Sierra Leone: Urban-elite bias, atrocity & debt

Abstract

Sierra Leone experienced the violent results of an undeclared civil war which lasted over a decade. The state had lost control of the country's hinterland! Maiming, killing, and destruction dominated this part of West Africa, and the violence largely resulted from a set of programmes and policies of the country's post-colonial government which produced pronounced and obscene elite-peasant disparities. With the termination of hostilities, the IMF and the World Bank have financially assisted the country's recovery and rehabilitation through a set of programmes. These were dominated by the IMF's Post-Conflict scheme and the jointly-administered (IMF/WB) Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative. This paper interrogates the documents of these International Financial Institutions (IFIs) and queries such data in two senses: a) has the nation's development agenda been able to recover from the debt overhang, and b) are the fundamental causes of the country's violent past addressed? The experience of Sierra Leone provides a window into the operations of the IFIs as they impose neoliberal globalisation in the third world.

Deforestation: constructing problems and solutions on Sierra Leone's Freetown Peninsula

“…The central government focused its power and activities in Freetown, widely neglecting the rest of the country (see J. Riddell 1985Riddell , 2005aRiddell , 2005b, which led to an increase in rural-tourban migration that was not met with any strategic planning policies (J. Doherty 1985).…”

Trade unions in a fragile state: the case of Sierra Leone

“…The multivariable Human Development Index places Sierra Leone 158 overall out of 169 countries, with particularly low indicators on poverty with, for example over two‐thirds of the employed population living on less than $1.25 per day (UNDP, 2010). This status derives from a range of interlocking social, political and economic factors all exacerbated by a decade of conflict that destroyed communities and decimated the already frail infrastructure (Riddell, 2005). Private investment in significant industrial sectors was already severely circumscribed, and conflict made business development in some areas of the country simply impossible.…”

Breaks with the Past: Conflict, Displacement, Resettlement and the Evolution of Forest Socio-Ecologies in Sierra Leone

“…On one hand, the autonomy and capacity of the Department itself were reduced quite dramatically by the patterns of Stevens' rule and his increasing focus on mineral-and particularly diamond-wealth. In order to consolidate his grip on power, Stevens increasingly centralized the political and economic functions of the state in the capital city of Freetown, using the state and its resources to distribute patronage to his cronies while the rest of the country was neglected (Riddell 1985(Riddell , 2005. Forestry was no exception, and the authority of the Department in this period became highly concentrated in the Chief Conservator of Forests, a figure tied by personalized neopatrimonial connections to the president, ensuring "that the Forestry [Department] literally spoke with a 'single voice' in policy formulation" (Grainger and Konteh 2007: 54).…”