Fanthorpe_chiefs And Democratic Decentralization

African Affairs, 105/418, 27–49

doi:10.1093/afraf/adi091

© The Author [2005]. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Royal African Society. All rights reserved

Advance Access Publication 5 December 2005

ON THE LIMITS OF LIBERAL PEACE: CHIEFS AND DEMOCRATIC DECENTRALIZATION IN POST-WAR SIERRA LEONE RICHARD FANTHORPE

ABSTRACT Liberal peace, the explicit merging of international security and development policy, has arrived fairly late on the scene in Sierra Leone. One of its primary foci is regimes of customary governance and sociality associated with chiefdom administration. Many international agencies consider these regimes irredeemably oppressive towards the rural poor and a root cause of the recent civil war. While the present government of Sierra Leone remains supportive of chieftaincy, international donors are supporting a fast-track decentralization programme that, it is hoped, will supply a new system of democratic governance to a rural populace already straining against the leash of ‘custom’. This article, drawing upon the author’s recent fieldwork in Sierra Leone, undertakes a critical examination of this policy. It is argued that, popular grievances notwithstanding, chieftaincy is the historic focus of struggles for political control over the Sierra Leonean countryside. Both the national elite and the rural poor remain deeply engaged in these struggles, and many among the latter continue to value customary authority as a defence against the abuse of bureaucratic power. Fast-tracking decentralization in the war-ravaged countryside may therefore only succeed in shifting the balance of political power away from the poor.

THE PROLIFERATION OF CIVIL CONFLICT IN THE POST-COLD WAR ERA has prompted the merging of international development and security policy. A fundamental fear in the global North is that ‘new wars’ may create ‘zones of lawlessness’, open to exploitation by international criminal and terrorist organizations.1 Development is now perceived as having a vital role in combating violent instability. Its explicit aim is to transform societies in such a way as to avoid future conflict, employing guiding principles that Richard Fanthorpe ([email protected]) is an independent consultant and visiting research fellow at the Department of Anthropology, University of Sussex. This article is an output from a research project funded by the UK Department for International Development (DFID). The views expressed are not necessarily those of DFID. 1. The Africa Conflict Prevention Pool: An information document (DFID, London, 2004), p. iii. See also A More Secure World: Our shared responsibility. Report of the Secretary-General’s High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change (United Nations, New York, 2004); Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars: Organized violence in a global era (Polity Press, Cambridge, 2001).

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are generically liberal: individual rights, social responsibility, accountability, democracy, and respect for the rule of law.2 Mindful of the problematic consequences of imposing new governance systems upon independent sovereign states, Northern agencies prefer to seek out local partners for change. These can be hard to find in the aftermath of a protracted conflict, yet, as Mark Duffield points out, conflict itself is perceived as an opportunity for intervention: Although violence can destroy development, a common strand within liberal governance is that it also erodes the cohesion of a society’s culture, customs and traditions. Given that a radicalised development now seeks to transform societies as a whole, including the beliefs and attitudes of the people concerned, this Hobbesian outcome of violence has a certain utility. In ideological terms, it makes the process of transition easier. While the rolling back of development and the deepening of poverty provides the urgency to intervene, the destruction of culture furnishes the opportunity for aid agencies to establish new and replacement forms of collective identity and social organisation.3

Analyses and policy strategies characteristic of liberal peace are gaining currency in post-war Sierra Leone. The cessation of hostilities has seen the establishment of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and a Special Court for prosecuting leaders of wartime factions. But a major focus of the liberal reform agenda over the longer term is local government. The legacy of colonial ‘indirect rule’ is particularly strong in Sierra Leone, and chiefs remain closely involved in almost every aspect of everyday governance in rural areas. The present government of Sierra Leone remains supportive of chieftaincy, but many in international circles consider it an irredeemably illiberal institution and, in retrospect, a major causal factor in the recent civil war. Donors are now supporting a fast-track decentralization programme that, they hope, will supply a new system of democratic governance to a rural populace already straining against the leash of ‘custom’. The present article undertakes a critical examination of this policy. Governance reform in post-war Sierra Leone No aspect of the recent conflict in Sierra Leone has provoked more consternation than the reported collusion of notional adversaries, notably the national army and pro-government Civil Defence Force (CDF) militias on the one hand and Revolutionary United Front (RUF) insurgents on the other, in terrorising civilians and looting property. Most commentators 2. Michael Dillon and Julian Reid, ‘Global liberal governance: biopolitics, security and war’, Millennium Journal of International Studies 30, 1 (2001), pp. 41–66; Mark Duffield, Global Governance and the New Wars: The merging of development and security (Zed Books, London, 2001). 3. Duffield, Global Governance, p. 123.

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agree that the common social denominator here was a youth cohort modernized by education and exposure to mass consumption, yet thwarted in its projects of self-realization by poverty and political exclusion.4 As the Sierra Leone TRC notes in its final report: The majority of the fighting forces were composed of the young, the disgruntled, the unemployed and the poor. The Commission has identified an astonishing ‘factional fluidity’ among the different militias and armed groups that prosecuted the war. Both overtly and covertly, gradually and suddenly, fighters switched sides or established new ‘units’. These ‘chameleonic tendencies’ spanned across all factions without exception. The factional fluidity that defined this conflict was drawn into its sharpest focus in the latter stages of the conflict. Many of the early members of the RUF on its Southern Front in the Pujehun District reappeared as Kamajors under the banner of the CDF after 1997. Theirs was not so much a switching of sides as the identification of a new vehicle on which to purvey their notions of empowerment as civil militiamen [emphasis original].5

The report is explicit in apportioning blame for this alienation: Successive political elites plundered the nation’s assets, including its mineral riches, at the expense of the national good. Government accountability was non-existent. Institutions meant to uphold human rights, such as the courts and civil society, were thoroughly co-opted by the executive. This context provided ripe breeding grounds for opportunists who unleashed a wave of violence and mayhem that was to sweep through the country. Many Sierra Leoneans, particularly the youth, lost all sense of hope in the future. Youths became easy prey for unscrupulous forces who exploited their disenchantment to wreak vengeance against the ruling elite. The Commission holds the political elite of successive regimes in the post-independence period responsible for creating the conditions for conflict.6

By the close of hostilities, most of these ‘unscrupulous forces’ (including the RUF military leadership) had been neutralized by one means or another. A disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration (DDR) scheme, distributing vocational training opportunities attached to small bursaries, succeeded in dispersing ex-combatants. There has been no sign of a return to armed conflict since the formal declaration of peace in January 2002. None of the 4. Paul Richards, ‘Rebellion in Liberia and Sierra Leone: a crisis of youth?’, in O.W. Furley (ed.), Conflict in Africa (I.B. Tauris, London, 1995), pp. 134–70; Paul Richards, Fighting for the Rainforest: War, youth and resources in Sierra Leone (The International African Institute in association with James Currey, Oxford, 1996); Ibrahim Abdullah and Patrick Muana, ‘The Revolutionary United Front of Sierra Leone: a revolt of the lumpenproletariat’, in Christopher Clapham (ed.), African Guerrillas (James Currey, Oxford, 1998), pp. 172–201; Jimmy Kandeh, ‘Ransoming the state: elite origins of subaltern terror in Sierra Leone’, Review of African Political Economy 81 (1999), pp. 349–66; Thandika Makandawire, ‘The terrible toll of post-colonial “rebel movements” in Africa: towards an explanation of violence against the peasantry’, Journal of Modern African Studies 40, 1 (2002), pp. 181–215. 5. TRC Report, ‘Findings’, in The Final Report of the Truth & Reconciliation Commission of Sierra Leone, Vol. 2 (2004), paras 95–7 (http://trcsierraleone.org/drwebsite/publish/v2c2.shtml, 25 October 2005). 6. Ibid, paras 13–8.

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wartime factions have made any headway in peacetime politics, and the present government of Sierra Leone, led by the Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP), still represents the old elite. Yet it has welcomed post-war donor interventions, including the ambitious programme for decentralization. While Sierra Leone appears to have made rapid strides since the cessation of hostilities, concern remains widespread that the root causes of the conflict have not been addressed. Many international observers persist in drawing attention to the depths of alienation implicit in attacks on civilians and public property. As a recent consultancy report on Sierra Leone’s National Recovery Strategy (NRS) notes: The extensive, wanton damage to government buildings during the war is by any logical analysis indefensible, and was part of a systemic attack on all symbols of governance. This raises the question of why such a wholescale attack should have been contemplated. The destruction is perhaps also symbolic of peoples’ perceptions of the structures the rebels set out to destroy. As efforts continue to rebuild governance, serious questions perhaps need to be raised about the kinds of governance structures we are recreating. Social institutions/systems do not decay or get abandoned/destroyed without reason. Merely recreating structures, if these are in fact part of the problem and not part of the solution, would be counterproductive [emphasis original].7

These concerns also reflect the experiences of aid agencies when managing relief distributions in rural areas at the closing stages of the war. Agencies encountered a host of local grievances against chiefs and local elders that had not featured in international understandings of the conflict up to that point.8 Foremost among these grievances were that chiefs controlled a local judicial system regularly handing down fines that were grossly incommensurate with the offences committed and that they were in the habit of compelling their subjects to work for them without payment. Agencies were left in no doubt as to the alleged consequences of these malpractices. For example, the international non-governmental organization (NGO) Conciliation Resources facilitated a series of public workshops on governance in southern Sierra Leone at the closing stages of the war. A subsequent field report outlines rural youths’ views on the consequences of corrupt justice: 7. Karen Moore, Chris Squire, and Foday MacBailey, Sierra Leone National Recovery Strategy Assessment, Final Report (United Nations Office fot the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), United Nations Mission to Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL) and United Nations Development Program (UNDP), in Cooperation with the Government of Sierra Leone, Freetown, 2003). 8. Initial reports and analyses of these grievances can be found in Steven Archibald and Paul Richards, ‘Seeds and rights: new approaches to agricultural rehabilitation in Sierra Leone’, Disasters 26, 4 (2002), pp. 356–67 and ‘Converts to human rights? Popular debate about war and justice in rural central Sierra Leone’, Africa 72, 3 (2002), pp. 339–67; Richard Fanthorpe, ‘Humanitarian aid in post-war Sierra Leone: the politics of moral economy’, in Sarah Collinson (ed.), Power, Livelihoods and Conflict: Case studies in political economy analysis for humanitarian action. Humanitarian Policy Group Report No. 13 (Overseas Development Institute, London, 2003), pp. 53–65; Humanitarian Accountability Project (HAP), Agency Self-Assessment About Transparency and Accountability in Sierra Leone: A HAP survey (Humanitarian Accountability Project, Geneva, 2002).

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This is an age-old problem in the community and is one of the main factors underlying the war. These heavy fines cause deep-seated grudges as well [as] force young people to flee as they are unable to pay. The chiefs in the community are not paid [by the government]. Therefore, they find their living from conflict and the fines that it produces. Combining this practice with other malpractices that chiefs enjoy has made chiefs a target for victimisation by armed youth[s], as they themselves feel victimised by the authorities.9

A summary report on this consultancy exercise went on to observe that ‘many youth[s] joined the rebel war out of frustration to be able to [exact] revenge on the chiefdom[s] for all the bad governance that had been targeting them over the years’.10 At first, these rural grievances left international agencies in something of a quandary. Indeed, the above-noted consultations were facilitated for the Paramount Chiefs Restoration Programme (PCRP), a project supported by the United Kingdom Department for International Development (DFID) and aimed, as its title indicates, at the post-war re-establishment of the chieftaincy system.11 During the conflict, chiefs had been targeted along with other authority figures, but there had been no indication that belligerents reserved a special hostility for them. On the contrary, occupying RUF forces revived chieftaincy as an instrument of civil–military liaison in northern areas late in the war, and Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) junta leader Johnny Paul Koroma announced on one occasion that top-ranking (paramount) chiefs would serve as assessors in his proposed People’s Revolutionary Courts.12 Replacing the ad hoc rural civil administrations set up by belligerents on both sides with legal authorities (i.e. chiefs) was a post-war priority for the government of Sierra Leone. Preliminary public consultations in civil society forums in Freetown and refugee camps in Guinea had reported that ‘chiefs have a vital role to play in restoring stability and that there is no other institution capable of replacing them at this stage in the Sierra Leone polity’.13 The government of Sierra Leone now acknowledges that corrupt and oppressive governance in the chiefdoms contributed to the general climate of 9. Conciliation Resources, Report on Bumpeh Chiefdom (Moyamba District) Consultation, 19th-20th January 2000 (Paramount Chiefs Restoration Unit, Governance Reform Secretariat, Ministry of Presidential Affairs [PRU/GRS/MPA], Freetown, 2000), p. 5. 10. Conciliation Resources, Summary Report: Observations and recommendations on the pilot project (PRU/GRS/MPA, Freetown, 2000), p. 3. 11. This programme was renamed the Chiefdom Governance Reform Programme in its second and final year, although its operational components remained unchanged. See Richard Fanthorpe, Alice Jay, and Victor Kalie Kamara, Sierra Leone: A review of the Chiefdom Governance Reform Programme, incorporating an analysis of chiefdom administration in Sierra Leone (DFID, London, 2002). 12. Speech by AFRC Chairman Major Johnny Paul Koroma, 30 July 1997 (http://www.sierraleone.org/koroma073097.html, 21 March 2005). 13. Paramount Chiefs Restoration Programme, Sierra Leone, Project Memorandum (DFID, London, 2000), p. 18.

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alienation that propelled the nation into conflict. Yet it has pledged to restore dignity and prestige to chieftaincy and insists that the pre-war ‘breakdown in traditional order’ was caused by previous (including colonial) governments’ ‘interference’ in chieftaincy affairs.14 However, an analysis now gaining international currency is that ‘custom’ has become an instrument of oppression in rural Sierra Leone and that grievances against chiefs represent the political voice, hitherto unrecognized, of apparently nihilistic wartime violence. Paul Richards, a leading proponent of this analysis, has argued that these grievances are evidence of an ongoing rural ‘class’ conflict. Citing examples from recent interview material, he notes how deeply rural youths appear to resent chiefs’ calls upon their labour for unpaid ‘community work’ and their control over the customary marriage system.15 Analysing these grievances ethnographically, Richards argues that polygyny facilitates exploitation of the labour of young people. Daughters of poor families are, to all intents and purposes, sold in marriage to wealthy village polygynists. Young men, accordingly, become dependent on these wealthy families for access to marriage partners and are forced to pay a heavy ‘bride price’ for that privilege. After marriage they are subjected to further customary demands reflecting their status as sons-in-law (‘bride service’). Those seeking to avoid such entrapment find themselves hauled before the local courts and handed down fines that can only be paid off with further toil at the behest of chiefs and elders.16 Richards goes on to explore the historical roots of this alleged exploitation with special reference to the Mano river region. Here, a turbulent nineteenth century had seen local ‘warlords’ competing for control over trade routes and accumulating dependent populations of clients and slaves. Colonial ‘indirect rule’, Richards argues, furnished these warlords with an opportunity to reinvent themselves as a chiefly land-owning class and maintain a hegemony over the descendants of their former slaves and subordinates through tributary demands, agricultural corvées, polygyny, and other ‘customary’ claims upon their labour and resources. Putting these strands of evidence together, Richards argues that the recent civil war is best 14. See, e.g., Speeches Delivered by his Excellency the President at Kenema, Bo, Makeni and Port Loko to the Newly Elected Paramount Chiefs, From 26th-30th January, 2003 (http://www.statehouse-sl.org/speeches/speeches-bo-makeni.html). This view is strongly reflected in the TRC Report, Vol. 2, Ch. 2, paras 47–8. 15. Paul Richards, ‘To fight or to farm: agrarian dimensions of the Mano River conflicts (Liberia and Sierra Leone)’, African Affairs 104, 417 (2005), pp. 571–90. See also Richards, Controversy over Recent West African Wars: An agrarian question? Occasional Paper (Centre of West African Studies, University of Copenhagen, 2004). 16. This analysis bears a close resemblance to the neo-Marxist ‘lineage mode of production’ model developed by Claude Meillassoux and others in the 1960s and 1970s. That model defined slavery as a condition of unrelieved domestic subordination: while most youths would acquire ‘elder’ status in the course of time, that transition could be delayed indefinitely if they were denied access to marriageable women. See Joel Kahn, ‘Marxist anthropology and segmentary societies: a review of the literature’, in Joel Kahn and Josep Llobera (eds), The Anthropology of Pre-Capitalist Societies (Humanities Press, Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1981), pp. 57–88.

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understood as a revolt of the former slave and subordinate classes against customary authority: Regular fining of young cultivators keeps them in poverty and dependency. Chiefs and landowners thereby accumulate surplus labour and send their own children to town for education. The children of the poor remain in the village, providing ‘community labour’ for roads and other basic amenities mainly benefiting traders and the chiefly classes. The more docile among the descendants of the former farm slaves continue to work the land for subsistence returns. Others, less willing to queue in line for increasingly uncertain patrimonial scraps, default on their fines, are hounded into vagrancy and end up as protagonists of war.17

For Richards, the stark conclusion emerging here is that the failings of chiefdom-level governance were a major cause of the war and that further conflict in Sierra Leone is inevitable without institutional transformation at the grassroots.18 Other analyses have taken up the same message. One commentator goes so far as to suggest that post-conflict restoration of chiefs is tantamount to ‘re-creating the pre-conditions for war’ in Sierra Leone,19 while others conclude that fully equitable, participatory, and accountable governance is unlikely to emerge in rural Sierra Leone until people ‘change from being subjects [of chiefs] to citizens with rights and responsibilities’.20 The above-noted NRS report turns this stark assessment into a specific plea for liberal peace in Sierra Leone. The post independence history of Sierra Leone has witnessed violent upheavals so powerful that they rocked many existing social institutions, toppling some and precipitating wild adjustments in others. The problem of disintegration of social institutions does not dictate its own solution i.e. the blueprint for the new institutional arrangements. Such catastrophic changes prime society for major institutional transformation. Society is in a plastic state, like half melted wax out of which anything can be moulded. The war has provided an opportunity for Sierra Leoneans to rethink fundamental issues relating to their national dynamics and identity. This should include the rebuilding of sustainable institutions as part of a new foundation responsive to the particular conditions and needs of the people they are intended to serve. The lessons from the war and this recovery effort would be valueless without fundamental questions about what in the national system of doing business may have contributed to the war starting in the first place and its inherent destructiveness. The recovery and development phase must guard against merely recreating institutions and focus on fundamentally reforming or replacing them.21 17. Richards, ‘To fight or to farm’, p. 525. 18. Paul Richards, Khadija Bah, and James Vincent, Social Capital and Survival: Prospects for community driven development in post-conflict Sierra Leone. Social Development Paper No. 12 (World Bank, Washington DC, 2004); Richards, Controversy, p. 21. 19. Joseph Hanlon, ‘Is the international community helping to recreate the pre-conditions for war in Sierra Leone?’, Paper presented at the WIDER Conference Making Peace Work, Helsinki, Finland, 4–5 June, 2004. See also International Crisis Group, Liberia and Sierra Leone: Rebuilding failed states (Dakar, Brussels, 2004), pp. 23–4. 20. Alice Jay and Momoh Taziff Koroma, From ‘Crying and Clientelism to Rights and Responsibilities (Republic of Sierra Leone and the European Union, 2004). 21. Karen Moore et al., Sierra Leone National Recovery Strategy Assessment, p. v.

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By no means all international agencies subscribe to this revisionist analysis. But at the very least, the rural grievances it highlights have focussed attention on the need for institutional reforms. For many donors, the chiefdoms are already beyond redemption. As a DFID discussion document notes: There appears to be very little support or interest in developing the chiefdom system among other potential donors. This is partly because ‘the British are doing it’ and mainly because negative views of the chiefdom system prevail. The Americans, for example, are said to believe in total abolition. Several agencies (the [World] Bank, UNDP [United Nations Development Programme] and EU [European Union]) are keen to support the reestablishment of elected local government.22

A political rationale for decentralization A fast-track decentralization programme is now underway, with the aim of devolving central government functions to elected local authorities. Decentralization in Sierra Leone involves the reconstruction of an entire tier of local government that disappeared long before the start of the recent conflict. Actual devolution of functions from central to local government is likely to be slow, given wartime upheavals, but many donors are keen to set the process in motion as a means of reincorporating the rural poor into the Sierra Leonean body politic. For example, a recent World Bank loan appraisal report notes that: One major contributing factor to the ten-year civil war in the nineties was the antagonism between a large section of the population who were marginalized from the political process and deprived of social services and economic development opportunities, and those who controlled resources through power and corruption. The Kabbah government has chosen a route of political decentralization to open up the political space and improve inclusiveness…By establishing democratically elected local councils to replace the existing Management Committees appointed by the President, the Government hopes to create a participatory local governance structure where people (including previously marginalized groups) can actively participate in the decision-making process at the local level.23

The World Bank is also a subscriber to the view that Sierra Leone’s unsettled post-war state presents a window of opportunity for fast-tracking decentralization before the forces of illiberalism have a chance to regroup: The experience of South Africa and Indonesia seems to demonstrate that a time of major political change is a good one at which to promote decentralization. South Africa’s decentralization governance was associated with the constitutional transformation from apartheid; Indonesia’s with the weak support for the post-Soeharto government of Habibie 22. Garth Glentworth, Non-Project Concept Note: Sierra Leone Chiefdom Governance Reform Programme phase 2 (DFID, London, 2003). 23. World Bank, Project Appraisal Document on a Proposed Grant in the Amount of SDR 16.8 Million (USD 25.12 Million Equivalent) to the Government of Sierra Leone for an Institutional Reform and Capacity Building Project. Report No. 28315-SL (World Bank, Washington DC, 2004), p. 17.

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and demands for political and fiscal decentralization. Sierra Leone may be at just such a juncture. Settled social, political and bureaucratic structures can more easily capture a policy [that is] against their interests…If there is a strong belief that decentralization will improve the access of the poor to services, then it may be best to move fairly aggressively and quickly, to set in motion a process that will be difficult to reverse.24

A further expectation of decentralization, which international staff tend to express more readily in conversation than in print, is that it will both capture and catalyse modernizing ideas about citizenship and sociality already emerging at the grassroots. What decentralization means for the future of the chiefdoms is yet to be determined. At present, the programme is reviving 12 district and five urban councils in the provinces. Senior figures in the Sierra Leone government take the view that the new councils’ main purpose is the administration of post-war reconstruction and development, while the 149 chiefdoms are still needed to perform essential local functions, notably the administration of customary land rights, revenue collection, and the maintenance of law and order. The Local Government Act of 2004 reconfirms the chiefdoms’ status as the basic institutional tier to which the new councils may delegate functions.25 This division of functions recapitulates that obtaining between the chiefdoms and the original district councils, suspended in 1972. The original councils were incorporated in 1950 after the colonial administration had reached the conclusion that the chiefdoms were too small and inefficiently run to manage the overseas development investment expected to come on stream after the Second World War.26 The funding structure of the new councils also replicates the old arrangements. The Sierra Leone government resisted pressure from donors to reserve a fixed proportion of central state revenue for transfer to local government, with the result that the new councils will be financed partially through development grants and partially from a precept on local taxes collected by the chiefdoms. Formal review of the chiefdoms’ capacity to perform this (or indeed any other) delegated function has yet to be undertaken. The provisions of the new Act would appear to make the post-war rehabilitation of chiefdom-level institutional capacity an integral component of decentralization. However, the chiefdoms remain beyond the pale as far as many international agencies are concerned.27 Indeed, a grants manager working for an international NGO operating in southeastern Sierra Leone informed me in September 2004 that leading donor agencies are now refusing 24. World Bank, Sierra Leone: Strategic options for public sector reform. Report No. 25110-SL (World Bank, Washington DC, 2003), pp. 43–4. 25. Republic of Sierra Leone, Local Government Act, 2004 (Government Printing Department, Freetown, 2004), para 28. 26. H.W. Davidson, Report on the Functions and Finances of District Councils in Sierra Leone (Government Printer, Freetown, 1953). 27. DFID is committed to further support for chiefdom administration but has yet to decide on a specific programme. Other agencies have also supported piecemeal reconstruction of local court enclosures (barris) and chiefdom administration offices.

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to fund projects unless they are implemented in partnership with district council Ward Development Committees (WDCs). According to my informant, village and chiefdom development committees are no longer accepted as implementing partners because they are generally considered to be ‘corrupt’. There are currently 382 local government wards in the provinces, all but 15 belonging to the district councils. According to the Local Government Act of 2004, WDCs should comprise the paramount chief, all councillors elected for that ward, plus no more than ten ordinary members (of whom at least five must be women) elected by ward residents at a public meeting. The primary functions of the WDCs, according to the Act, are to liaise between the local councils and the public and to ‘mobilise local residents for the implementation of self-help and development projects’. Since the World Bank and other major donors hope to shift from financing discrete programmes to direct budgetary support as soon as decentralization is completed, the WDCs could become conduits for substantial development investment. Off the record, some international agency staff are now predicting the final demise of chiefdom administration as soon as this funding stream reaches the grassroots. Social research and post-war aid intervention Whether the present, donor-driven agenda for governance reform in Sierra Leone gauges rural sociality and politics accurately is open to question. Historical and colonial ethnographic sources are strongly emphasized in Richards’s above-noted analysis, and this may create a potentially misleading impression of present-day politics and sociality in rural areas. For example, while chiefs’ calls for ‘community labour’ may be resented by some, many of these activities — e.g. clearing overgrown bush paths that may harbour poisonous snakes, maintaining footbridges, and refurbishing school buildings — clearly benefit the community as a whole and not just local elites. These activities are hardly comparable with the agricultural corvées of the early colonial era.28 Furthermore, many historical techniques for control over labour and marriage are simply not possible under modern conditions. Not even the most powerful rural patriarchs can prevent disgruntled youth of both sexes from leaving to try their luck among family, friends, and associates who have already migrated to the towns and diamond-mining areas. Recent 28. Some recent commentators, prompted by Richards’s analysis, have claimed that the colonial Forced Labour Ordinance of 1932 is still in force. The central provision of this Ordinance was to guarantee the right of chiefs to call upon their subjects to work on their farms for a set number of days each year. In fact, this legislation was superseded by the Chiefdom Treasuries Ordinance of 1937 and formally repealed in 1956. See Richards et al., Social Capital and Survival, p. 14; Moore et al., Sierra Leone National Recovery Strategy Assessment, p. 22, and Hanlon, ‘Is the international community helping to recreate the pre-conditions for war in Sierra Leone?’, p. 4. See also Sierra Leone, Legislative Council Debates, Volume VIII, Session 1955-56 (Government Printing Department, Freetown, Sierra Leone, 1958).

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anthropological studies do indeed suggest that customary rights and obligations attached to marriage have become a source of contention in rural Sierra Leone; but the social context they describe is complex and multifaceted. For example, Kris Hardin’s study of a small town in the Kono diamondmining area in the 1980s reports that most couples were cohabiting without completing bridewealth payments. In the old rural milieu, men had seen wives and children as economic investments, but social priorities had changed in the face of new opportunities for education, cash-cropping, and wage employment. Husbands were becoming increasingly resentful of their customary obligations to their wives’ families, especially as demands now had a substantial cash element. Even so, changing social attitudes had not resulted in the abandonment of customary marriage as much as its politicization. As Hardin notes: [B]etween 1982 and 1984 I recorded only three marriages being negotiated in Kainkordu, a town of about 1,200. When asked about this, young men, as well as older men and young women, said they were hesitant to enter into marriages. Young men were afraid that they would be unable to meet the expectations of a wife and her family. Many felt that the expectations required of them were too high and that trying to meet them would lessen their ability to advance. Several young men spoke of trying to establish a ‘foundation’ before marriage, referring to a pool of resources, accumulated either through wage labour or inheritance, that would allow them to continue to accumulate enough resources to meet marital expectations. On the other hand, young women generally felt that men were disrespectful to them and, moreover, tried to take advantage of them by expecting their labour and children but were unwilling to support them or be respectful to their families. Such cautionary attitudes may signal only a delay in entering marriages but, because many of the young men who find themselves in precarious positions with their families become migrant workers, it is likely that a certain percentage of them will never marry, although they may father children or marry non-Kono women and thus have a different set of responsibilities.29

Working in an agrarian community in southern Sierra Leonean during the same period, Mariane Ferme also observes how the combined effects of poverty and perennial shortages of farm labour have added a strong element of ruthlessness to the pursuit of putative rights and obligations in marriage. Many husbands appeared to Ferme to be in constant anxiety that any decline in their economic fortunes would prompt their wives to leave in search of better options, often with the active encouragement of natal families who would use the bridewealth received from the new husband to pay off the old. Young male ‘strangers’ choosing to settle in the village were therefore viewed with ambivalence. While their labour was greatly valued, they were also seen as potential threats to the stability of local marriages. Village elders’ time-honoured response was to assign these young ‘strangers’ to local patrons, who would be expected to arrange the 29. Kris Hardin, The Aesthetics of Action: Continuity and change in a West African town (Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC, 1993), p. 69.

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marriages that would bind these youths into the local web of mutual social obligations. Even so, one young man observed by Ferme had managed to resist such strategies of incorporation for several years, apparently moving from patron to patron at will.30 There is no support in either study for Richards’s claim that chiefs and elders have been monopolizing the sexual services of young women and that discrepancy invites closer scrutiny of the context from which Richards’s testimonial data originated. Some commentators argue that explanations offered by ex-combatants for their involvement in internal conflicts that have seen widespread looting and attacks on civilians are always likely to be hollow and self-serving.31 Yet, the striking feature of the testimonial data cited by Richards is that ex-RUF fighters, non-combatant youth, ex-CDF fighters, and even village elders all appear to be emphasizing the iniquities of traditional governance and jurisprudence.32 These testimonies were given during a period of intensive engagement between rural Sierra Leoneans and agencies involved in post-war reconstruction. Since the cessation of hostilities, countless rural consultations have been held for the purposes of needs assessment, identification of project beneficiaries, policy dissemination and feedback, civic education (‘sensitization’), and conflict resolution. Donor-beneficiary engagement has generated its own forms of discourse and politics. During my own recent research in northern Sierra Leone, I heard a great deal of unprompted talk about the war and the moral ills that helped to provoke it. Sometimes, this talk evoked memories of specific events during the RUF occupation: e.g. the murder of a local trader notorious for turning every fuel shortage into his own profit or the destruction of the houses of party political activists who had rampaged across the properties of defeated rivals during a pre-war election. Yet I was also struck by the frequency with which talk of the possibility of renewed violence was used to draw my attention, as a foreigner, to current social problems. For example, when I interviewed local landowners in Rokupr in Kambia district in November, 2002, they complained bitterly that the local section chief was appointing people who were ‘not chiefs’ — e.g. trades union leaders and traders of non-local origin — to the chiefdom council ahead of themselves. They were also aggrieved that ground rent for a locally based government rice research station had not been paid for over 30 years. One man stood up in the meeting to state that while he was now too old to fight, he would not hesitate to send his sons to fight should another conflict 30. Mariane Ferme, The Underneath of Things: Violence, history and the everyday in Sierra Leone (University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 2001), pp. 81–111. 31. Paul Collier, Economic Causes of Civil Conflict and Implications for Policy (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2000); Mkandawire, ‘The terrible toll’. 32. It must be noted, however, that some of the interview materials cited by Richards in his latest article are not in fact excerpts from the transcriptions of focus group consultations but edited quotations from the written observations of consultation facilitators.

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arise. This statement was met with thunderous applause from the floor. Similar grievances over the appointment of chiefs and chiefdom councillors were aired in neighbouring villages, and in one of these meetings a locally born ex-RUF combatant stood up to state that he would kill any village chief imposed upon his people without their consent.33 The reports of the above-noted PCRP consultations provide further indications of impoverished rural Sierra Leoneans’ determination to make an impact upon the deliberations of central government and aid agencies. These consultations were carried out in 75 chiefdoms in southern Sierra Leone between 1999 and 2001. Pilot studies had reported that the return of paramount chiefs was likely to provoke local controversy, not least because it would necessitate the withdrawal of CDF civil administrations. The consultations were therefore aimed at facilitating a new ‘local governance pact’ between chiefs and populace for the post-war era. Teams of professional facilitators were supplied with a set of discussion/activity modules with which to organize the consultation process. The topics covered by these modules included identification of sources of conflict within the chiefdom, discussion of the principles of good governance, discussion of the roles and responsibilities of chiefs and chiefdom functionaries (treasury clerk, chiefdom police, court clerks, etc.), examining the role of the local courts, and devising ‘community action plans’ for local development. A report on each consultation was forwarded to the Governance Reform Secretariat in the Ministry of Presidential Affairs.34 While all the facilitators attempted to implement these modules, local participants are frequently reported as stating that their main reason for attending the consultation was to learn of the benefits on offer and send a message back to government that their situation remained desperate. In one consultation, participants rejected the facilitators’ methodology, demanding instead an opportunity to recount in detail the destructive effects of the recent war on local livelihoods and communities. Even when the modules were successfully implemented, participants continued to emphasize their grievances and local development needs. Chiefs were by no means the sole focus of these grievances. Allegations of corruption among district bureaucrats, of metropolitan elite interference in chiefdom affairs, and of extortion, forced labour, and illegal jurisprudence visited 33. It has not gone unnoticed among rural civilians that ex-combatants were among the first to receive post-war ‘development’ support (i.e. education and training) in the shape of DDR and associated schemes. Many have taken note that fighting, or the threat thereof, captures the attention of aid agencies and can bring rewards. See also Danny Hoffman, ‘The civilian target in Sierra Leone and Liberia: political power, military strategy, and humanitarian intervention’, African Affairs 103, 411 (2004), pp. 211–26. 34. For further information on these consultations and the facilitators’ reports cited in this article, see Richard Fanthorpe, Chiefdom Governance Reform Programme Public Workshops: An analysis of the facilitators’ reports. Research report (DFID, London, 2004).

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upon civilians by CDF personnel, also feature prominently in the reports on these consultations. The point at issue here is that post-war aid intervention has created a moral economy of needs assessment and benefit prioritization that rural people are desperate to influence to their advantage. This engagement encourages the use of grievance as a rhetorical device for calling attention to needs and claiming just desserts, especially where it connects to issues (e.g. ‘governance’ and ‘conflict resolution’) of evident concern to NGOs and other foreign agencies. Taking such discourse out of context may therefore create a misleading impression of grassroots political currents and demand for governance reform. This is not to imply that local grievances are false, but rather to conclude that effective gauging of rural politics and sociality requires analysis of the broad spectrum of rural testimony, not just complaints against chiefs and elders. Chieftaincy politics in the aftermath of civil war Analysis of this broad spectrum of rural opinion reveals considerable public ambivalence towards customary authority rather than outright rejection. The colonial divide between colony and protectorate, and concentration of state and service activity in Freetown, has left chiefs in Sierra Leone in a stronger political position than many of their counterparts in other West African countries. ‘Straddling’ chiefdom and state politics remains the foundation of many political careers in Sierra Leone. ‘Sons of the soil’ who succeed in acquiring wealth and political office at the centre are expected to bring development investment to their home communities and to intervene in other ways in local affairs to the advantage of the groups that sponsored their education and/or supported their election. Indeed, many chiefdoms are riven by internal factional conflict, and the struggle for power at the centre has long been imbricated with struggles over chieftaincy.35 These very strategies have also exposed chiefdom governance to exploitative control from above. For example, an allegation frequently voiced in rural areas is that politicians and bureaucrats of all ranks have been placing clients in positions of authority in the chiefdoms for no better purpose than milking local resources. One paramount chief I interviewed during fieldwork was in the midst of a bitter dispute with the local member of parliament over the latter’s habit of appointing section chiefs without legal authority. Another, newly elected, paramount chief was in the process of sacking the 35. See John Cartwright, Politics in Sierra Leone, 1947-67 (University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1970); Victor Minikin, ‘Indirect political participation in two Sierra Leone chiefdoms’, Journal of Modern African Studies 11, 1 (1973), pp. 129–35; Walter Barrows, Grassroots Politics in an African State: Integration and development in Sierra Leone (Africana Publishing Company, New York, and London, 1976), pp. 143–242; Roger Tangri, ‘Central-local politics in contemporary Sierra Leone’, African Affairs 77, 307 (1978), pp. 165–73.

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many lower ranking chiefs a government-appointed regent chief had recently appointed from among members of his own family. There are also widespread complaints that senior chiefs themselves are appointing business partners and other ‘strangers’ to chiefdom councillorships ahead of the locally born (as noted in the example given above). Similarly multifaceted political struggles also appear in the reports of the PCRP consultations. In one consultation, it was alleged that a deputy minister in Freetown had recently threatened to remove the Senior District Officer (SDO) from his post unless he took action to rectify alleged inequities in the local distribution of food relief. The regent chief informed the facilitators that this deputy minister was a ‘son of the soil’ and member of a chiefly family who was really objecting to the fact that a member of a rival chiefly family had been put in charge of the relief distribution. This rival was subsequently relieved of his duties.36 It was claimed in several other consultations that the people of particular chiefdom sections had adopted a policy of non-cooperation with their paramount or regent chief in protest against alleged misallocation of aid benefits.37 In a further consultation, it was noted that the speaker (a senior chief second only in rank to a paramount chief) had remained behind to liaise with the CDF after the paramount chief had gone into exile. The speaker had helped to organize ‘community labour’, at the behest of the SDO and the CDF regional command, for clearing bush around villages and pathways so as to deny cover for enemy ambushes. He had also participated in a meeting in which the local CDF leadership, after lengthy debate, had agreed to ‘pardon’ the paramount chief for past misdemeanours and sanction his return. As soon as he did so, the paramount chief received a petition from several village chiefs that CDF personnel had ‘manhandled’ their people into complying with the ‘community labour’ order and that the speaker had fined non-compliers for infringing chiefdom bylaws. The paramount chief took the view that the CDF had no authority to enforce ‘community labour’ orders and commanded the speaker to refund the fines from his own pocket. When he refused, he was suspended and a replacement appointed.38 In another case, a regent chief was reported to be in conflict with two section chiefs. The people had welcomed the regent chief’s formal suspension of these section chiefs, but one had won the support of the CDF regional commander, and the SDO was backing the 36. Action For Peace, Consultative Meeting on the Restoration of Paramount Chiefs Project in Dodo Chiefdom, Kenema District, 15th-16th September 2000 (PRU/GRS/MPA, Freetown, 2000). 37. Sections are administrative subdivisions of chiefdoms and may have anything from a few hundred to tens of thousands of inhabitants. Section chiefs occupy the middle tier in the chieftaincy hierarchy above village/town chiefs and below the paramount chief and speaker. 38. Ndegbormei Development Association, Consultative Workshops held in Kori Chiefdom, Moyamba District, Southern Province, May 2000 (PRU/GRS/MPA, Freetown, 2000).

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other. It was alleged in the consultation that these chiefs were still ruling their sections as private fiefdoms, although one had recently seen a son killed in a fracas with local villagers.39 Participants in these consultations made it clear that external political interference in chiefdom affairs had begun long before the war. In five chiefdoms, it was alleged that the pre-war APC regime had deposed a legitimate paramount chief in order to install its own protégé. In each case, the APCbacked chief had since died, and the deposed chief had been re-elected. But in two further chiefdoms, paramount chiefs that had allegedly won office as a direct result of All Peoples Congress (APC) patronage were still in power. Both were deeply unpopular. One had been living outside his chiefdom for many years, and the other was so resigned to his unpopularity that he informed the facilitators that he was ‘in doubt if people would attend this particular meeting as the invitation was sent out under his signature’.40 It was also customary in this particular chiefdom for newly elected paramount chiefs to serve as patrons of Wunde society initiations and collect offerings from the people in that capacity.41 This custom allowed a chief to recoup election expenses, and the offerings were regarded as a measure of popular support for the chief. The facilitators reported that the paramount chief had never once been invited to serve as patron of Wunde initiations in his 25 years in office. His house in the chiefdom had also been burnt to the ground during the war. The cessation of hostilities, and the international intervention for post-war reconstruction, has done nothing to diminish the intensity of chieftaincy politics. Few chiefdom administrations have the capacity for effective revenue collection, not least because the local poll tax was set for years at the wholly uneconomic rate of 500 Leones (£0.15) per annum. However, tax assessment (as opposed to collection) remains a major political instrument. Rules laid down in the colonial era decree that the governing council of each chiefdom should comprise every hereditary chief plus one councillor for each residential cluster of 20 local tax payers. Chiefdom councillors are legally responsible for maintaining social order and may call upon the chiefdom police (a security-cum-bailiff force attached to the local courts) to arrest citizens for non-payment of tax and other offences. Only councillors are eligible to vote in paramount chieftaincy elections and that rule provides rival political factions with every incentive for colluding with district bureaucrats 39. Conflict Management and Peace Building (CMPB), Report on Gorama Mende Chiefdom (Kenema District) Consultation, 10th-11th July 2000 (PRU/GRS/MPA, Freetown, 2000). 40. Conciliation Resources, Report on Baiima (Gbo Chiefdom) Consultation, 25th-26th May, 2000 (PRU/GRS/MPA, Freetown, 2000). 41. Wunde, a secret society specializing in military training, was fundamental to the organization of the pre-colonial Kpa–Mende confederacy. This polity was later divided into several colonial chiefdoms, but Wunde initiation remains a key marker of local identity and belonging in the Kpa–Mende area.

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in inflating tax assessments for their localities. Many of these lists have long been divorced from any measurable realities on the ground.42 In one post-war paramount chieftaincy election I researched in depth, a senior civil servant (a ‘son of the soil’), the SDO, and the regent chief colluded in an attempt to deliver the election to their favoured candidate, the regent chief’s brother. This collusion resulted in a gazetted councillor list that omitted an entire section belonging to a rival faction, the paper creation of a new section replete with the names of ‘ghost’ villages and their councillors, the invention of a chiefly pedigree for the favoured candidate, and the bribery of a legitimate candidate in an effort to persuade him to endorse that invented pedigree. This conspiracy was thwarted at the last step by a grassroots counter-conspiracy in which the recently demobilized CDF played a prominent role. A posse of young, ex-CDF ‘councillors’ elbowed their way into the election meeting and helped to deliver a narrow victory to a rival candidate. The successful candidate’s paternal uncle had bought a chiefly pedigree from a local ruling family 40 years earlier. While that historical exchange was common knowledge, the successful candidate came from a respected local family and was considered by many local people to be far more communitarian than his elite-supported rival. In another recent election, the population of an entire chiefdom section levied a tax upon themselves in order to bribe the local SDO to allocate their section as many additional tax receipt books as possible. Each additional receipt stub was filled in with the name of a new ‘taxpayer’. A revision of the councillor list, ratified by the SDO, allocated this small section an unprecedented majority of councillors in the chiefdom and put it on course to produce the winning candidate in the forthcoming paramount chieftaincy election. However, the local government ministry rejected this list after a powerful member of the opposing faction had supplied it with prima facie evidence of the fraud. An old list was hastily updated for the election proper, but the SDO escaped formal censure, and the attempted fraud was never made public. Rural Sierra Leoneans are fully aware that debureaucratization works to the advantage of the powerful and often call for bureaucratic capacitybuilding as a means of safeguarding their customary rights and properties. Calls voiced in the PCRP consultations include the return of budgetary powers to an expanded and more democratically representative chiefdom committee,43 a return to regular auditing of chiefdom financial accounts, 42. Richard Fanthorpe, Tax Administration and Representative Authority in the Chiefdoms of Sierra Leone. Research Report (DFID, London, 2004). 43. The chiefdom committee is the executive arm of the chiefdom council. According to the Tribal Authorities (Amendment) Act of 1964, the chiefdom committee consists of the paramount chief (chairman), senior speaker (vice-chairman), second speaker (if any), two members from each district council ward elected by the chiefdom councillors, and a literate councillor nominated by the local government minister. Present day chiefdom committees include a women’s leader (Mammy Queen) and youth’s representative.

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public vetting of chiefdom taxpayer and councillor lists, more frequent population censuses and better dissemination of census data, and, above all, clarification of all aspects of the law and its proper enforcement in corruption cases. While these calls suggest a revitalization of grassroots demand for modern government, they also have a politically pragmatic element. For example, participants in the PCRP consultations often pointed out that if an expanded chiefdom committee, rather than the district administration, was made responsible for hiring chiefdom administration staff (Treasury Clerk, Court Chairman and Court Clerk, chiefdom police, etc.), it could ensure that these employees were ‘sons of the soil’ and not ‘strangers’ predisposed to exploit local resources for their own benefit. As one facilitating team notes in its report: What is the greatest concern now to the Chiefdom authorities in Kowa Chiefdom is the Treasury Clerk, who has absconded with all their Chiefdom revenue and could not be traced. [We] strongly recommend that any other Treasury Clerk to be appointed must be an indigene of the Chiefdom, since in matters like this he could be traced or his family held responsible.44

The same sentiments were evident in discussions of paramount chieftaincy elections. While changes in the ratio of councillors to taxpayers and the abolition of hereditary rules of succession were mooted, the general sentiment among participants in the PCRP consultations was that the current system should remain intact but with an expanded franchise. As another report puts it the people are strongly advocating that PCs [i.e. paramount chiefs] be elected by all taxpayers. They argue that Councillors who vote for PCs do not adequately represent the interest of the people. It would be easy to manipulate a few people but not the majority.45

The same pragmatic interests underlie public attitudes towards chiefs. Over the last four years, I have travelled extensively in Sierra Leone and had an opportunity to sample opinion on chieftaincy matters across a broad social spectrum. When asked if the chieftaincy system has a future, informants tend to reply that institutional reforms are urgently needed. But the predominant response is that chiefs still have a vital role to play because they (and by implication not the state) ‘know a person’s right’, i.e. the customary rights and properties that establish de facto local citizenship. Taken together, these responses suggest that donor-supported post-war re-bureaucratization should have started at the chiefdom rather 44. Campaign for Peace and Reconciliation, Consultative Workshop on Paramount Chiefs Restoration in Kowa Chiefdom, Moyamba District, 14th and 15th June 2000 (PRU/GRS/ MPA, Freetown, 2000). 45. CMPB, Report on Ngelehun Badijia Chiefdom Consultation Workshop, Bo District, 3rd-4th June 2000 (PRU/GRS/MPA, Freetown, 2000), p. 6.

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than the district level (especially in respect of revenue collection). Without reform at this level, many among the poor will continue to suffer exploitation. Conclusion: prospects for decentralization The incipient collapse of formal chiefdom administration during the war, together with grievances recently brought to the attention of aid agencies, might appear to suggest that chieftaincy is in terminal decline. However, the cases above show that it remains the focus of an intense struggle for political control over the Sierra Leonean countryside, a struggle in which both the national elite and rural poor are deeply engaged. Indeed, far from rendering society into a ‘plastic state’ from which ‘anything can be moulded’, the recent war merely provided a new range of opportunities for protagonists in that struggle. For the poor, securing political leaders that remain downwardly accountable is an absolute priority. Many continue to find chiefs preferable to elected politicians and bureaucrats because, according to their calculation, chiefs are predisposed to defend the customary property and citizenship regimes that establish their own authority. It is precisely in this context that rural people may continue to answer their chiefs’ calls for ‘community labour’, however grudgingly, because it sets the right moral example. Similar points apply to customary sociality. While testimonial data gathered in the context of post-war reconstruction may highlight the social stresses engendered by rural poverty, they are not necessarily indicative of terminal rupture. Deliberate exploitation of customary rights and dues has long been a source of resentment in rural areas, but poverty also forces people to make use of whatever social and moral leverage they can muster in order to stay in contention for resources. In this context, ‘custom’ may still serve as a defence against a putative realm of politics and sociality in which loyalty and trust are available to the highest bidder. Donors often demand clear-cut recommendations from researchers and consultants as opposed to reflections on local complexity. But if there is any lesson here for the liberal peace project it is that reformist zeal, and ‘one size fits all’ institutional remedies may blind practitioners to the political imperatives that bind the rural poor to non-liberal modes of governance and therefore leave hastily erected ‘democratic’ institutions vulnerable to political capture by the very forces the project seeks to thwart. It is too early to tell if decentralization offers any real solution to Sierra Leone’s rural governance conundrum. Yet it is undoubtedly a far more conservative programme than some donors and practitioners like to imagine. In essence, it is reviving a local government tier whose original design purpose was the administration of external development investment and grafting this tier onto institutions — the

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chiefdoms — that continue to command the primary political affiliations of the rural populace. It is hard to imagine an arrangement less likely to promote a transformation in political culture, and it seems as if the Sierra Leone government and international donors have approached decentralization with very different agendas. A further concern here is that the Sierra Leone government appears to be ignoring the lessons of history. In their second decade of operation, the original district councils began to suffer severe financial problems as central government grants began to dry up, and the precept on chiefdom revenues became increasingly difficult to collect. Corruption scandals and political infighting became commonplace, and de facto management of education, transport, and agricultural extension services was leaking back to central government before the councils went into suspension.46 The funding structure of the new councils is almost identical to that of the old, although the new councils can now set whatever rate of chiefdom poll tax they see fit. When I raised the question of the chiefdoms’ actual capacity to collect revenue with the district administrator (the post-decentralization equivalent of the SDO) and district council chairman of Bo district in August, 2004, they replied that the district council was legally empowered to delegate responsibilities to the chiefdoms, but how the chiefdoms met these responsibilities was a matter for them. Yet, Freetown newspapers are already carrying reports of conflict between chiefdom administrations and district councils over councillors’ demands to exercise personal supervision over chiefdom revenue collection.47 Further reports allege that some chiefdom administrations are levying taxes on local goods and services that duplicate those now collected on behalf of the district councils.48 These problems may disappear when decentralization has had time to bed down, but there is an obvious risk that the new councils will become increasingly reliant upon external funding and that the resolve of international donors to go on protecting their investment in the programme will be severely tested. Furthermore, the old ways of doing politics are already impacting upon the new councils. Nationwide consultations carried out prior to the drafting of the Local Government Act of 2004 reported overwhelming popular demand for non-partisan local elections.49 The SLPP-led government rejected this demand, claiming, somewhat unconvincingly given its overwhelming 46. Roger Tangri, ‘Local government institutions in Sierra Leone, part 1: district councils 1951-71’, Journal of Administration Overseas XVII, 1 (1978), pp. 17–27; ‘Local government institutions in Sierra Leone, part 2: contemporary chiefdom administration’, Journal of Administration Overseas XVII, 2 (1978), pp. 118–28. 47. ‘Controversy looms over local government revenue collection’, Standard Times, 13 August 2004. 48. ‘Bo traders angry over taxation’, Standard Times, 17 August 2004. 49. Government of Sierra Leone, Task Force on Decentralisation and Local Governance, District Level Consultations, Final Report (Government of Sierra Leone, UNDP and DFID, Freetown, 2003).

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parliamentary majority, that opposition parties had forced its hand.50 There followed an intense scramble for party nominations, with many of the losers going on to stand as independents. While a revived APC party had some unexpected successes in the local government elections of May, 2004, notably in Freetown, the SLPP also made inroads into APC strongholds in the north. The chairman of Sierra Leone’s National Electoral Commission resigned in September 2004 following the government’s failure to act on several well-publicized electoral irregularities.51 Several paramount chiefs campaigned actively in the run up to the May 2004 elections, most on behalf of the SLPP. An allegation circulating widely during this period was that the government would depose chiefs who failed to support the ruling party and/or its official candidates and that paramount chiefs would do the same to section chiefs who failed to support their party of choice. In Makeni, the northern provincial headquarters, the APC won control over the town council despite the local paramount chief’s heavy canvassing on behalf of the SLPP. The incoming council chairman issued a public condemnation of the pre-decentralization management of local government finances, in which the paramount chief had had a leading role. The latter retaliated by announcing a policy of non-cooperation with the town council.52 Elsewhere, there have been reports of newly elected district councillors allying with chiefdom political factions in attempts to create spheres of authority that specifically exclude paramount chiefs.53 Councillors currently have the upper hand in these local political struggles due to their anticipated command of substantial donor resources. Already, some senior figures in the old provincial administration are complaining that councillors ‘feel well connected and think their activities must not be questioned’.54 A senior civil servant in the ministry of local government and community development candidly informed me in August 2004 that the decentralization secretariat was having difficulties convincing councillors that WDCs should be elected by local residents, rather than appointed by them personally. Training workshops for councillors and WDC members were continuing in the first half of 2005, but again there is a very real danger that in its present form, decentralization will simply create new platforms for the old politics, and that the rural poor will be locked, as before, into a desperate scramble for elite patronage. 50. Address by his Excellency the President, During the Inauguration of Newly Elected Councillors of the Local Government Councils, 29th June 2004 (http://www.statehousesl.org/speeches/loc-coun-june29.html, 21 March 2005). 51. ‘NEC officers in trouble’, Standard Times, 31 May 2004; ‘NEC boss resigns due to political interference’, Concord Times, 2 September 2004. 52. ‘Paramount Chief Humiliated in Makeni’, Standard Times, Freetown, Sierra Leone, June 1 2004; ‘Standard Point’, Standard Times, Freetown, Sierra Leone, September 10 2004. 53. ‘Tension in Diang chiefdom’, Standard Times, 26 October 2004. 54. ‘Provincial Secretary East says councillors are full of ego’, Concord Times, 30 August 2004.

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Bibliography of books and articles References to other sources, including interviews, archives, newspaper articles, websites and grey publications, are contained in relevant footnotes.

Abdullah, Ibrahim and Muana, Patrick, ‘The Revolutionary United Front of Sierra Leone: a revolt of the lumpenproletariat’, in Christopher Clapham (ed.), African Guerrillas (James Currey, Oxford, 1998), pp. 172–201. Archibald, Steven and Richards, Paul, ‘Converts to human rights? Popular debate about war and justice in rural central Sierra Leone’, Africa 72, 3 (2002), p. 347. Archibald, Steven and Richards, Paul, ‘Seeds and rights: new approaches to agricultural rehabilitation in Sierra Leone’, Disasters 26, 4 (2002), pp. 356–67. Barrows, Walter, Grassroots Politics in an African State: Integration and development in Sierra Leone (Africana Publishing Company, New York, and London, 1976). Cartwright, John, Politics in Sierra Leone, 1947-67 (University of Toronto Press, 1970). Collier, Paul, Economic Causes of Civil Conflict and Implications for Policy (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2000). Dillon, Michael and Reid, Julian, ‘Global liberal governance: biopolitics, security and war’, Millennium Journal of International Studies 30, 1 (2001), pp. 41–66. Duffield, Mark, Global Governance and the New Wars: The merging of development and security (Zed Books, London, 2001). Ferme, Mariane, The Underneath of Things: Violence, history and the everyday in Sierra Leone (University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 2001). Hardin, Kris, The Aesthetics of Action: Continuity and change in a West African town (Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC, 1993). Hoffman, Danny, ‘The civilian target in Sierra Leone and Liberia: political power, military strategy, and humanitarian intervention’, African Affairs 103, 411 (2004), pp. 211–26. Kahn, Joel, ‘Marxist anthropology and segmentary societies: a review of the literature’, in Kahn, Joel and Llobera, Josep (eds), The Anthropology of Pre-Capitalist Societies (Humanities Press, Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1981), pp. 57–88. Kaldor, Mary, New and Old Wars: Organized violence in a global era (Polity Press, Cambridge, 2001). Kandeh, Jimmy, ‘Ransoming the state: elite origins of subaltern terror in Sierra Leone’, Review of African Political Economy 81 (1999), pp. 349–66. Minikin, Victor, ‘Indirect political participation in two Sierra Leone chiefdoms’, Journal of Modern African Studies 11, 1 (1973), pp. 129–35. Mkandawire, Thandika, ‘The terrible toll of post-colonial “rebel movements” in Africa: towards an explanation of violence against the peasantry’, Journal of Modern African Studies 40, 1 (2002), pp. 181–215. Richards, Paul, ‘Rebellion in Liberia and Sierra Leone: a crisis of youth?’, in O.W. Furley (ed.), Conflict in Africa (I.B. Tauris, London, 1995), pp. 134–70. Richards, Paul, ‘To fight or to farm? agrarian dimensions of the Mano River conflicts (Liberia and Sierra Leone)’, African Affairs 104, 417 (2005), pp. 571–90. Richards, Paul, Controversy over Recent West African Wars: An agrarian question? Occasional Paper (Centre of West African Studies, University of Copenhagen, 2004). Richards, Paul, Fighting for the Rainforest: War, youth and resources in Sierra Leone (The International African Institute in association with James Currey, Oxford, 1996).

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Tangri, Roger, ‘Central-local politics in contemporary Sierra Leone’, African Affairs 77, 307 (1978), pp. 165–73. Tangri, Roger, ‘Local government institutions in Sierra Leone, part 1: district councils 1951-71’, Journal of Administration Overseas XVII, 1 (1978), pp. 17–27. Tangri, Roger, ‘Local government institutions in Sierra Leone, part 2: contemporary chiefdom administration’, Journal of Administration Overseas XVII, 2 (1978), pp. 118–28.