*Originally published in 2022 and preserved as part of our archive project.Get E-International Relations delivered to your inbox, free of charge. As you sign up, consider becoming a paid subscriber to support our work.

It is often-times said that Things Fall Apart. In this case, especially so when referring to the 1959 book written by Nigerian author Chinua Achebe as a subtle metaphor for Africa’s fragile post-colonial governance. Chaos also features strongly in contemporary literary and political discourse on African governance. In his sequel to Africa Betrayed, George Ayittey characterizes a continent in chaos at the end of the twentieth century – a political economy in free-fall undermined by the incursion of foreign powers. Indigenous systems of government pre-dating European confiscation manifestly wrecked by colonial and post-colonial systems. Africa is thus paralysed, unable to move forward. West Africa is no exception. In Chaos in Africa, Ayittey might have predicted the recent series of municipal disasters in Sierra Leone which are surely evidence of a country at crisis point.

Once again ordinary Sierra Leoneans are paying the cruel price for appalling safety standards, corrupt municipalities, and commercial operations which city councils prioritized at the expense of public safety. On 5 November 2021 more than a hundred people died in a fireball caused by a petrol truck crash in the country’s capital, Freetown. There had been numerous warnings about the dangers of fuel trucks in city streets, but these had gone unheeded. Fuel companies were unwilling to take the longer suburban access to avoid the chaos of Freetown’s Centre. City Hall officials and the police had both allegedly been bought off, so traffic enforcement was predictably lax.

David Harris’ 2020 book Sierra Leone: A Political History portrays the decent into chaos experienced by Sierra Leone, its catastrophic civil war and faltering attempt to build a state given the country's immensely problematic colonial legacies. War then precipitated a huge and largely unsuccessful international effort to construct a 'liberal peace', before largely abandoning Sierra Leone as a laboratory for post-Cold War interventions. It is a foreword to the governance chaos of present-day Freetown. Even in the loose administrations of West Africa it is rare that such a combination of corruption and incompetence would combine to incinerate over a hundred civilians and leave hundreds severely injured. The past decade has seen multiple hovercraft, helicopter, and ferry disasters which led to promised public inquiries but little in the way of mitigation. The victims were buried, the injured hospitalized as best as the city’s antiquated health system could provide, and life went on.

In March 2021, over 80 people were injured after a major fire in one of the city's slums. Consequently, over 5,000 people were displaced and are unlikely ever to be re-housed. In 2017 over 1,000 people were killed after heavy rains led to a mudslide, also leaving around 3,000 survivors homeless. Reckless deforestation had........

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