were appointed by paramount chiefs, village chiefs, or the
British authorities, decided who would become the
paramount chief. One might have imagined that this
colonial institution would also have been abolished or at
least reformed after independence. But just like the
marketing board, it was not, and continued unchanged.
Today paramount chiefs are still in charge of collecting
taxes. It is no longer a hut tax, but its close descendant, a
poll tax. In 2005 the Tribal Authority in Sandor elected a
new paramount chief. Only candidates from the Fasuluku
ruling house, which is the only ruling house, could stand.
The victor was Sheku Fasuluku, King Suluku’s great-great-
grandson.
The behavior of the marketing boards and the traditional
systems of land ownership go a long way to explain why
agricultural productivity is so low in Sierra Leone and much
of sub-Saharan Africa. The political scientist Robert Bates
set out in the 1980s to understand why agriculture was so
unproductive in Africa even though according to textbook
economics this ought to have been the most dynamic
economic sector. He realized that this had nothing to do
with geography or the sorts of factors discussed in chapter
2 that have been claimed to make agricultural productivity
intrinsically low. Rather, it was simply because the pricing
policies of the marketing boards removed any incentives
for the farmers to invest, use fertilizers, or preserve the soil.
The reason that the policies of the marketing boards
were so unfavorable to rural interests was that these
interests had no political power. These pricing policies
interacted with other fundamental factors making tenure
insecure, further undermining investment incentives. In
Sierra Leone, paramount chiefs not only provide law and
order and judicial services, and raise taxes, but they are
also the “custodians of the land.” Though families, clans,
and dynasties have user rights and traditional rights to land;
at the end of the day chiefs have the last say on who farms
where. Your property rights to land are only secure if you
are connected to the chief, perhaps from the same ruling
family. Land cannot be bought or sold or used as collateral
for a loan, and if you are born outside a chieftaincy, you
cannot plant any perennial crop such as coffee, cocoa, or
palm for fear that this will allow you to establish “de facto”