who was a rebel. Military discipline completely vanished.
By the time the war ended in 2001, probably eighty
thousand people had died and the whole country had been
devastated. Roads, houses, and buildings were entirely
destroyed. Today, if you go to Koidu, a major diamond-
producing area in the east, you’ll still see rows of burned-
out houses scarred with bullet holes.
By 1991 the state in Sierra Leone had totally failed. Think
of what King Shyaam started with the Bushong (this
page–this page): he set up extractive institutions to cement
his power and extract the output the rest of society would
produce. But even extractive institutions with central
authority concentrated in his hands were an improvement
over the situation without any law and order, central
authority, or property rights that characterized the Lele
society on the other side of the river Kasai. Such lack of
order and central authority has been the fate of many
African nations in recent decades, partly because the
process of political centralization was historically delayed in
much of sub-Saharan Africa, but also because the vicious
circle of extractive institutions reversed any state
centralization that existed, paving the way for state failure.
Sierra Leone during her bloody civil war of ten years,
from 1991 to 2001, was a typical case of a failed state. It
started out as just another country marred by extractive
institutions, albeit of a particularly vicious and inefficient
type. Countries become failed states not because of their
geography or their culture, but because of the legacy of
extractive institutions, which concentrate power and wealth
in the hands of those controlling the state, opening the way
for unrest, strife, and civil war. Extractive institutions also
directly contribute to the gradual failing of the state by
neglecting investment in the most basic public services,
exactly what happened in Sierra Leone.
Extractive institutions that expropriate and impoverish the
people and block economic development are quite
common in Africa, Asia, and South America. Charles
Taylor helped to start the civil war in Sierra Leone while at
the same time initiating a savage conflict in Liberia, which
led to state failure there, too. The pattern of extractive
institutions collapsing into civil war and state failure has
happened elsewhere in Africa; for example, in Angola,