Decentralization in Sierra Leone - Research for Development

Decentralization in Sierra Leonegovernment and its agencies, national and international organizations, and the privatesector.” The LGA also authorizes local councils to determine rates of local tax, claim aprecept on revenues collected by chiefdom authorities, approve the annual budgets ofChiefdom Councils (the chiefdom authority recognized in law), oversee the implement ofthese budgets and pass bye-laws (including bye-laws altering or modifying customs andtraditions “impeding development in a locality”). The Act grants paramount chiefs ex officioseats on urban councils that are located within the boundaries of their chiefdoms. However,chiefs’ ex officio seats on District Councils are restricted to three in more populous districts(Bo, Kenema, Kailahun, Kono and Moyamba) and two in all the others. This arrangementdiffers from the pre-1972 situation in which all Paramount Chiefs in a district sat in council(Tangri, 1978a).The LGA also establishes a new grassroots forum, the Ward Development Committee(WDC). Chaired by an elected councillor, the WDC comprises of no more than ten wardresidents (at least half of whom are required to be women) elected at a public meeting, plusthe local Paramount Chief. The main functions of WDCs, as set out by the LGA, are to“mobilize residents of the ward for the implementation of self-help and developmentprojects”, “provide a focal point for the discussion of local problems and needs”, and“organize communal and voluntary work”. The Act further states that Chiefdom Councilsshould continue to perform the functions set out in the Chiefdom Councils Act (Cap 61 ofthe Laws of Sierra Leone, 1960). It summarizes these functions as: a) preventing thecommission of offences; b) making and enforcing bye laws; c) prohibiting illegal gambling;d) holding land in trust for the chiefdom people.Competing Spheres of Local AuthorityBy endorsing the historic division of functions between chiefdoms and local councils, theLGA created a context for political competition between them. Studies of the original localcouncils emphasised that many elected councillors and council staff were relatives of chiefsand that chiefdom factions competed to divert council resources to their own localities(Kilson, 1966; Tangri, 1978a). However, the current generation of local councillors is far lessinclined to defer to chiefs’ interests.For example, a common complaint from elected councillors and council staff in the earlyyears of the decentralization programme was that chiefdom authorities were purposefullyfailing to account for much of the revenue they were collecting so as to minimize the revenueprecept. A district council chairman in the Northern Province claimed in an interview in 2008that he had petitioned the new President to transfer the management of the Chiefdom Policeto the local councils so they could be used as a tax enforcement agency, although nothing hadcome of it. Two urban council chairmen complained on separate occasions that their effortsto develop planning capacity were being undermined constantly by unregulated land salesbrokered by chiefs.For their part, paramount chiefs often complained that elected councillors were claiming forthemselves the status of “highest political authority” in their localities and using that as apretext to interfere in the governance of their chiefdoms (Manning, 2008; Robinson, 2010).Another complaint was that elected councillors were trying to exclude paramount chiefmembers from voting in council on the grounds that the LGA only authorizes “councillors”,to vote. A further complaint from a Paramount chief in Bo District was that local councilswere claiming their revenue precept every year but failing to deliver any projects to hischiefdom. A Paramount Chief interviewed in Makeni in 2005 observed that he held twoFanthorpe Consultancy Ltd Page 55