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

Party (SLPP), which 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 for Albert 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