Why Nations Fail

12.
THE VICIOUS CIRCLE
Y
OU
 C
AN’T
 T
AKE THE
 T
RAIN
 
TO
 B
O
 A
NYMORE
A
LL OF THE
W
EST
A
FRICAN
nation of Sierra Leone became
a British colony in 1896. The capital city, Freetown, had
originally been founded in the late eighteenth century as a
home for repatriated and freed slaves. But when Freetown
became a British colony, the interior of Sierra Leone was
still made up of many small African kingdoms. Gradually, in
the second half of the nineteenth century, the British
extended their rule into the interior through a long series of
treaties with African rulers. On August 31, 1896, the British
government declared the colony a protectorate on the basis
of these treaties. The British identified important rulers and
gave them a new title, paramount chief. In eastern Sierra
Leone, for example, in the modern diamond-mining district
of Kono, they encountered Suluku, a powerful warrior king.
King Suluku was made Paramount Chief Suluku, and the
chieftaincy of Sandor was created as an administrative unit
in the protectorate.
Though kings such as Suluku had signed treaties with a
British administrator, they had not understood that these
treaties would be interpreted as carte blanche to set up a
colony. When the British tried to levy a hut tax—a tax of five
shillings to be raised from every house—in January 1898,
the chiefs rose up in a civil war that became known as the
Hut Tax Rebellion. It started in the north, but was strongest
and lasted longer in the south, particularly in Mendeland,
dominated by the Mende ethnic group. The Hut Tax
Rebellion was soon defeated, but it warned the British
about the challenges of controlling the Sierra Leonean
hinterland. The British had already started to build a railway
from Freetown into the interior. Work began in March 1896,
and the line reached Songo Town in December 1898, in
the midst of the Hut Tax Rebellion. British parliamentary

---

papers from 1904 recorded that:
In the case of the Sierra Leone Railways the
Native Insurrection that broke out in February
1898 had the effect of completely stopping
the works and disorganizing the staff for
some time. The rebels descended upon the
railway, with the result that the entire staff had
to be withdrawn to Freetown … Rotifunk, now
situated upon the railways at 55 miles from
Freetown, was at that time completely in the
hands of the rebels.
In fact, Rotifunk was not on the planned railway line in
1894. The route was changed after the start of the rebellion,
so that instead of going to the northeast, it went south, via
Rotifunk and on to Bo, into Mendeland. The British wanted
quick access to Mendeland, the heart of the rebellion, and
to other potentially disruptive parts of the hinterland if other
rebellions were to flare up.
When Sierra Leone became independent in 1961, the
British handed power to Sir Milton Margai and his Sierra
Leone People’s Party (SLPP), which attracted support
primarily in the south, particularly Mendeland, and the east.
Sir Milton was followed as prime minister by his brother, Sir
Albert Margai, in 1964. In 1967 the SLPP narrowly lost a
hotly contested election to the opposition, the All People’s
Congress Party (APC), led by Siaka Stevens. Stevens was
a Limba, from the north, and the APC got most of their
support from northern ethnic groups, the Limba, the Temne,
and the Loko.
Though the railway to the south was initially designed by
the British to rule Sierra Leone, by 1967 its role was
economic, transporting most of the country’s exports:
coffee, cocoa, and diamonds. The farmers who grew
coffee and cocoa were Mende, and the railway was
Mendeland’s window to the world. Mendeland had voted
hugely for Albert Margai in the 1967 election. Stevens was
much more interested in holding on to power than
promoting Mendeland’s exports. His reasoning was simple:
whatever was good for the Mende was good for the SLPP,
and bad for Stevens. So he pulled up the railway line to

---

Mendeland. He then went ahead and sold off the track and
rolling stock to make the change as irreversible as
possible. Now, as you drive out of Freetown to the east, you
pass the dilapidated railway stations of Hastings and
Waterloo. There are no more trains to Bo. Of course,
Stevens’s drastic action fatally damaged some of the most
vibrant sectors of Sierra Leone’s economy. But like many
of Africa’s postindependence leaders, when the choice
was between consolidating power and encouraging
economic growth, Stevens chose consolidating his power,
and he never looked back. Today you can’t take the train to
Bo anymore, because like Tsar Nicholas I, who feared that
the railways would bring revolution to Russia, Stevens
believed the railways would strengthen his opponents. Like
so many other rulers in control of extractive institutions, he
was afraid of challenges to his political power and was
willing to sacrifice economic growth to thwart those
challenges.
Stevens’s strategy at first glance contrasts with that of the
British. But in fact, there was a significant amount of
continuity between British rule and Stevens’s regime that
illustrates the logic of vicious circles. Stevens ruled Sierra
Leone by extracting resources from its people using similar
methods. He was still in power in 1985 not because he had
been popularly reelected, but because after 1967 he set up
a violent dictatorship, killing and harassing his political
opponents, particularly the members of the SLPP. He
made himself president in 1971, and after 1978, Sierra
Leone had only one political party, Stevens’s APC. Stevens
thus successfully consolidated his power, even if the cost
was impoverishing much of the hinterland.
During the colonial period, the British used a system of
indirect rule to govern Sierra Leone, as they did with most
of their African colonies. At the base of this system were
the paramount chiefs, who collected taxes, distributed
justice, and kept order. The British dealt with the cocoa and
coffee farmers not by isolating them, but by forcing them to
sell all their produce to a marketing board developed by the
colonial office purportedly to help the farmers. Prices for
agricultural commodities fluctuated wildly over time. Cocoa
prices might be high one year but low the next. The
incomes of farmers fluctuated in tandem. The justification

---

for marketing boards was that they, not the farmers, would
absorb the price fluctuations. When world prices were high,
the board would pay the farmers in Sierra Leone less than
the world price, but when world prices were low, they would
do the opposite. It seemed a good idea in principle. The
reality was very different, however. The Sierra Leone
Produce Marketing Board was set up in 1949. Of course
the board needed a source of revenues to function. The
natural way to attain these was by paying farmers just a little
less than they should have received either in good or bad
years. These funds could then be used for overhead
expenditures and administration. Soon the little less
became a lot less. The colonial state was using the
marketing board as a way of heavily taxing farmers.
Many expected the worst practices of colonial rule in sub-
Saharan Africa to stop after independence, and the use of
marketing boards to excessively tax farmers to come to an
end. But neither happened. In fact, the extraction of farmers
using marketing boards got much worse. By the mid-
1960s, the farmers of palm kernels were getting 56 percent
of the world price from the marketing board; cocoa farmers,
48 percent; and coffee farmers, 49 percent. By the time
Stevens left office in 1985, resigning to allow his
handpicked successor, Joseph Momoh, to become
president, these numbers were 37, 19, and 27 percent,
respectively. As pitiful as this might sound, it was better
than what the farmers were getting during Stevens’s reign,
which had often been as low as 10 percent—that is, 90
percent of the income of the farmers was extracted by
Stevens’s government, and not to provide public services,
such as roads or education, but to enrich himself and his
cronies and to buy political support.
As part of their indirect rule, the British had also
stipulated that the office of the paramount chief would be
held for life. To be eligible to be a chief, one had to be a
member of a recognized “ruling house.” The identity of the
ruling houses in a chieftaincy developed over time, but it
was essentially based on the lineage of the kings in a