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

on us by years of autocratic rule and militarism. But, we shall exercise restraint and continue to wait patiently at the rendezvous of peace—where we shall all be winners. We are committed to peace, by any means necessary, but what we are not committed to is becoming victims of peace. We know our cause to be just and God/Allah will never abandon us in our struggle to reconstruct a new Sierra Leone.
    Though Sankoh and other RUF leaders may have started with political grievances, and the grievances of the people suffering underthe APC’s extractive institutions may have encouraged them to join the movement early on, the situation quickly changed and spun out of control. The “mission” of the RUF plunged the country into agony, as in the testimony of a teenager from Geoma, in the south of Sierra Leone:
    They gathered some of us … They chose some of our friends and killed them, two of them. These were people whose fathers were the chiefs, and they had soldiers’ boots and property in their houses. They were shot, for no other reason than that they were accused of harbouring soldiers. The chiefs were also killed—as part of the government. They chose someone to be the new chief. They were still saying they had come to free us from the APC. After a point, they were not choosing people to kill, just shooting people.
    In the first year of the invasion, any intellectual roots that the RUF may have had were completely extinguished. Sankoh executed those who criticized the mounting stream of atrocities. Soon, few voluntarily joined the RUF. Instead they turned to forcible recruitment, particularly of children. Indeed, all sides did this, including the army. If the Sierra Leonean civil war was a crusade to build a better society, in the end it was a children’s crusade. The conflict intensified with massacres and massive human rights abuses, including mass rapes and the amputation of hands and ears. When the RUF took over areas, they also engaged in economic exploitation. It was most obvious in the diamond mining areas, where they press-ganged people into diamond mining, but was widespread elsewhere as well.
    The RUF wasn’t alone in committing atrocities, massacres, and organized forced labor. The government did so as well. Such was the collapse of law and order that it became difficult for people to tell who was a soldier and 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 yougo 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