas, and fertiliser passes--clearly give it the upper hand.

Two other scenarios—bombing Iran to the Stone Age, as Trump has threatened to do, and a long war of attrition—will be catastrophic for the Gulf States. Iran will drag the Gulf States back to the Stone Age with it if Trump acts on that plan. And even if the Gulf regimes survive, a protracted war will end their fairy-tale development model that has not only given them unrivalled wealth but also transformed their region into a hub for global air travel, finance, real estate investment, and tourism.

It is time for the Gulf States to move beyond the U.S. security umbrella, normalise ties with a more powerful Iran, which will always be their neighbour, and build broader security alliances. Providing bases to a global power whose interests often diverge from its hosts—and which frequently resorts to offensive force—is a strategic recipe for disaster.

Stalemate, stagnation and retrogression

Sierra Leoneans are trapped in a stalemate, a cycle of permanent state of electioneering without development or progress. Despite nearly 30 years of ‘democracy’ and repeated elections, and 60 years of independence, we seem to be stuck politically, constitutionally and ‘developmentally’

Basic infrastructure and social services needed for the survival of citizens is either non-existent or a luxury affordable to only a few. In Freetown, access to potable water and continuous electricity is simply not there while the city itself has degenerated into a glorified slum city. The decaying houses, sprawling urban slums, and general chaos are palpable. Dead bodies are sometimes left unattended on main streets for days, a grim reflection of our systemic collapse.

Key state institutions such as electoral bodies, the judiciary, and police have been effectively captured by the current SLPP Government, even worse than what we saw under the Ernest Bai Koroma-led APC government.

But even more worrying as a nation is the fact that the 1991 constitution, cobbled together under one party rule with little or no public consultations, is not fit for purpose but the process of trying to develop a new one has all but stalled for the past three decades. A democracy that seems unable to produce a constitution.

We all know the reason for this stalled constitutional reform process - incumbent governments have always sought to manipulate the outcome to their own political advantage. For example, the previous government simply abandoned a very expensive review process led by the late Justice Cowan after spending millions in consultations. The current SLPP government has resorted to a piecemeal approach focusing mainly on those areas that will help them retain power. We cannot continue like this. What is clear is that constitution-making cannot take place effectively under the stewardship of a sitting government that is actively competing to retain power. When the players are in charge of making the rules, you can only guess the outcome.

A Two-year Transitional Government

With that said, I will return to my argument for a 2030 vote. To achieve a new social contract grounded in a constitution fit for purpose, independent electoral bodies, an impartial judiciary and public officials that are accountable to citizens and not the president, the best way forward is a two-year transition framework with a Constituent Assembly and an Interim Government.

Such a transition Government should have a clearly defined mandate. Firstly, to draft a new constitution that is citizen-led and that clearly addressed some burning issues like resource management and governance.

The second task would be to conduct a credible census to establish accurate demographic data that is free from political manipulation. Not the contested ones we’ve seen in recent times. A third, but equally important task in the mandate would be to overhaul the elections management bodies, especially the Electoral Commission for Sierra Leone to ensure absolute independence and organise free and fair elections and handover power.

Think of the Constituent Assembly as an upgraded and more impactful Bintumani 1 and 2 Conferences but with representatives directly elected or selected by communities as well as representatives from civil society. Political parties will be excluded from the Assembly which will elect an interim President who will form a government in collaboration with civil society and citizens association. However, political parties can submit proposals for consideration by the Assembly.

To ensure that the Constituent Assembly members and new Interim Transition Government members do not manipulate the constitutional process to favour them, all members of the Transitional Government and Constituent Assembly (CA) must be constitutionally barred from seeking elected office or any political appointments in a future Govt. This mechanism ensures that governance is entrusted to credible, career professionals, academics, lawyers, and civic leaders including grassroots people like market traders, whose sole incentive is national service.

The Choice Before Us

I know that some might argue that this is far-fetched and unrealistic. Some might question the process and feasibility of setting up an independent transitional government. In my view, we as a people have a choice to make - a continuation down the path that leads to perpetual stagnation, or a radical reset and experiment that ensures a peaceful, progressive and stable future.

This transitional arrangement would build on a proud tradition of civic resistance that started with the 1977 students uprising through to the pro-democracy Bintumani 1 and 2 Conferences, to the anti-NPRC women led marches and the August 18 1997 anti-AFRC protests. Such a democratic revolution will also set the stage for future struggles for economic emancipation of the working people of Sierra Leone.

As Frederick Douglass once said: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” Therefore, it is entirely up to us to demand change or it will never happen. Instead of waiting for a saviour, we need to think and act collectively for the Sierra Leone we wish to see. For me, I’m just putting ideas out there, maybe some Gen Zs are listening. So yes, I agree with Mr. Moses Mambu. Let’s do 2030. But I am sure he will disagree with me completely. For once, let’s think outside of the box. It is insufficient and unhelpful to complain that our democracy doesn’t work without taking concrete steps to fix it besides the periodic, ceremonial elections that happen every five years.

This article was first published by Engage Salone an online publication.

https://www.engagesalone.org/

I came back after two years, and I am still in shock. This once-historic city has not only stopped growing; it has decided to roll down the hill and sit in the mud. We are no longer a city; we are a giant, open-air garbage dump with a few buildings in it, masquerading as a capital.

Beautiful Sierra Leone, they call it. But nobody mentions that the beauty is only visible from an airplane window,because once you land, the reality hits you harder than a pothole at 60 kilometres per hour.

The Road to Nowhere. Literally.

Let us start with the roads. Ah, the roads.

Yes, I love the hillside bypass road a good and easy way to connect to the east. I will give credit where it is due. But that is where the praise ends, my friend.

Some roads are so poor, they make you question the meaning of civilisation. Potholes so deep you could lose a small child in them or worse, lose your dignity trying to dodge them. Driving in Freetown is not a commute; it is a chiropractor’s dream. By the time you get from Aberdeen to Kissy, your spine has rearranged itself into a new shape that even yoga cannot fix.

Let me take you on a tour of our finest “obstacle courses”:

Circular Road? More like “Circular Nightmare.” You go round and round, not because it is designed that way, but because you are dodging craters that would make the moon jealous. By the time you escape, you have aged five years.

Bombay Street to Kissy Road Junction? God help you. This is not a road; it is a demolition derby. The potholes have potholes. You do not drive there; you pray and navigate like you are crossing a minefield. If your car suspension survives, consider it a miracle.

Firth, Firth Everywhere! You cannot go anywhere without hearing “Firth this, Firth that.” Every street, every corner. The road is so bad, even the name sounds like a curse word. “Firth” is not just a place; it is a warning.

Model Road? The only thing “model” about it is the way it models complete destruction. It is a perfect example of how NOT to build a road. If this is a model, I would hate to see the prototype.

And do not even get me started on the Goderich to Lumley stretch. That road is so bad, your car will develop new rattles you did not know existed. By the time you reach your destination, you will need a chiropractor, a mechanic, and a therapist.

The Regent Road? It is not a road; it is a mountain climbing expedition. The potholes are so steep, you need four-wheel drive just to crawl up. And coming down? You are not driving; you are falling with style.

Now, the classic: Sani Abacha Street. This road is so bad, even the goats refuse to walk on it. The potholes are so deep, people have started naming them. “This one is John,” “That one is Mary.” They have become landmarks.

The Ministry of Works? The Road Maintenance Authority? I think they are just names on a signboard. If they actually exist, they must be on strike,since 1995.

And let me tell you about the dead dog. A dog died on the road. It stayed there for days and days as the stench punctuated the air like a bad cologne. Nobody removed it. Nobody cared. Drivers just swerved around it like it was another pothole. The flies had a party. The vultures had a feast. And we? We just held our noses and kept driving.

That is Freetown for you. Even the dead cannot get proper burial on our roads.

Zebra Crossing: Just Fancy Decoration

On many days I stood at the zebra crossing, feeling like a fool. Every vehicle was supposed to stop so people could cross—ah, I nor forget that for the Western societies.

But here? We just drive off.

I waited and waited like a lost puppy, hoping for mercy. Eventually, I gave up on human decency and waited until no vehicle, keh keh, or even police vehicle was visible and then I took my life in my hands and hurriedly crossed.

In Freetown, a zebra crossing is not a pedestrian right-of-way; it is just a suggestion painted on the road for decoration. Tourists beware: if you step on that white stripe, you will become a hood ornament.

The Scent of a Nation

You know a city is in trouble when the smell hits you before the temperature.

The gutters are clogged with rubbish that has been there since the last rain season and the rain season is a distant memory now. The stench is nauseating. It is a mix of rotting garbage, open sewage, and broken dreams.

And this is where the problem starts. We are sitting on a ticking time bomb. We are begging for cholera, typhoid, and any other disease with a hard-to-pronounce name. We tell tourists, “Come see the historic city,” but the mosquitoes are here to collect their blood tax. Malaria is our unofficial national sport. We are still fighting diseases that the rest of the world defeated with a simple net and a bit of soap.

Electricity: Better, But Still a Joke

Yep, the electricity is better than before. I will give credit where it is due.

But “better” in Freetown means it only goes off ten times a day instead of twenty. You cannot even enjoy the small improvement because you are too busy praying that the lights stay on long enough to charge your phone. And when the lights go off which they will, inevitably,the generators roar to life like angry lions, and the noise joins the chaos. That is, of course, for those who can afford fuel. For the rest of us? We sit in the dark and count our blessings.

And do not get me started on power banks. These days, a power bank is not a luxury; it is a survival tool. You must carry one everywhere you go,to work, to the market, to church, to bed. You charge it whenever the light decides to show up, and you guard it like your firstborn child.

The other day, I forgot my power bank at home. Just one day. One small mistake. And I spent the entire day without my phone. No WhatsApp. No calls. No nothing. I was a ghost in the city. My battery died at 11 AM, and I walked around like a lost soul, unable to check the time, unable to reply to messages, unable to even pretend I was busy scrolling.

The Boys on Kush: Generation Lost

Let us talk about the elephant in the room or rather, the boys on the corner.

The young men of Freetown are being destroyed by kush, killing them like chicken. They wander the streets like zombies,rotten feets, vacant eyes, empty futures. Nobody talks about it. The government pretends not to see it. The opposition is too busy positioning themselves for power to care.

These are our future leaders, our future workforce, our future fathers. And we are watching them disappear into a cloud of smoke while we argue about politics.

The Economy: Hmmmm

The economy is hmmm. I do not even know what to say anymore.

A friend of mine once wrote in his newspaper: “Is the economy stupid?” Well, I think it is. No control. No direction. No mercy.

Prices go up every day like they are training for the Olympics. Salaries stay the same,frozen in time like they belong in a museum. You cannot buy a bag of rice without crying. You cannot fill your generator without selling your soul and even then, the soul market is down.

Inflation is not just a word in Freetown; it is a way of life. The other day, I went to the market with 100,000 Leones. I came back with a headache and a single onion. The onion looked at me like, “You cannot afford me, my friend.” I had to put it back.

Leone has lost so much value, even the birds refuse to pick it up. You drop money on the ground, and people walk past it. Not because they are honest because the money is not worth the effort to bend down.

The economy is not just stupid; it is insulting. It is like a bad joke that nobody finds funny except the people in power. They sit in their air-conditioned offices, sipping tea, while we are out here calculating how many days we can survive on one meal.

“Be patient,” “we will deliver”,they say.

I am patient. I am so patient, I have become a professional waiter. I wait for the prices to come down. I wait for the salary increase. I wait for the government to do something.

And while I wait, the economy laughs at me.

The “Wild, Wild West” of Street Trading

Traders are everywhere. On the road, in the road, under the road. You cannot drive without buying three oranges, a phone charger, and a used tire you do not need.

There are no market hours. In other countries, they clean the streets at night. In Freetown, we just throw more rubbish on the street. If the government tried to set a time, people would say, “This is not London o!”

People will pee and defecate in any corner they find. Hygiene? We don’t know her.

The Driving of the Headless Chickens

You have the “Keh Keh” and bike riders. They drive like they are in a video game. No rules. Red light? A suggestion. One-way? Just a label.

They are everywhere, and they are terrified of nothing. Combine that with the police who are busy “harassing” drivers for “nothing” (or everything), and you have a traffic jam that makes you want to leave your car and walk only to get hit by a bike.

The Politicians and Their “Plans”

Now, who is supposed to fix this?

Well, we have a Mayor. Apparently, she is very good at speaking with a British accent. “Oh, right, jolly good!” But when it comes to fixing the gutters, cleaning the streets, or doing the things the city desperately needs? Silence.

The Government? Ah, they don’t care either. “It is not our stronghold,” they say. But this is the capital. The city belongs to all of us.

The Opposition? They are just waiting for the next election so they can sit down and do nothing.

We have no planning. No structure. It is just politics on top of politics. “Who cares about the rubbish? Let us focus on the power!” Meanwhile, the city is sinking,literally and metaphorically.

Environmental Disaster: Building On Dreams and Swamps

And to top it off, we are building houses in the hills, swamps, and waterlogged areas. Because why not? Who needs engineering when you have ambition?

When the rains come, the houses wash away, and we wonder why. It is not flooding; it is just the city returning to the sea where it belongs.

In Conclusion: A Cautionary Tale

I was born here, but I do not recognize this place. It is a put-off. If I feel this way, how will a tourist feel?

Foreigners will see the dirt, catch a fever, run back to their countries, and never return. No one wants to invest in a city that smells like a sewer and drives like a warzone. No tourist wants to visit a city where stepping on a zebra crossing is a death wish.

Every passing day, I do not look forward to the next. I just want the days to go quickly so I can leave. And frankly, until we decide to care about our own city, Freetown is not a destination,it is a cautionary tale.

We have the potential. We have the history. We have the beautiful landscapes. But we lack the will. We lack the discipline. We lack the leadership.

And until that changes, Freetown will remain what it has become: a city that survives, but never thrives.

Do you agree? Let us know if your phone battery hasn’t died.