Jimmy D. Kandeh

Ransoming the state: elite origins of Subaltern terror in Sierra Leone

Elite practices that valorised pillage, massified society, banalised violence and ‘sobelised’ the army are central to understanding the tragedy of subaltern terror in Sierra Leone. The appropriation of lumpen violence and thuggery by the political class undermined security and paved the way for the political ascendancy of armed marginals. By heavily recruiting thugs, criminals and rural drifters into national security apparatuses, incumbent political elites sowed the seeds of their own political demise as well as that of the state. Socially uprooted and politically alienated, lumpenised youth are inherently prone to criminal adventurism and when enlisted in the army are more likely to become ‘sobels’ or renegade soldiers. This article situates the transformation of praetorian violence from a tool of political domination to a means of criminal expropriation in the engendering context of elite parasitism and repression.

Politicization of Ethnic Identities in Sierra Leone

This article traces the impact of state formation and class formation on the emergence and development of competitive ethnopolitical identities in Sierra Leone. The politicization of Creole, Mende, Temne and Limba identity deserves scrutiny on account of the dominant role these identities have played in shaping political processes in postcolonial Sierra Leone. Not only is Sierra Leone a culturally plural and intensely stratified society, its postcolonial political history attests to, and offers interesting insights about, the intimate connections between class, ethnicity and state formation. From the end of the nineteenth century until independence, the most divisive ethnoregional conflict in Sierra Leone pitted colony Creole elites against protectorate African elites. The Creoles, separatist in their political attitudes and aspirations, rejected political equality with protectorate Africans and the latter resented both the assertions of superiority by Creoles and their relative dominance in Sierra Leone politics prior to decolonization. This polarization persists even today, but its political significance has paled in comparison to both the rift between the Mendes of the south and the Temnes of the north and the contemporary dominance of Limba cultural entrepreneurs and politicians. Fissures in protectorate elite solidarity coincided with the emergence of political organizations founded and led by competing petty bourgeois elements. One such organization, the All Peoples Congress (APC) party, was formed as an alternative to the Mende-dominated Sierra Leone Peoples Party (SLPP).

What does the ‘militariat’ do when it rules? military regimes: the Gambia, Sierra Leone and Liberia

A significant group of military interventions, especially in West Africa, has been carried out not by disaffected senior officers, but by junior officers and NCOs ‐ the militariat, occupying a class position within the army analogous to the working class within society as a whole. Such interventions are directed as much against the senior officers as against the political elite to which they are closely linked by clientelist ties. Despite this, and the populist rhetoric adopted by the militariat when first in power, the regimes they install have failed to adopt social transformative goals, or create new mobilisational political structures. Comparison of Liberia under the PRC (1980–89), Sierra Leone under the NPRC (1992–96) and the Gambia under the AFPRC (1994) shows that instead the regimes are marked by violence and instability, and in two cases by the outbreak of civil war. Corruption and human rights abuses have been commonplace, and the regimes have failed to strengthen state capacities, to restore mi...

Sierra Leone's post-conflict elections of 2002

The landslide victory by the Sierra Leone Peoples Party (SLPP) in the 2002 elections was due not to any ideological or policy differences with opposition parties, but to the perception among a plurality of voters that the party delivered on its promise to end the war and therefore deserved re-election. The elections were in effect a referendum on the incumbent president and his ruling SLPP, with voters overwhelmingly concluding that Ahmad Tejan Kabba, the SLPP leader, was preferable to the legion of certified scoundrels seeking to replace him. Signs of the All Peoples Congress (APC), the party that was in power from 1968-92, making a political comeback galvanised otherwise unenthusiastic voters into supporting Kabba and the SLPP. In contrast to the APC, against whom the rebel war was launched, or the Revolutionary United Front Party (RUFP), which initiated and prosecuted the insurgency, or the Peoples Liberation Party (PLP), whose earlier incarnation prolonged the war by colluding with rebels, Kabba and the SLPP claimed to have ended a war that was caused, launched and sustained by assorted elements of the political opposition. The SLPP, however, can ill-afford to bask in electoral triumph or ignore the festering problems of rampant official corruption and mass poverty that led to armed conflict in the 199Os. Tackling the problem of corruption and mass deprivation may hold the key to democratic consolidation, but it is doubtful whether the SLPP, as presently constituted, is capable of leading the fight against these scourges. The SLPP may be reaching out to become a national party but it still remains an unreconstructed patronage outfit that is unresponsive to popular currents and mass aspirations.

Rogue incumbents, donor assistance and Sierra Leone's second post-conflict elections of 2007

The removal of the governing Sierra Leone Peoples Party (SLPP) from power through the ballot box in 2007 represents a watershed moment in the growth and maturation of Sierra Leones teething electoral democracy. This is because the peaceful alternation of political parties in power tends to strengthen democracy and nurture public confidence in elections as mechanisms of political change. In contrast to what happened in 1967, when the SLPP derailed the countrys first post-independence democratic experiment by orchestrating a military coup after losing power in parliamentary elections, the SLPP in 2007 found itself isolated both internally and externally, and could rely neither on the support of a restructured army and police nor on external patrons like the United Kingdom which, among other things, suspended budgetary support for the government pending the satisfactory conclusion of the elections. The emergence of the Peoples Movement for Democratic Change (PMDC), whose membership consists largely of disaffected former SLPP members and supporters, and the electoral alliance forged between the PMDC and the All Peoples Congress (APC) in the presidential run-off, doomed any chance the SLPP may have had of holding on to power. The elections were referenda on the SLPP, which lost both the presidency and the legislature because its rogue leadership squandered the goodwill of the public, misappropriated donor funds with impunity, and failed to deliver basic social goods and services.

Sierra‐Leone: contradictory class functionality of the ‘soft’ state

While the ‘soft’ state may be metaphorically descriptive of the malleability, hegemonic impotence and functional incapacitation of the post‐colonial state in Africa, the class functionality of state softness remains ambivalent and problematic. Although a soft, institutionally fragile state with multiple informal points of entry is generally conducive to processes of class formation at the top, it is doubtful whether such an impaired apparatus of political domination can be reproductive of long term ruling class interests. And because the class whose formation is made possible by institutional fragility lacks a hegemonic ideology and is largely parasitic and unproductive in its modes of consumption and accumulation, it is inherently incapable of leading a genuine capitalist, populist or socialist transformation of African society. This incongruent, stultifying duality in the class functionality of the soft state is at the centre of the problem posed by the contemporary political and economic retardation of...

TRANSITION WITHOUT RUPTURE : SIERRA LEONE'S TRANSFER ELECTION OF 1996

Sierra Leones transfer election of 1996 was instigated by a resurgent civil society that came alive after thirty years of dictatorship. This electoral democratic renewal did not, however, alter the spoils logic that has defined the organization and exercise of political power in Sierra Leone since the late 1960s. Because performance by a popularly elected government is critical to the consolidation of public support for democracy, the SLPPs inability to distance itself from its discredited precursors endangered the countrys fragile democracy.