Oumar Farouk Sesay: Sierra Leone Telegraph: 16 March 2026:
In Sierra Leone, public service often ends the way it begins – with a story. Not a balance sheet. Not a report card. A story – told after the fact, polished by memory, and usually centred on one brave figure who tried, who fought, who meant well, but was blocked by enemies from within.
We have perfected this genre of governance: the legend of the almost.
Ask almost anyone who has held office – minister, deputy, adviser, permanent secretary, or the quiet official who keeps the files moving, and you will hear the familiar epic of sacrifice and lonely resolve.
It is usually told as a solo mission to “save the nation,” a brave attempt that collapsed because colleagues betrayed them, rivals sabotaged them, or supporters vanished when duty came knocking. In these accounts, the narrator is always the protagonist – slowed not by a shortage of vision, but by obstacles conveniently located “from within.”
A river might have been spared mercury poisoning, they will tell you, if only their cabinet paper had been debated fairly.
This pattern is now our most dependable political afterlife. You hear it in memoirs and interviews, radio debates and farewell speeches; in conversations that begin with a sigh and end with the same verdict:
I tried. I fought. I meant well. But they would not let me work.
But the chorus points to a national problem. If so many officials insist they carried the right ideas and the courage to act, why has that conviction so rarely produced shared results? Why do our personal legends end exactly where national progress should begin?
We are not short of dreams. We are flooded with them: flyovers and water buses; highways, hospitals, and water schemes; a mining sector that refines and transforms; an education system modern enough to make Sierra Leone an envy rather than an apology.
And then, almost on cue, comes the turn. The superhero minister meets kryptonite. The plan “stalls.” The timeline becomes rumour. The budget becomes a story about a story. And the hero returns, bruised and misunderstood, with the same line: “They would not let me work.”
So, we must ask the most dangerous question: who are these nemeses that always win while the nation loses? Are they individuals – petty saboteurs and jealous gatekeepers armed with gossip and grudges? Or are they something more invisible, more disciplined: the architecture of governance itself?
Because if the obstacle is always “from within,” then within what? Within institutions that are underpowered and easily captured. Within procurement systems where convenience outruns correctness. Within political cultures where loyalty is rewarded more reliably than competence. That is where “within” lives—not in myth, but in machinery.
And the cost is not poetic. It is practical—and brutal.
A stalled procurement is not a mere “delay”; it is a clinic without oxygen, a school without materials, a road that eats transport fares and lives. A delayed project becomes inflated costs, unpaid contractors, and citizens trained to lower expectations until disappointment feels normal.
The deepest cost is quiet: the death of trust—when people stop believing public work can be completed cleanly, on time, and for the public good.
Stories, in our politics, do more than entertain. They exonerate. Intention becomes achievement. Responsibility becomes “somewhere else.” We become a nation of plausible explanations and unfinished bridges—sounding like builders while living amid abandoned scaffolding.
A nation cannot be developed by heroes alone. Heroes burn out. Heroes get removed. Heroes get compromised. Heroes—being human—eventually disappoint.
A serious country is built differently: through institutions that outlive personalities; rules that outlast moods; transparency that makes sabotage expensive; continuity that treats public projects as national property, not political trophies.
That foundation includes what we often treat as decoration but is, in fact, structural: an independent judiciary.
When courts are truly independent and functional, they make governance credible. They enforce contracts. They uphold procurement challenges. They deter corruption by making consequences real. In short: they turn “they would not let me work” from a slogan into a claim that must face evidence.
Without judicial independence, everything becomes negotiable: laws become suggestions, contracts become favours, and accountability becomes proximity to power. In that climate, honest officials are punished for discipline, while opportunists are rewarded for speed.
So let us measure leadership less by what is announced and more by what is built: procurement that can be audited; standards that survive reshuffles; public data citizens can track; and courts that can uphold the rules without trembling.
We also need a new civic expectation: if you claim you were sabotaged, prove it. Name the bottleneck. Show the paperwork. Publish the procurement trail. Explain the overruns. A mature democracy cannot run on vibes and heroic narration; it must run on records.
And citizens, too, must interrogate ourselves—briefly, brutally. We cannot demand miracles and then starve institutions. We cannot treat competence as arrogance and mediocrity as fate. We cannot call every reform theatre and then complain when nothing survives the next election cycle.
This is why initiatives like Running Out Of Time—Salone (ROOTS) matter. ROOTS seeks to deepen civic awareness, then go further by helping citizens set a manifesto-like agenda: clear priorities government can be monitored against, and performance evaluated with discipline. Not another chorus of complaints, but a civic scorecard. Not he said, she said, but commitments measured over time.
If ROOTS succeeds, it will do something quietly revolutionary: it will make the little stories expensive to tell—because the record will be public, and results will be countable.
And that is how a nation outgrows the legend of the almost: when progress no longer appears as miracle and vanishes as rumour, but arrives as policy, is verified as evidence, and becomes habit.
Then our stories will change. They will not begin with “I tried.” They will begin with “We built.”
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