complete state failure, destroying not only law and order but
also even the most basic economic incentives. The result is
economic stagnation and—as the recent history of Angola,
Cameroon, Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo,
Haiti, Liberia, Nepal, Sierra Leone, Sudan, and Zimbabwe
illustrates—civil wars, mass displacements, famines, and
epidemics, making many of these countries poorer today
than they were in the 1960s.
A C HILDREN’S C RUSADE ?
On March 23, 1991, a group of armed men under the
leadership of Foday Sankoh crossed the border from
Liberia into Sierra Leone and attacked the southern frontier
town of Kailahun. Sankoh, formerly a corporal in the Sierra
Leonean army, had been imprisoned after taking part in an
abortive coup against Siaka Stevens’s government in
1971. After being released, he eventually ended up in
Libya, where he entered a training camp that the Libyan
dictator Colonel Qaddafi ran for African revolutionaries.
There he met Charles Taylor, who was plotting to overthrow
the government in Liberia. When Taylor invaded Liberia on
Christmas Eve 1989, Sankoh was with him, and it was with
a group of Taylor’s men, mostly Liberians and Burkinabes
(citizens of Burkina Faso), that Sankoh invaded Sierra
Leone. They called themselves the RUF, the Revolutionary
United Front, and they announced that they were there to
overthrow the corrupt and tyrannical government of the
APC.
As we saw in the previous chapter, Siaka Stevens and
his All People’s Congress, the APC, took over and
intensified the extractive institutions of colonial rule in
Sierra Leone, just as Mugabe and ZANU-PF did in
Zimbabwe. By 1985, when Stevens, ill with cancer, brought
in Joseph Momoh to replace him, the economy was
collapsing. Stevens, apparently without irony, used to enjoy
quoting the aphorism “The cow eats where it is tethered.”
And where Stevens had once eaten, Momoh now gorged.
The roads fell to pieces, and schools disintegrated.
National television broadcasts stopped in 1987, when the
transmitter was sold by the minister of information, and in
1989 a radio tower that relayed radio signals outside