Decentralization in Sierra Leone - Research for Development

Decentralization in Sierra Leonepopulation is skewed towards the better educated and better off groups in the provincialpopulation. Unlike poor farmers in remote villages, these groups do not depend so much onchiefs to authorize land rights and communicate information on development and services.5.8 Tax Authority and Service DeliveryTables 5.1 to 5.9 present data on respondents’ views on the relationship between duty to paytax and the duty to deliver services. When asked whether they were willing to pay tax (table5.1.), 86.2% of respondents answered in the affirmative. WARD scored highest followed byBo, Kono and Bombali. WARD is the only district in the survey where local taxes arecollected directly by the councils. When asked to predict the consequences of putting localcouncils in sole charge of local revenue collection (Table 5.3), 30.3% of respondents statedthat it would be a change for the better, 33.4% stated that it would be a change for the worse,21.6% said there would be no change and 14.7% stated that they didn’t know.Surprisingly, a change for the better scored much higher in Kono than any other district,especially Bo. These results may reflect a relaxed attitude to chieftaincy in relativelyprosperous Bo District and the fact that public deference towards Kono District’s powerfuland wealthy chiefs is more pragmatic than ideological. 7 Older people and women are morelikely to regard putting local councils in charge of all local taxes as a change for the worse(Tables 5.4 and 5.5) than younger people and men. When respondents were asked to pinpointthe reasons for their answers in a multiple choice exercise (Table 5.6), 70.7% of respondentsagreed with the statement that taxes should fund local services yet 66.5% agreed with thestatement that tax collection is the responsibility of traditional authorities and 65.5% agreedwith the statement that people would refuse to pay tax to anyone except chiefs.Finally, respondents were asked whether they were receiving local council services. Overall,66.9% of respondents agreed that their local council was supporting education locally (Table5.7), 46.9% agreed that the local council was supporting health (Table 5.8) and 47.1% agreedthat the local council was supporting agriculture (Table 5.9). However, there were significantregional differences. Bo respondents scored all sectors highly; Kono and Bombalirespondents scored education highly but health and agriculture much lower, while WARDrespondents returned low scores for all sectors. Once again, the “SLPP effect” in Bo and theproximity of central government in WARD is visible in these results.7 It is possible that the focus groups interviewed by the research team, and perhaps CBOs in KonoDistrict generally, have closer links to chiefs than in other areas and that their views on chieftaincy arenot wholly representative of the Kono public at large.Fanthorpe Consultancy Ltd Page 39