Sierra Leone – A sum of errors

Oumar Farouk Sesay: Sierra Leone Telegraph: 5 October 2026:

Sierra Leone has never lacked brilliant people. Our deeper failure has been our inability to build institutions that can multiply that brilliance. (Photo: Dr Davidson Nicol was the first black African elected as a Fellow of a Cambridge college – a physician, diplomat, and writer).

For generations, Sierra Leoneans have distinguished themselves abroad—in universities, medicine, diplomacy, engineering, literature, international organizations, and the professions.

Yet when those same talents are brought together within the machinery of our own state, the arithmetic often becomes bewildering.

One plus one does not always become two. Sometimes two plus two appears to become minus two. It is our strange national arithmetic: the sum of errors.

Consider the Sierra Leonean professional who thrives in London, Washington, Accra, Abuja, or Geneva. When that person comes home, his intelligence doesn’t disappear at Lungi. His qualifications don’t evaporate, and Immigration doesn’t confiscate his experience.

What changes upon his arrival in Sierra Leone is the environment and the architecture of governance he is now bound to operate within, despite all his sterling credentials. That distinction takes us closer to the heart of our national predicament.

In The Social Conquest of Earth, evolutionary biologist E. O. Wilson explored a central paradox of human society: individuals often compete selfishly within groups, yet cooperative groups can outperform those torn by internal rivalry.

That insight holds up an uncomfortable mirror to Sierra Leone. Perhaps our problem is not a shortage of intelligence but a failure to organize it. Perhaps we do not lack cooperation. Perhaps our cooperation is too often confined to circles smaller than the nation.

A country is not developed merely by assembling gifted people. A football team of eleven brilliant players can still lose to a less talented side that understands positioning, discipline, and teamwork. An orchestra of virtuosos can still produce noise if each insists on playing a different score.

National development is similarly orchestral: talent may reside in individuals, but development depends on the capacity to coordinate that talent toward a common purpose.

One excellent doctor may save many lives. However, a functioning health system requires doctors, nurses, technicians, administrators, procurement officers, cleaners, drivers, and regulators working within institutions that enable competence to reinforce competence.

The same is true of public service. One honest official may resist corruption, expose wrongdoing, or defend principle at considerable personal cost. Such courage matters. But a functioning state cannot depend on the perpetual appearance of exceptional individuals willing to become martyrs for ordinary standards of integrity.

Sierra Leone’s governance narrative is crowded with stories of lone Odysseuses—figures navigating sirens, cyclopes, hostile seas, and treacherous currents in search of an institutional Ithaca that always seems to recede beyond the horizon. We celebrate their courage, their refusals, and their lonely battles against compromised systems. Yet their individual odysseys have rarely coalesced into a shared national epic of institutional triumph.

And perhaps that is precisely the problem.

A republic should not demand heroism for routine competence or exceptional courage for ordinary honesty. Its institutions should make integrity survivable, professionalism normal, and competence reproducible. Individual excellence remains necessary, but it becomes transformative only when institutions can preserve, multiply, and transmit it beyond the individual.

What Sierra Leone needs, therefore, is not the disappearance of heroes but a state that does not depend on them: not merely exceptional people doing exceptional things, but durable institutions that make good performance ordinary.

Our problem may be less that Sierra Leoneans cannot cooperate than that too many of our institutions reward narrower loyalties more generously than they reward commitment to the larger national good.

Where competence is rewarded, competence multiplies. Where loyalty is rewarded above ability, loyalty becomes currency. Where proximity to power determines opportunity, people invest in being near power.

People learn the pulse of the systems in which they must survive. If advancement depends upon patronage, cultivate patrons. If appointments depend upon political allegiance, demonstrate allegiance.

If opportunity depends upon ethnicity, family, region, or friendship, strengthen those networks. One person behaving this way may prosper. A thousand people behaving this way may impoverish a republic.

The irony is that Sierra Leoneans demonstrate impressive cooperation every day. Families pool resources to educate their children. Communities build mosques, churches, and schools. Osusu groups sustain informal economies through trust and reciprocity. Hometown associations and diaspora organizations mobilize resources for their communities.

We know how to cooperate. The harder question is how large the circle of cooperation becomes. The family cooperates. The community cooperates. The political faction cooperates.

But can the nation cooperate?

Our difficulty is not a lack of loyalty. Sierra Leone does not need less loyalty. It needs larger loyalty. We do not need people to stop loving their families, communities, regions, ethnic groups, or political parties. We need institutions strong enough to ensure that these identities do not determine who receives justice, employment, protection, or opportunity.

Beyond every legitimate “us” there must be a larger “us.”

Recent Afrobarometer findings capture part of this contradiction. Sierra Leoneans report high levels of tolerance toward people from other ethnic and political groups, while trust across some of those boundaries remains weaker.

Tolerance and trust are not the same. Tolerance says: You may live beside me. Trust says: I am prepared to build with you.

Nationhood requires the second. A republic cannot mature if public institutions are seen as prizes captured by whichever political network happens to be in power.

Governments are temporary. Citizenship is permanent.

I should expect justice from the courts regardless of who occupies the State House. I should believe the police will protect me without first asking about my political affiliation. I should be able to enter a government ministry without searching for someone from my district, ethnic group, family, or party.

And no competent Sierra Leonean should have to change political clothing every five years to remain useful to his country.

Strong institutions are not strong because they favour us. They are strong because we can trust them when they do not favour us. This is where Wilson’s insight becomes a lesson in institutional design.

A society cannot rely upon goodness alone. Good institutions do not abolish self-interest. They civilise it. They make competence rewarding. They make honesty worthwhile. They make cooperation rational.

They make fairness toward strangers a principle rather than a favour. Fairness, in this sense, is not merely altruism. It is enlightened self-preservation.

I defend judicial independence today because I may need an independent judge tomorrow. I support merit-based recruitment because government incompetence eventually reaches everyone’s doorstep. I oppose discrimination against another region because I am defending a rule that may one day protect mine.

Some things no citizen can purchase privately. No family, however wealthy, can buy a trustworthy national judiciary. No ethnic group can privately own macroeconomic stability. No political party can permanently monopolize peace. No household can privatize institutional legitimacy.

Some goods exist only because we possess them together. That is the republic. Where institutions fail, countries waste talent without visibly destroying it. No bonfire is required.

You place the wrong person above the right one. You frustrate competence until it withdraws. You politicize professionalism. You make independent thought expensive and patronage profitable. Eventually, some talented people leave.

Some remain and become silent. Others adapt. And the nation loses without ever calculating what it has lost. No line in the national budget is headed – Wasted Genius.

For decades, we have celebrated Sierra Leone’s diamonds, gold, rutile, bauxite, iron ore, fertile land, and fisheries. But geology does not create prosperity. Institutions do.

Perhaps the greatest mineral Sierra Leone has never properly mined is the Sierra Leonean mind. We export it, celebrate it abroad, invite it home, and decorate it with titles—yet too often we insert it into systems that demand accommodation rather than transformation.

The problem therefore cannot be solved simply by changing governments. Governments must change. That is democracy. Institutions must endure. That is nationhood.

Three years ago, I asked how a country with so many brilliant people could produce outcomes so far below the sum of their talents. I would frame the question differently today. Perhaps the problem was never the numbers. Perhaps it was the equation into which we kept plugging them.

Sierra Leone does not need to manufacture brilliant people; it has produced them for generations. What it has failed to produce with the same consistency are institutions that allow brilliance to recognize brilliance, competence to reward competence, and citizenship to rise above faction.

That is the unfinished work. Not less loyalty, but larger loyalty. Not fewer ambitious people, but institutions that make ambition answerable to the public good. Not more heroes, but a state in which honesty does not require heroism and competence does not require political permission.

Change the incentives. Reward excellence. Protect institutional independence. Make fairness predictable. Build enough trust so that talent no longer has to belong to the right family, region, party, or patron to serve the country. Then our national arithmetic begins to change.

Two plus two will no longer become minus two. Because the final tragedy of Sierra Leone is not that we lack the numbers. It is that we keep placing good numbers inside a bad equation.

Until we change the equation, we will keep exporting brilliance, importing disappointment, and calling the result fate. It is not fate. It is design. And what has been badly designed can be redesigned.

That is how we begin correcting the sum of errors.