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.
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It is not only that many of the postindependence leaders of Africa moved into the same residences, made use of the same patronage networks, and employed the same ways of manipulating markets and extracting resources as had the colonial regimes and the emperors they replaced; but they also made things worse. It was indeed a farce that the staunchly anticolonial Stevens would be concerned with controlling the same people, the Mende, whom the British had sought to control; that he would rely on the same chiefs whom the British had empowered and then used to control the hinterland; that he would run the economy in the same way, expropriating the farmers with the same marketing boards and controlling the diamonds under a similar monopoly. It was indeed a farce, a very sad farce indeed, that Laurent Kabila, who mobilized an army against Mobutu’s dictatorship with the promise of freeing the people and ending the stifling and impoverishing corruption and repression of Mobutu’s Zaire, would then set up a regime just as corrupt and perhaps even more disastrous. It was certainly farcical that he tried to start a Mobutuesque personality cult aided and abetted by Dominique Sakombi Inongo, previously Mobutu’s minister of information, and that Mobutu’s regime was itself fashioned on patterns of exploitation of the masses that had started more than a century previously with King Leopold’s Congo Free State. It was indeed a farce that the Marxist officer Mengistu would start living in a palace, viewing himself as an emperor, and enriching himself and his entourage just like Haile Selassie and other emperors before him had done.
It was all a farce, but also more tragic than the original tragedy, and not only for the hopes that were dashed. Stevens and Kabila, like many other rulers in Africa, would start murdering their opponents and then innocent citizens. Mengistu and the Derg’s policies would bring recurring famine to Ethiopia’s fertile lands. History was repeating itself, but in a very distorted form. It was a famine in Wollo province in 1973 to which Haile Selassie was apparently indifferent that did so much finally to solidify opposition to his regime. Selassie had at least been only indifferent. Mengistu instead saw famine as a political tool to undermine the strength of his opponents. History was not only farcical and tragic, but also cruel to the citizens of Ethiopia and much of sub-Saharan Africa.
The essence of the iron law of oligarchy, this particular facet of the vicious circle, is that new leaders overthrowing old ones with promises of radical change bring nothing but more of the same.
More (#2) from Why Nations Fail:
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