Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty

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 forAlbert 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 bythe 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,