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

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

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by the 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, the farmers of palm kernels were getting 56
percent of the world price from the marketing board; cocoa farmers,
48 percent; and coffee farmers, 49 percent. By the time Stevens left
office in 1985, resigning to allow his handpicked successor, Joseph
Momoh, to become president, these numbers were 37, 19, and 27
percent, respectively. As pitiful as this might sound, it was better than
what the farmers were getting during Stevens’s reign, which had often
been as low as 10 percent—that is, 90 percent of the income of the
farmers was extracted by Stevens’s government, and not to provide
public services, such as roads or education, but to enrich himself and
his cronies and to buy political support.
As part of their indirect rule, the British had also stipulated that the
office of the paramount chief would be held for life. To be eligible to
be a chief, one had to be a member of a recognized “ruling house.”
The identity of the ruling houses in a chieftaincy developed over

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time, but it was essentially based on the lineage of the kings in a