John Pa Baimba Sesay: Sierra Leone Telegraph: 29 December 2025:
The dirty secret of development is that it is never neutral, and it is never painless. Every serious attempt at national transformation threatens someone’s power, privilege, or access to resources. That is why development so often stalls, not for lack of ideas, plans, or rhetoric, but for lack of political courage.
Taketsugu Tsurutani makes this point forcefully in The Politics of National Development: Political Leadership in Transitional Societies. He argues that no political leadership, however powerful or technically competent, can advance national development unless it is genuinely committed to that objective.
Crucially, such commitment must go far beyond eloquent speeches or policy documents. It requires the political will to take difficult, unpopular decisions especially those that confront entrenched interests determined to preserve the status quo.
Development, in practice, demands a deliberate reordering of how resources, both tangible and intangible, are extracted, distributed, and controlled. This reordering disrupts patronage systems, challenges corruption, and reallocates opportunity. It inevitably provokes resistance.
The question is not whether resistance will occur, but whether leadership is prepared to withstand it.
From a governance perspective, initiating a new order is among the most dangerous political acts any leadership can undertake. In transitional societies, the risks are magnified. Weak institutions, deeply rooted patron-client networks, and unresolved historical grievances severely limit state capacity.
Reform threatens fragile political coalitions and exposes leaders to backlash from actors who benefit handsomely from dysfunction.
This is why commitment alone isn’t enough. The success of development-oriented leadership depends equally on political intelligence; that is the ability to read shifting contingencies, build coalitions, neutralize opposition, and sequence reforms strategically. Development is as much a political contest as it is a technical exercise.
China’s global expansion illustrates this dynamic clearly. Its rapid ascent did not occur simply because it welcomed foreign capital. It accelerated when the state made a calculated political choice to pursue a deliberate “go-global” strategy anchored in overseas investment. That decision reflected not only ambition, but strategic clarity and political discipline.
The economic dividends that followed were not accidental; they were the product of deliberate, and at times risky, political choices.
Sierra Leone’s experience offers a sobering contrast. Efforts to promote national development have repeatedly collided with entrenched interests that profit from existing patterns of extraction, corruption, and inequality. Successive governments have announced ambitious reform and development agendas, yet implementation has often faltered.
The obstacles are familiar: wavering political will, limited administrative capacity, and the difficulty of confronting powerful domestic actors without destabilizing fragile political arrangements.
The lesson is uncomfortable but unavoidable. Development does not fail because leaders lack vision. It fails because vision is not matched by the willingness to confront power, absorb political costs, and sustain reform under pressure.
Sierra Leone’s development journey reinforces Tsurutani’s central argument: genuine transformation requires more than good intentions. It demands leadership that is not only committed to change, but also politically astute enough to navigate resistance, forge durable coalitions, and persist in reform even when doing so is personally and politically costly.
Until leaders are prepared to accept that development is a fight and not a slogan, the promise of transformation will remain just that: a promise, a fake one at that.
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