Decentralization in Sierra Leone - Research for Development

Decentralization in Sierra LeoneThe SLPP government led by Ahmad Tejan Kabbah attempted to carry decentralizationforward after the return to civilian rule in March 1996. In its own policy statements, theKabbah government emphasised its commitment to reverse the centralizing trend of pastgovernments and to “allow people to be actively involved in their own development”. It alsoemphasized the value of having local councils in place to advise and assist agencies engagedin post-war reconstruction and to bring public services closer to the people (GoSL, 1996;1997). The resumption of armed conflict soon overtook these plans, and the opportunity toimplement them did not arise again until the formal declaration of peace in January 2002.Up to this point, peacebuilding had not featured explicitly among the expected outcomes ofdecentralization in Sierra Leone. However, the end of the civil war coincided with a newemphasis upon security and conflict mitigation within international development, promptedby the global proliferation of civil conflicts at the end of the Cold War (Duffield, 2001).Democratic decentralization became one of many mainstream development strategiesanswering to these new priorities (Siegle and O’Mahoney, 2006). Its “good governance”objectives, i.e. improving efficiency and accountability in local service delivery andenhancing citizens’ participation in governmental decision-making, acquired a new salienceas means by which social contracts between governments and citizens could be re-forged andalienated populations reincorporated into national bodies politic (Schou and Haug, 2005;Crawford and Hartmann, 2008; Scott, 2009).The particular character of Sierra Leone’s civil war gave policy makers further cause toexplore the peacebuilding potential of the Kabbah government’s decentralization plans. Theethnic, religious and regional factionalism so prominent in other post-Cold War conflicts wasnoticeably lacking in the Sierra Leone conflict. The prevailing analysis at war’s end was thatyears of government authoritarianism, corruption and neglect had engendered a collapse insocial trust. The RUF insurgency, it was argued, had provided excluded and impoverishedyoung Sierra Leoneans with an opportunity for self-empowerment. Fighting forces on bothsides had been overtaken by this imperative as soon as they started taking on new recruits anda prolonged and chaotic conflict had ensued (Richards, 1996; Sierra Leone Truth andReconciliation Commission, 2004; Keen, 2005; Peters, 2011).Furthermore, when aid agencies moved into the countryside to deliver aid at the end of thewar, they encountered a host of grievances against chiefs. A claim frequently aired in agencyledforums was that chiefs’ governance had become so despotic that it had driven largenumbers of able-bodied young people out of rural areas. Some of these exiles, it was furtherclaimed, had joined the RUF insurgents specifically to exact revenge on chiefs (ConciliationResources, 2000; Fanthorpe, 2004a). These complaints seemed to suggest that the abovenotedUNDP consultants had misread political currents in Sierra Leone; that “age-old testedprimordial institutions” had also become instruments of oppression, offering the rural massesno respite from a corrupt, authoritarian state (Richards, 2005). To many commentators, it thusseemed that a modern and fully democratic local government system was urgently needed inSierra Leone if long-term peace and ability were going to be secured (Jackson, 2007).Decentralization was confirmed as a priority programme for Sierra Leone at the first post-warConsultative Group meeting, held in Paris in November 2002. According to a recent WorldBanks retrospective on the unfolding of the programme, it was agreed at the Paris meetingthat the “exclusion and deprivation of the rural masses” was a fundamental cause of the civilwar and that decentralization was a key strategy for redressing this problem, re-energizinglocal leadership across the country and opening space for popular participation (Zhou, 2009).Fanthorpe Consultancy Ltd Page 51