Fanthorpe_chiefs and democratic decentralization

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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

ABSTRACTLiberal peace, the explicit merging of international security and developmentpolicy, has arrived fairly late on the scene in Sierra Leone. One of its prim-ary foci is regimes of customary governance and sociality associated withchiefdom administration. Many international agencies consider theseregimes irredeemably oppressive towards the rural poor and a root causeof the recent civil war. While the present government of Sierra Leone remainssupportive of chieftaincy, international donors are supporting a fast-trackdecentralization programme that, it is hoped, will supply a new system ofdemocratic governance to a rural populace already straining against theleash of ‘custom’. This article, drawing upon the author’s recent fieldworkin Sierra Leone, undertakes a critical examination of this policy. It isargued that, popular grievances notwithstanding, chieftaincy is the his-toric focus of struggles for political control over the Sierra Leonean coun-tryside. Both the national elite and the rural poor remain deeply engagedin these struggles, and many among the latter continue to value customaryauthority as a defence against the abuse of bureaucratic power. Fast-track-ing decentralization in the war-ravaged countryside may therefore onlysucceed in shifting the balance of political power away from the poor.

THE PROLIFERATION OF CIVIL CONFLICT IN THE POST-COLD WAR ERA hasprompted the merging of international development and security policy. Afundamental fear in the global North is that ‘new wars’ may create ‘zonesof lawlessness’, open to exploitation by international criminal and terroristorganizations.1 Development is now perceived as having a vital role incombating violent instability. Its explicit aim is to transform societies insuch a way as to avoid future conflict, employing guiding principles that

Richard Fanthorpe ([email protected]) is an independent consultant and visitingresearch fellow at the Department of Anthropology, University of Sussex. This article is anoutput 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’sHigh-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 problematicconsequences of imposing new governance systems upon independentsovereign states, Northern agencies prefer to seek out local partners forchange. 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 opportunityfor intervention:

Although violence can destroy development, a common strand within liberal govern-ance 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 outcomeof violence has a certain utility. In ideological terms, it makes the process of transitioneasier. While the rolling back of development and the deepening of poverty providesthe urgency to intervene, the destruction of culture furnishes the opportunity for aidagencies to establish new and replacement forms of collective identity and socialorganisation.3

Analyses and policy strategies characteristic of liberal peace are gainingcurrency in post-war Sierra Leone. The cessation of hostilities has seen theestablishment of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and aSpecial Court for prosecuting leaders of wartime factions. But a majorfocus 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 everydaygovernance in rural areas. The present government of Sierra Leoneremains supportive of chieftaincy, but many in international circles considerit an irredeemably illiberal institution and, in retrospect, a major causalfactor in the recent civil war. Donors are now supporting a fast-trackdecentralization programme that, they hope, will supply a new system ofdemocratic governance to a rural populace already straining against the leashof ‘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 con-sternation than the reported collusion of notional adversaries, notably thenational army and pro-government Civil Defence Force (CDF) militias onthe one hand and Revolutionary United Front (RUF) insurgents on theother, 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, GlobalGovernance and the New Wars: The merging of development and security (Zed Books, London,2001).3. Duffield, Global Governance, p. 123.

ON THE LIMITS OF LIBERAL PEACE 29

agree that the common social denominator here was a youth cohort mod-ernized by education and exposure to mass consumption, yet thwarted inits projects of self-realization by poverty and political exclusion.4 As theSierra Leone TRC notes in its final report:

The majority of the fighting forces were composed of the young, the disgruntled, theunemployed and the poor. The Commission has identified an astonishing ‘factionalfluidity’ among the different militias and armed groups that prosecuted the war. Bothovertly and covertly, gradually and suddenly, fighters switched sides or establishednew ‘units’. These ‘chameleonic tendencies’ spanned across all factions without excep-tion. The factional fluidity that defined this conflict was drawn into its sharpest focusin the latter stages of the conflict. Many of the early members of the RUF on itsSouthern Front in the Pujehun District reappeared as Kamajors under the banner ofthe CDF after 1997. Theirs was not so much a switching of sides as the identificationof 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, atthe expense of the national good. Government accountability was non-existent. Insti-tutions meant to uphold human rights, such as the courts and civil society, were thor-oughly co-opted by the executive. This context provided ripe breeding grounds foropportunists who unleashed a wave of violence and mayhem that was to sweepthrough the country. Many Sierra Leoneans, particularly the youth, lost all sense ofhope in the future. Youths became easy prey for unscrupulous forces who exploitedtheir disenchantment to wreak vengeance against the ruling elite. The Commissionholds the political elite of successive regimes in the post-independence periodresponsible for creating the conditions for conflict.6

By the close of hostilities, most of these ‘unscrupulous forces’ (includingthe RUF military leadership) had been neutralized by one means or another.A disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration (DDR) scheme, distrib-uting vocational training opportunities attached to small bursaries, succeededin dispersing ex-combatants. There has been no sign of a return to armedconflict 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 forthe Rainforest: War, youth and resources in Sierra Leone (The International African Institute inassociation with James Currey, Oxford, 1996); Ibrahim Abdullah and Patrick Muana, ‘TheRevolutionary United Front of Sierra Leone: a revolt of the lumpenproletariat’, in ChristopherClapham (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 Polit-ical Economy 81 (1999), pp. 349–66; Thandika Makandawire, ‘The terrible toll of post-colo-nial “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 ofSierra 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 thepresent government of Sierra Leone, led by the Sierra Leone People’s Party(SLPP), still represents the old elite. Yet it has welcomed post-war donorinterventions, including the ambitious programme for decentralization.

While Sierra Leone appears to have made rapid strides since the cessa-tion of hostilities, concern remains widespread that the root causes of theconflict have not been addressed. Many international observers persist indrawing attention to the depths of alienation implicit in attacks on civiliansand public property. As a recent consultancy report on Sierra Leone’sNational Recovery Strategy (NRS) notes:

The extensive, wanton damage to government buildings during the war is by any log-ical analysis indefensible, and was part of a systemic attack on all symbols of govern-ance. This raises the question of why such a wholescale attack should have beencontemplated. The destruction is perhaps also symbolic of peoples’ perceptions of thestructures the rebels set out to destroy. As efforts continue to rebuild governance, seriousquestions 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 ofthe solution, would be counterproductive [emphasis original].7

These concerns also reflect the experiences of aid agencies when managingrelief distributions in rural areas at the closing stages of the war. Agenciesencountered a host of local grievances against chiefs and local elders that hadnot featured in international understandings of the conflict up to that point.8

Foremost among these grievances were that chiefs controlled a local judicialsystem regularly handing down fines that were grossly incommensurate withthe offences committed and that they were in the habit of compelling theirsubjects to work for them without payment. Agencies were left in no doubtas to the alleged consequences of these malpractices. For example, the inter-national non-governmental organization (NGO) Conciliation Resources facil-itated a series of public workshops on governance in southern Sierra Leoneat the closing stages of the war. A subsequent field report outlines ruralyouths’ views on the consequences of corrupt justice:

7. Karen Moore, Chris Squire, and Foday MacBailey, Sierra Leone National Recovery StrategyAssessment, Final Report (United Nations Office fot the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs(OCHA), United Nations Mission to Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL) and United Nations Develop-ment 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 PaulRichards, ‘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 warand justice in rural central Sierra Leone’, Africa 72, 3 (2002), pp. 339–67; RichardFanthorpe, ‘Humanitarian aid in post-war Sierra Leone: the politics of moral economy’, inSarah Collinson (ed.), Power, Livelihoods and Conflict: Case studies in political economy analysisfor humanitarian action. Humanitarian Policy Group Report No. 13 (Overseas DevelopmentInstitute, London, 2003), pp. 53–65; Humanitarian Accountability Project (HAP), AgencySelf-Assessment About Transparency and Accountability in Sierra Leone: A HAP survey (Humani-tarian Accountability Project, Geneva, 2002).

ON THE LIMITS OF LIBERAL PEACE 31

This is an age-old problem in the community and is one of the main factors underlyingthe war. These heavy fines cause deep-seated grudges as well [as] force young peopleto flee as they are unable to pay. The chiefs in the community are not paid [by thegovernment]. Therefore, they find their living from conflict and the fines that itproduces. Combining this practice with other malpractices that chiefs enjoy has madechiefs a target for victimisation by armed youth[s], as they themselves feel victimisedby 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 beentargeting them over the years’.10

At first, these rural grievances left international agencies in something of aquandary. Indeed, the above-noted consultations were facilitated for theParamount Chiefs Restoration Programme (PCRP), a project supported bythe United Kingdom Department for International Development (DFID)and aimed, as its title indicates, at the post-war re-establishment of thechieftaincy system.11 During the conflict, chiefs had been targeted alongwith other authority figures, but there had been no indication that belliger-ents reserved a special hostility for them. On the contrary, occupying RUFforces revived chieftaincy as an instrument of civil–military liaison in northernareas late in the war, and Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) juntaleader Johnny Paul Koroma announced on one occasion that top-ranking(paramount) chiefs would serve as assessors in his proposed People’s Revo-lutionary Courts.12 Replacing the ad hoc rural civil administrations set up bybelligerents on both sides with legal authorities (i.e. chiefs) was a post-warpriority for the government of Sierra Leone. Preliminary public consulta-tions in civil society forums in Freetown and refugee camps in Guinea hadreported that ‘chiefs have a vital role to play in restoring stability and thatthere is no other institution capable of replacing them at this stage in theSierra Leone polity’.13

The government of Sierra Leone now acknowledges that corrupt andoppressive 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 thepilot project (PRU/GRS/MPA, Freetown, 2000), p. 3.11. This programme was renamed the Chiefdom Governance Reform Programme in itssecond and final year, although its operational components remained unchanged. See RichardFanthorpe, Alice Jay, and Victor Kalie Kamara, Sierra Leone: A review of the ChiefdomGovernance Reform Programme, incorporating an analysis of chiefdom administration inSierra Leone (DFID, London, 2002).12. Speech by AFRC Chairman Major Johnny Paul Koroma, 30 July 1997 (http://www.sierra-leone.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 restoredignity and prestige to chieftaincy and insists that the pre-war ‘breakdown intraditional order’ was caused by previous (including colonial) governments’‘interference’ in chieftaincy affairs.14 However, an analysis now gaining inter-national currency is that ‘custom’ has become an instrument of oppression inrural Sierra Leone and that grievances against chiefs represent the politicalvoice, hitherto unrecognized, of apparently nihilistic wartime violence.

Paul Richards, a leading proponent of this analysis, has argued that thesegrievances are evidence of an ongoing rural ‘class’ conflict. Citing examplesfrom recent interview material, he notes how deeply rural youths appear toresent chiefs’ calls upon their labour for unpaid ‘community work’ and theircontrol over the customary marriage system.15 Analysing these grievancesethnographically, Richards argues that polygyny facilitates exploitation of thelabour of young people. Daughters of poor families are, to all intents and pur-poses, sold in marriage to wealthy village polygynists. Young men, accord-ingly, become dependent on these wealthy families for access to marriagepartners and are forced to pay a heavy ‘bride price’ for that privilege. Aftermarriage they are subjected to further customary demands reflecting their sta-tus as sons-in-law (‘bride service’). Those seeking to avoid such entrapmentfind themselves hauled before the local courts and handed down fines thatcan 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 exploitationwith special reference to the Mano river region. Here, a turbulent nineteenthcentury had seen local ‘warlords’ competing for control over trade routesand accumulating dependent populations of clients and slaves. Colonial‘indirect rule’, Richards argues, furnished these warlords with an oppor-tunity to reinvent themselves as a chiefly land-owning class and maintain ahegemony over the descendants of their former slaves and subordinatesthrough tributary demands, agricultural corvées, polygyny, and other‘customary’ claims upon their labour and resources. Putting these strandsof 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 stronglyreflected 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 ofWest 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 modeldefined slavery as a condition of unrelieved domestic subordination: while most youths wouldacquire ‘elder’ status in the course of time, that transition could be delayed indefinitely if theywere denied access to marriageable women. See Joel Kahn, ‘Marxist anthropology andsegmentary 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 againstcustomary authority:

Regular fining of young cultivators keeps them in poverty and dependency. Chiefsand landowners thereby accumulate surplus labour and send their own children totown for education. The children of the poor remain in the village, providing ‘com-munity labour’ for roads and other basic amenities mainly benefiting traders and thechiefly classes. The more docile among the descendants of the former farm slavescontinue to work the land for subsistence returns. Others, less willing to queue in linefor increasingly uncertain patrimonial scraps, default on their fines, are hounded intovagrancy and end up as protagonists of war.17

For Richards, the stark conclusion emerging here is that the failings ofchiefdom-level governance were a major cause of the war and that furtherconflict in Sierra Leone is inevitable without institutional transformation atthe grassroots.18 Other analyses have taken up the same message. Onecommentator goes so far as to suggest that post-conflict restoration ofchiefs is tantamount to ‘re-creating the pre-conditions for war’ in SierraLeone,19 while others conclude that fully equitable, participatory, andaccountable governance is unlikely to emerge in rural Sierra Leone untilpeople ‘change from being subjects [of chiefs] to citizens with rights andresponsibilities’.20 The above-noted NRS report turns this stark assess-ment into a specific plea for liberal peace in Sierra Leone.

The post independence history of Sierra Leone has witnessed violent upheavals sopowerful that they rocked many existing social institutions, toppling some and precip-itating wild adjustments in others. The problem of disintegration of social institutionsdoes not dictate its own solution i.e. the blueprint for the new institutional arrange-ments. Such catastrophic changes prime society for major institutional transformation.Society is in a plastic state, like half melted wax out of which anything can bemoulded. The war has provided an opportunity for Sierra Leoneans to rethink funda-mental issues relating to their national dynamics and identity. This should include therebuilding of sustainable institutions as part of a new foundation responsive to theparticular conditions and needs of the people they are intended to serve. The lessonsfrom the war and this recovery effort would be valueless without fundamentalquestions about what in the national system of doing business may have contributedto the war starting in the first place and its inherent destructiveness. The recovery anddevelopment phase must guard against merely recreating institutions and focus onfundamentally 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: Prospectsfor community driven development in post-conflict Sierra Leone. Social Development PaperNo. 12 (World Bank, Washington DC, 2004); Richards, Controversy, p. 21.19. Joseph Hanlon, ‘Is the international community helping to recreate the pre-conditionsfor 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 SierraLeone: Rebuilding failed states (Dakar, Brussels, 2004), pp. 23–4.20. Alice Jay and Momoh Taziff Koroma, From ‘Crying and Clientelism to Rights andResponsibilities (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 attentionon the need for institutional reforms. For many donors, the chiefdoms arealready beyond redemption. As a DFID discussion document notes:

There appears to be very little support or interest in developing the chiefdom systemamong other potential donors. This is partly because ‘the British are doing it’ andmainly because negative views of the chiefdom system prevail. The Americans, forexample, are said to believe in total abolition. Several agencies (the [World] Bank,UNDP [United Nations Development Programme] and EU [European Union]) arekeen 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 ofdevolving central government functions to elected local authorities. Decentrali-zation in Sierra Leone involves the reconstruction of an entire tier of localgovernment that disappeared long before the start of the recent conflict. Actualdevolution 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 motionas a means of reincorporating the rural poor into the Sierra Leonean bodypolitic. 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 antago-nism between a large section of the population who were marginalized from the polit-ical process and deprived of social services and economic development opportunities,and those who controlled resources through power and corruption. The Kabbahgovernment has chosen a route of political decentralization to open up the politicalspace and improve inclusiveness…By establishing democratically elected localcouncils to replace the existing Management Committees appointed by the President,the Government hopes to create a participatory local governance structure wherepeople (including previously marginalized groups) can actively participate in thedecision-making process at the local level.23

The World Bank is also a subscriber to the view that Sierra Leone’sunsettled post-war state presents a window of opportunity for fast-trackingdecentralization before the forces of illiberalism have a chance to regroup:

The experience of South Africa and Indonesia seems to demonstrate that a time of majorpolitical change is a good one at which to promote decentralization. South Africa’sdecentralization governance was associated with the constitutional transformation fromapartheid; Indonesia’s with the weak support for the post-Soeharto government of Habibie

22. Garth Glentworth, Non-Project Concept Note: Sierra Leone Chiefdom GovernanceReform Programme phase 2 (DFID, London, 2003).23. World Bank, Project Appraisal Document on a Proposed Grant in the Amount of SDR16.8 Million (USD 25.12 Million Equivalent) to the Government of Sierra Leone for anInstitutional 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 ajuncture. Settled social, political and bureaucratic structures can more easily capture apolicy [that is] against their interests…If there is a strong belief that decentralization willimprove the access of the poor to services, then it may be best to move fairly aggressivelyand quickly, to set in motion a process that will be difficult to reverse.24

A further expectation of decentralization, which international staff tendto express more readily in conversation than in print, is that it will bothcapture and catalyse modernizing ideas about citizenship and socialityalready emerging at the grassroots.

What decentralization means for the future of the chiefdoms is yet to bedetermined. At present, the programme is reviving 12 district and five urbancouncils in the provinces. Senior figures in the Sierra Leone government takethe view that the new councils’ main purpose is the administration of post-warreconstruction and development, while the 149 chiefdoms are still needed toperform essential local functions, notably the administration of customary landrights, revenue collection, and the maintenance of law and order. The LocalGovernment Act of 2004 reconfirms the chiefdoms’ status as the basic institu-tional tier to which the new councils may delegate functions.25 This division offunctions recapitulates that obtaining between the chiefdoms and the originaldistrict councils, suspended in 1972. The original councils were incorporatedin 1950 after the colonial administration had reached the conclusion that thechiefdoms were too small and inefficiently run to manage the overseas devel-opment investment expected to come on stream after the Second WorldWar.26 The funding structure of the new councils also replicates the oldarrangements. The Sierra Leone government resisted pressure from donors toreserve a fixed proportion of central state revenue for transfer to local govern-ment, with the result that the new councils will be financed partially throughdevelopment grants and partially from a precept on local taxes collected by thechiefdoms. Formal review of the chiefdoms’ capacity to perform this (orindeed any other) delegated function has yet to be undertaken.

The provisions of the new Act would appear to make the post-war rehabil-itation of chiefdom-level institutional capacity an integral component ofdecentralization. However, the chiefdoms remain beyond the pale as far asmany international agencies are concerned.27 Indeed, a grants managerworking for an international NGO operating in southeastern Sierra Leoneinformed 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 Depart-ment, Freetown, 2004), para 28.26. H.W. Davidson, Report on the Functions and Finances of District Councils in SierraLeone (Government Printer, Freetown, 1953).27. DFID is committed to further support for chiefdom administration but has yet to decideon a specific programme. Other agencies have also supported piecemeal reconstruction oflocal court enclosures (barris) and chiefdom administration offices.

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to fund projects unless they are implemented in partnership with districtcouncil Ward Development Committees (WDCs). According to my informant,village and chiefdom development committees are no longer accepted asimplementing partners because they are generally considered to be ‘corrupt’.

There are currently 382 local government wards in the provinces, all but 15belonging to the district councils. According to the Local Government Act of2004, WDCs should comprise the paramount chief, all councillors elected forthat ward, plus no more than ten ordinary members (of whom at least fivemust be women) elected by ward residents at a public meeting. The primaryfunctions of the WDCs, according to the Act, are to liaise between the localcouncils and the public and to ‘mobilise local residents for the implementa-tion of self-help and development projects’. Since the World Bank and othermajor donors hope to shift from financing discrete programmes to directbudgetary support as soon as decentralization is completed, the WDCs couldbecome conduits for substantial development investment. Off the record,some international agency staff are now predicting the final demise of chief-dom 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 inSierra Leone gauges rural sociality and politics accurately is open to ques-tion. Historical and colonial ethnographic sources are strongly emphasizedin Richards’s above-noted analysis, and this may create a potentially mis-leading impression of present-day politics and sociality in rural areas. Forexample, while chiefs’ calls for ‘community labour’ may be resented bysome, many of these activities — e.g. clearing overgrown bush paths thatmay harbour poisonous snakes, maintaining footbridges, and refurbishingschool buildings — clearly benefit the community as a whole and not justlocal elites. These activities are hardly comparable with the agriculturalcorvées of the early colonial era.28

Furthermore, many historical techniques for control over labour andmarriage are simply not possible under modern conditions. Not even themost powerful rural patriarchs can prevent disgruntled youth of both sexesfrom leaving to try their luck among family, friends, and associates whohave already migrated to the towns and diamond-mining areas. Recent

28. Some recent commentators, prompted by Richards’s analysis, have claimed that thecolonial Forced Labour Ordinance of 1932 is still in force. The central provision of this Ordi-nance was to guarantee the right of chiefs to call upon their subjects to work on their farms fora set number of days each year. In fact, this legislation was superseded by the ChiefdomTreasuries Ordinance of 1937 and formally repealed in 1956. See Richards et al., Social Cap-ital 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 inSierra Leone?’, p. 4. See also Sierra Leone, Legislative Council Debates, Volume VIII, Session1955-56 (Government Printing Department, Freetown, Sierra Leone, 1958).

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anthropological studies do indeed suggest that customary rights and obligationsattached to marriage have become a source of contention in rural SierraLeone; but the social context they describe is complex and multifaceted.For example, Kris Hardin’s study of a small town in the Kono diamond-mining area in the 1980s reports that most couples were cohabiting withoutcompleting bridewealth payments. In the old rural milieu, men had seenwives and children as economic investments, but social priorities hadchanged in the face of new opportunities for education, cash-cropping, andwage employment. Husbands were becoming increasingly resentful of theircustomary obligations to their wives’ families, especially as demands nowhad a substantial cash element. Even so, changing social attitudes had notresulted in the abandonment of customary marriage as much as its politici-zation. 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 andyoung women, said they were hesitant to enter into marriages. Young men were afraidthat they would be unable to meet the expectations of a wife and her family. Many feltthat the expectations required of them were too high and that trying to meet themwould lessen their ability to advance. Several young men spoke of trying to establish a‘foundation’ before marriage, referring to a pool of resources, accumulated eitherthrough wage labour or inheritance, that would allow them to continue to accumulateenough resources to meet marital expectations. On the other hand, young womengenerally felt that men were disrespectful to them and, moreover, tried to take advantageof them by expecting their labour and children but were unwilling to support them orbe respectful to their families. Such cautionary attitudes may signal only a delay inentering marriages but, because many of the young men who find themselves inprecarious positions with their families become migrant workers, it is likely that a cer-tain percentage of them will never marry, although they may father children or marrynon-Kono women and thus have a different set of responsibilities.29

Working in an agrarian community in southern Sierra Leonean duringthe same period, Mariane Ferme also observes how the combined effects ofpoverty and perennial shortages of farm labour have added a strongelement of ruthlessness to the pursuit of putative rights and obligations inmarriage. Many husbands appeared to Ferme to be in constant anxietythat any decline in their economic fortunes would prompt their wives toleave in search of better options, often with the active encouragement of natalfamilies who would use the bridewealth received from the new husband topay off the old. Young male ‘strangers’ choosing to settle in the villagewere therefore viewed with ambivalence. While their labour was greatlyvalued, they were also seen as potential threats to the stability of localmarriages. Village elders’ time-honoured response was to assign theseyoung ‘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 socialobligations. Even so, one young man observed by Ferme had managed toresist such strategies of incorporation for several years, apparently movingfrom patron to patron at will.30

There is no support in either study for Richards’s claim that chiefs andelders have been monopolizing the sexual services of young women and thatdiscrepancy invites closer scrutiny of the context from which Richards’stestimonial data originated. Some commentators argue that explanationsoffered by ex-combatants for their involvement in internal conflicts thathave seen widespread looting and attacks on civilians are always likely to behollow and self-serving.31 Yet, the striking feature of the testimonial datacited by Richards is that ex-RUF fighters, non-combatant youth, ex-CDFfighters, and even village elders all appear to be emphasizing the iniquitiesof traditional governance and jurisprudence.32 These testimonies were givenduring a period of intensive engagement between rural Sierra Leoneans andagencies involved in post-war reconstruction. Since the cessation of hostilities,countless rural consultations have been held for the purposes of needsassessment, identification of project beneficiaries, policy dissemination andfeedback, civic education (‘sensitization’), and conflict resolution.

Donor-beneficiary engagement has generated its own forms of discourseand politics. During my own recent research in northern Sierra Leone, Iheard a great deal of unprompted talk about the war and the moral ills thathelped to provoke it. Sometimes, this talk evoked memories of specificevents during the RUF occupation: e.g. the murder of a local trader notoriousfor turning every fuel shortage into his own profit or the destruction of thehouses of party political activists who had rampaged across the propertiesof defeated rivals during a pre-war election. Yet I was also struck by thefrequency with which talk of the possibility of renewed violence was usedto draw my attention, as a foreigner, to current social problems. Forexample, when I interviewed local landowners in Rokupr in Kambiadistrict in November, 2002, they complained bitterly that the local sectionchief was appointing people who were ‘not chiefs’ — e.g. trades unionleaders and traders of non-local origin — to the chiefdom council ahead ofthemselves. They were also aggrieved that ground rent for a locally basedgovernment rice research station had not been paid for over 30 years. Oneman stood up in the meeting to state that while he was now too old tofight, 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 SierraLeone (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 hislatest article are not in fact excerpts from the transcriptions of focus group consultations butedited 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 councillorswere aired in neighbouring villages, and in one of these meetings a locallyborn ex-RUF combatant stood up to state that he would kill any villagechief imposed upon his people without their consent.33

The reports of the above-noted PCRP consultations provide furtherindications of impoverished rural Sierra Leoneans’ determination to makean impact upon the deliberations of central government and aid agencies.These consultations were carried out in 75 chiefdoms in southern SierraLeone between 1999 and 2001. Pilot studies had reported that the returnof paramount chiefs was likely to provoke local controversy, not leastbecause it would necessitate the withdrawal of CDF civil administrations.The consultations were therefore aimed at facilitating a new ‘local governancepact’ between chiefs and populace for the post-war era. Teams of profes-sional facilitators were supplied with a set of discussion/activity moduleswith which to organize the consultation process. The topics covered bythese modules included identification of sources of conflict within thechiefdom, discussion of the principles of good governance, discussion ofthe roles and responsibilities of chiefs and chiefdom functionaries (treasuryclerk, chiefdom police, court clerks, etc.), examining the role of the localcourts, and devising ‘community action plans’ for local development. Areport on each consultation was forwarded to the Governance ReformSecretariat in the Ministry of Presidential Affairs.34

While all the facilitators attempted to implement these modules, localparticipants are frequently reported as stating that their main reason forattending the consultation was to learn of the benefits on offer and send amessage back to government that their situation remained desperate. Inone consultation, participants rejected the facilitators’ methodology,demanding instead an opportunity to recount in detail the destructiveeffects of the recent war on local livelihoods and communities. Even whenthe modules were successfully implemented, participants continued toemphasize their grievances and local development needs. Chiefs were byno means the sole focus of these grievances. Allegations of corruptionamong district bureaucrats, of metropolitan elite interference in chiefdomaffairs, and of extortion, forced labour, and illegal jurisprudence visited

33. It has not gone unnoticed among rural civilians that ex-combatants were among the firstto receive post-war ‘development’ support (i.e. education and training) in the shape of DDRand associated schemes. Many have taken note that fighting, or the threat thereof, capturesthe attention of aid agencies and can bring rewards. See also Danny Hoffman, ‘The civiliantarget in Sierra Leone and Liberia: political power, military strategy, and humanitarian inter-vention’, African Affairs 103, 411 (2004), pp. 211–26.34. For further information on these consultations and the facilitators’ reports cited in thisarticle, see Richard Fanthorpe, Chiefdom Governance Reform Programme Public Work-shops: 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 reportson these consultations.

The point at issue here is that post-war aid intervention has created amoral economy of needs assessment and benefit prioritization that ruralpeople are desperate to influence to their advantage. This engagementencourages the use of grievance as a rhetorical device for calling attentionto needs and claiming just desserts, especially where it connects to issues(e.g. ‘governance’ and ‘conflict resolution’) of evident concern to NGOsand other foreign agencies. Taking such discourse out of context maytherefore create a misleading impression of grassroots political currentsand demand for governance reform. This is not to imply that local griev-ances are false, but rather to conclude that effective gauging of rural politicsand 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 pub-lic ambivalence towards customary authority rather than outright rejection.The colonial divide between colony and protectorate, and concentration ofstate and service activity in Freetown, has left chiefs in Sierra Leone in astronger political position than many of their counterparts in other WestAfrican countries. ‘Straddling’ chiefdom and state politics remains thefoundation of many political careers in Sierra Leone. ‘Sons of the soil’ whosucceed in acquiring wealth and political office at the centre are expected tobring development investment to their home communities and to intervenein other ways in local affairs to the advantage of the groups that sponsoredtheir education and/or supported their election. Indeed, many chiefdomsare riven by internal factional conflict, and the struggle for power at thecentre has long been imbricated with struggles over chieftaincy.35

These very strategies have also exposed chiefdom governance to exploitativecontrol from above. For example, an allegation frequently voiced in ruralareas is that politicians and bureaucrats of all ranks have been placingclients in positions of authority in the chiefdoms for no better purpose thanmilking local resources. One paramount chief I interviewed during fieldworkwas in the midst of a bitter dispute with the local member of parliamentover 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 chief-doms’, Journal of Modern African Studies 11, 1 (1973), pp. 129–35; Walter Barrows, GrassrootsPolitics in an African State: Integration and development in Sierra Leone (Africana PublishingCompany, New York, and London, 1976), pp. 143–242; Roger Tangri, ‘Central-local polit-ics 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 hadrecently appointed from among members of his own family. There are alsowidespread complaints that senior chiefs themselves are appointing busi-ness partners and other ‘strangers’ to chiefdom councillorships ahead ofthe locally born (as noted in the example given above).

Similarly multifaceted political struggles also appear in the reports of thePCRP consultations. In one consultation, it was alleged that a deputy ministerin Freetown had recently threatened to remove the Senior District Officer(SDO) from his post unless he took action to rectify alleged inequities inthe local distribution of food relief. The regent chief informed the facilitatorsthat this deputy minister was a ‘son of the soil’ and member of a chieflyfamily who was really objecting to the fact that a member of a rival chieflyfamily had been put in charge of the relief distribution. This rival wassubsequently relieved of his duties.36 It was claimed in several otherconsultations that the people of particular chiefdom sections had adopted apolicy of non-cooperation with their paramount or regent chief in protestagainst alleged misallocation of aid benefits.37

In a further consultation, it was noted that the speaker (a senior chiefsecond only in rank to a paramount chief) had remained behind to liaisewith the CDF after the paramount chief had gone into exile. The speakerhad helped to organize ‘community labour’, at the behest of the SDO andthe CDF regional command, for clearing bush around villages and pathwaysso as to deny cover for enemy ambushes. He had also participated in ameeting in which the local CDF leadership, after lengthy debate, hadagreed to ‘pardon’ the paramount chief for past misdemeanours and sanctionhis return. As soon as he did so, the paramount chief received a petitionfrom several village chiefs that CDF personnel had ‘manhandled’ theirpeople into complying with the ‘community labour’ order and that thespeaker had fined non-compliers for infringing chiefdom bylaws. The para-mount chief took the view that the CDF had no authority to enforce‘community labour’ orders and commanded the speaker to refund the finesfrom his own pocket. When he refused, he was suspended and a replace-ment appointed.38 In another case, a regent chief was reported to be inconflict with two section chiefs. The people had welcomed the regentchief’s formal suspension of these section chiefs, but one had won thesupport of the CDF regional commander, and the SDO was backing the

36. Action For Peace, Consultative Meeting on the Restoration of Paramount ChiefsProject 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 fewhundred to tens of thousands of inhabitants. Section chiefs occupy the middle tier in thechieftaincy 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 rulingtheir sections as private fiefdoms, although one had recently seen a sonkilled in a fracas with local villagers.39

Participants in these consultations made it clear that external politicalinterference in chiefdom affairs had begun long before the war. In five chief-doms, it was alleged that the pre-war APC regime had deposed a legitimateparamount chief in order to install its own protégé. In each case, the APC-backed chief had since died, and the deposed chief had been re-elected. Butin two further chiefdoms, paramount chiefs that had allegedly won office as adirect result of All Peoples Congress (APC) patronage were still in power. Bothwere deeply unpopular. One had been living outside his chiefdom for manyyears, and the other was so resigned to his unpopularity that he informed thefacilitators that he was ‘in doubt if people would attend this particular meet-ing as the invitation was sent out under his signature’.40 It was also custom-ary in this particular chiefdom for newly elected paramount chiefs to serve aspatrons of Wunde society initiations and collect offerings from the people inthat capacity.41 This custom allowed a chief to recoup election expenses, andthe offerings were regarded as a measure of popular support for the chief.The facilitators reported that the paramount chief had never once beeninvited to serve as patron of Wunde initiations in his 25 years in office. Hishouse in the chiefdom had also been burnt to the ground during the war.

The cessation of hostilities, and the international intervention for post-warreconstruction, has done nothing to diminish the intensity of chieftaincypolitics. Few chiefdom administrations have the capacity for effectiverevenue collection, not least because the local poll tax was set for years at thewholly uneconomic rate of 500 Leones (£0.15) per annum. However, taxassessment (as opposed to collection) remains a major political instrument.Rules laid down in the colonial era decree that the governing council of eachchiefdom should comprise every hereditary chief plus one councillor foreach residential cluster of 20 local tax payers. Chiefdom councillors arelegally responsible for maintaining social order and may call upon the chiefdompolice (a security-cum-bailiff force attached to the local courts) to arrestcitizens for non-payment of tax and other offences. Only councillors areeligible to vote in paramount chieftaincy elections and that rule providesrival political factions with every incentive for colluding with district bureaucrats

39. Conflict Management and Peace Building (CMPB), Report on Gorama Mende Chief-dom (Kenema District) Consultation, 10th-11th July 2000 (PRU/GRS/MPA, Freetown,2000).40. Conciliation Resources, Report on Baiima (Gbo Chiefdom) Consultation, 25th-26thMay, 2000 (PRU/GRS/MPA, Freetown, 2000).41. Wunde, a secret society specializing in military training, was fundamental to the organi-zation of the pre-colonial Kpa–Mende confederacy. This polity was later divided into severalcolonial chiefdoms, but Wunde initiation remains a key marker of local identity and belongingin the Kpa–Mende area.

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in inflating tax assessments for their localities. Many of these lists have longbeen divorced from any measurable realities on the ground.42

In one post-war paramount chieftaincy election I researched in depth, asenior civil servant (a ‘son of the soil’), the SDO, and the regent chiefcolluded in an attempt to deliver the election to their favoured candidate,the regent chief’s brother. This collusion resulted in a gazetted councillorlist that omitted an entire section belonging to a rival faction, the papercreation of a new section replete with the names of ‘ghost’ villages and theircouncillors, the invention of a chiefly pedigree for the favoured candidate,and the bribery of a legitimate candidate in an effort to persuade him toendorse that invented pedigree. This conspiracy was thwarted at the laststep by a grassroots counter-conspiracy in which the recently demobilizedCDF played a prominent role. A posse of young, ex-CDF ‘councillors’elbowed their way into the election meeting and helped to deliver a narrowvictory to a rival candidate. The successful candidate’s paternal uncle hadbought a chiefly pedigree from a local ruling family 40 years earlier. Whilethat historical exchange was common knowledge, the successful candidatecame from a respected local family and was considered by many localpeople to be far more communitarian than his elite-supported rival.

In another recent election, the population of an entire chiefdom section lev-ied a tax upon themselves in order to bribe the local SDO to allocate their sec-tion as many additional tax receipt books as possible. Each additional receiptstub was filled in with the name of a new ‘taxpayer’. A revision of the council-lor list, ratified by the SDO, allocated this small section an unprecedentedmajority of councillors in the chiefdom and put it on course to produce thewinning candidate in the forthcoming paramount chieftaincy election. How-ever, the local government ministry rejected this list after a powerful memberof 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 escapedformal censure, and the attempted fraud was never made public.

Rural Sierra Leoneans are fully aware that debureaucratization works tothe advantage of the powerful and often call for bureaucratic capacity-building as a means of safeguarding their customary rights and properties.Calls voiced in the PCRP consultations include the return of budgetarypowers to an expanded and more democratically representative chiefdomcommittee,43 a return to regular auditing of chiefdom financial accounts,

42. Richard Fanthorpe, Tax Administration and Representative Authority in the Chiefdomsof Sierra Leone. Research Report (DFID, London, 2004).43. The chiefdom committee is the executive arm of the chiefdom council. According to theTribal Authorities (Amendment) Act of 1964, the chiefdom committee consists of theparamount chief (chairman), senior speaker (vice-chairman), second speaker (if any), twomembers from each district council ward elected by the chiefdom councillors, and a literatecouncillor nominated by the local government minister. Present day chiefdom committeesinclude a women’s leader (Mammy Queen) and youth’s representative.

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public vetting of chiefdom taxpayer and councillor lists, more frequentpopulation censuses and better dissemination of census data, and, aboveall, clarification of all aspects of the law and its proper enforcement incorruption cases. While these calls suggest a revitalization of grassrootsdemand for modern government, they also have a politically pragmaticelement. For example, participants in the PCRP consultations often pointedout that if an expanded chiefdom committee, rather than the districtadministration, was made responsible for hiring chiefdom administrationstaff (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. Asone facilitating team notes in its report:

What is the greatest concern now to the Chiefdom authorities in Kowa Chiefdom isthe Treasury Clerk, who has absconded with all their Chiefdom revenue and couldnot be traced. [We] strongly recommend that any other Treasury Clerk to beappointed must be an indigene of the Chiefdom, since in matters like this he could betraced or his family held responsible.44

The same sentiments were evident in discussions of paramount chief-taincy elections. While changes in the ratio of councillors to taxpayers andthe abolition of hereditary rules of succession were mooted, the generalsentiment among participants in the PCRP consultations was that thecurrent system should remain intact but with an expanded franchise. Asanother report puts it

the people are strongly advocating that PCs [i.e. paramount chiefs] be elected by alltaxpayers. They argue that Councillors who vote for PCs do not adequately representthe interest of the people. It would be easy to manipulate a few people but not themajority.45

The same pragmatic interests underlie public attitudes towards chiefs.Over the last four years, I have travelled extensively in Sierra Leone andhad an opportunity to sample opinion on chieftaincy matters across abroad social spectrum. When asked if the chieftaincy system has a future,informants tend to reply that institutional reforms are urgently needed. Butthe predominant response is that chiefs still have a vital role to playbecause they (and by implication not the state) ‘know a person’s right’,i.e. the customary rights and properties that establish de facto localcitizenship. Taken together, these responses suggest that donor-supportedpost-war re-bureaucratization should have started at the chiefdom rather

44. Campaign for Peace and Reconciliation, Consultative Workshop on Paramount ChiefsRestoration 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.

ON THE LIMITS OF LIBERAL PEACE 45

than the district level (especially in respect of revenue collection).Without reform at this level, many among the poor will continue to sufferexploitation.

Conclusion: prospects for decentralization

The incipient collapse of formal chiefdom administration during thewar, together with grievances recently brought to the attention of aid agen-cies, might appear to suggest that chieftaincy is in terminal decline. How-ever, the cases above show that it remains the focus of an intense strugglefor political control over the Sierra Leonean countryside, a struggle inwhich both the national elite and rural poor are deeply engaged. Indeed,far from rendering society into a ‘plastic state’ from which ‘anything can bemoulded’, the recent war merely provided a new range of opportunities forprotagonists in that struggle. For the poor, securing political leaders thatremain downwardly accountable is an absolute priority. Many continue tofind chiefs preferable to elected politicians and bureaucrats because,according to their calculation, chiefs are predisposed to defend the customaryproperty and citizenship regimes that establish their own authority. It isprecisely in this context that rural people may continue to answer theirchiefs’ calls for ‘community labour’, however grudgingly, because it setsthe right moral example.

Similar points apply to customary sociality. While testimonial data gatheredin the context of post-war reconstruction may highlight the social stressesengendered by rural poverty, they are not necessarily indicative of terminalrupture. Deliberate exploitation of customary rights and dues has longbeen a source of resentment in rural areas, but poverty also forces peopleto make use of whatever social and moral leverage they can muster in orderto stay in contention for resources. In this context, ‘custom’ may still serveas a defence against a putative realm of politics and sociality in whichloyalty and trust are available to the highest bidder.

Donors often demand clear-cut recommendations from researchers andconsultants as opposed to reflections on local complexity. But if there is anylesson here for the liberal peace project it is that reformist zeal, and ‘one size fitsall’ institutional remedies may blind practitioners to the political imperativesthat bind the rural poor to non-liberal modes of governance and thereforeleave hastily erected ‘democratic’ institutions vulnerable to political captureby the very forces the project seeks to thwart. It is too early to tell if decen-tralization offers any real solution to Sierra Leone’s rural governanceconundrum. Yet it is undoubtedly a far more conservative programme thansome donors and practitioners like to imagine. In essence, it is reviving alocal government tier whose original design purpose was the administrationof external development investment and grafting this tier onto institutions — the

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chiefdoms — that continue to command the primary political affiliations ofthe rural populace. It is hard to imagine an arrangement less likely to pro-mote a transformation in political culture, and it seems as if the SierraLeone government and international donors have approached decentraliza-tion with very different agendas.

A further concern here is that the Sierra Leone government appears tobe ignoring the lessons of history. In their second decade of operation, theoriginal district councils began to suffer severe financial problems as centralgovernment grants began to dry up, and the precept on chiefdom revenuesbecame increasingly difficult to collect. Corruption scandals and politicalinfighting became commonplace, and de facto management of education,transport, and agricultural extension services was leaking back to centralgovernment before the councils went into suspension.46 The funding structureof the new councils is almost identical to that of the old, although the newcouncils can now set whatever rate of chiefdom poll tax they see fit. WhenI raised the question of the chiefdoms’ actual capacity to collect revenuewith the district administrator (the post-decentralization equivalent of theSDO) and district council chairman of Bo district in August, 2004, theyreplied that the district council was legally empowered to delegate respon-sibilities to the chiefdoms, but how the chiefdoms met these responsibilitieswas a matter for them. Yet, Freetown newspapers are already carryingreports of conflict between chiefdom administrations and district councilsover councillors’ demands to exercise personal supervision over chiefdomrevenue collection.47 Further reports allege that some chiefdom adminis-trations are levying taxes on local goods and services that duplicate thosenow collected on behalf of the district councils.48 These problems maydisappear when decentralization has had time to bed down, but there is anobvious risk that the new councils will become increasingly reliant uponexternal funding and that the resolve of international donors to go onprotecting their investment in the programme will be severely tested.

Furthermore, the old ways of doing politics are already impacting upon thenew councils. Nationwide consultations carried out prior to the drafting ofthe Local Government Act of 2004 reported overwhelming popular demandfor non-partisan local elections.49 The SLPP-led government rejectedthis demand, claiming, somewhat unconvincingly given its overwhelming

46. Roger Tangri, ‘Local government institutions in Sierra Leone, part 1: district councils1951-71’, Journal of Administration Overseas XVII, 1 (1978), pp. 17–27; ‘Local governmentinstitutions in Sierra Leone, part 2: contemporary chiefdom administration’, Journal ofAdministration 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 ofthe losers going on to stand as independents. While a revived APC partyhad some unexpected successes in the local government elections of May,2004, notably in Freetown, the SLPP also made inroads into APC strong-holds in the north. The chairman of Sierra Leone’s National ElectoralCommission resigned in September 2004 following the government’s failureto act on several well-publicized electoral irregularities.51

Several paramount chiefs campaigned actively in the run up to the May2004 elections, most on behalf of the SLPP. An allegation circulatingwidely during this period was that the government would depose chiefs whofailed to support the ruling party and/or its official candidates and that para-mount chiefs would do the same to section chiefs who failed to supporttheir party of choice. In Makeni, the northern provincial headquarters, theAPC won control over the town council despite the local paramount chief’sheavy canvassing on behalf of the SLPP. The incoming council chairmanissued a public condemnation of the pre-decentralization management oflocal government finances, in which the paramount chief had had a leadingrole. The latter retaliated by announcing a policy of non-cooperation withthe town council.52 Elsewhere, there have been reports of newly electeddistrict councillors allying with chiefdom political factions in attempts tocreate spheres of authority that specifically exclude paramount chiefs.53

Councillors currently have the upper hand in these local political strugglesdue to their anticipated command of substantial donor resources. Already,some senior figures in the old provincial administration are complainingthat councillors ‘feel well connected and think their activities must not bequestioned’.54 A senior civil servant in the ministry of local governmentand community development candidly informed me in August 2004 thatthe decentralization secretariat was having difficulties convincing councillorsthat WDCs should be elected by local residents, rather than appointed bythem personally. Training workshops for councillors and WDC memberswere continuing in the first half of 2005, but again there is a very real dangerthat in its present form, decentralization will simply create new platformsfor the old politics, and that the rural poor will be locked, as before, into adesperate scramble for elite patronage.

50. Address by his Excellency the President, During the Inauguration of Newly ElectedCouncillors of the Local Government Councils, 29th June 2004 (http://www.statehouse-sl.org/speeches/loc-coun-june29.html, 21 March 2005).51. ‘NEC officers in trouble’, Standard Times, 31 May 2004; ‘NEC boss resigns due topolitical 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 August2004.

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

Abdullah, Ibrahim and Muana, Patrick, ‘The Revolutionary United Front of SierraLeone: 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 aboutwar and justice in rural central Sierra Leone’, Africa 72, 3 (2002), p. 347.

Archibald, Steven and Richards, Paul, ‘Seeds and rights: new approaches to agricul-tural rehabilitation in Sierra Leone’, Disasters 26, 4 (2002), pp. 356–67.

Barrows, Walter, Grassroots Politics in an African State: Integration and development inSierra 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 (WorldBank, Washington, DC, 2000).

Dillon, Michael and Reid, Julian, ‘Global liberal governance: biopolitics, security andwar’, Millennium Journal of International Studies 30, 1 (2001), pp. 41–66.

Duffield, Mark, Global Governance and the New Wars: The merging of developmentand security (Zed Books, London, 2001).

Ferme, Mariane, The Underneath of Things: Violence, history and the everyday inSierra 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-CapitalistSocieties (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 SierraLeone’, 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” inAfrica: towards an explanation of violence against the peasantry’, Journalof 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 ofCopenhagen, 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).

ON THE LIMITS OF LIBERAL PEACE 49

Tangri, Roger, ‘Central-local politics in contemporary Sierra Leone’, AfricanAffairs 77, 307 (1978), pp. 165–73.

Tangri, Roger, ‘Local government institutions in Sierra Leone, part 1: district councils1951-71’, Journal of Administration Overseas XVII, 1 (1978), pp. 17–27.

Tangri, Roger, ‘Local government institutions in Sierra Leone, part 2: contemporarychiefdom administration’, Journal of Administration Overseas XVII, 2(1978), pp. 118–28.