Since independence from Britain in 1961, military regimes, authoritarian single-party regimes, nepotism, and internal conflicts have marred Sierra Leone’s experiment in democracy. Elections became sham exercises in the name of democracy and a means to build networks of political patronage that exploited the state’s resources. Inevitably the institutions of the state and civil society collapsed under the weight of massive corruption, mismanagement, socio-economic decline, human rights violations, predatory rule, and civil war. Re-creating the state and civil society, in addition to establishing the essentials of good governance, are some of the challenges facing the current embattled government, established after the February-March 1996 presidential and parliamentary elections.

After the death of Sierra Leone’s first Prime Minister, Sir Milton Margai, on 28 April 1964, the politics of ethnicity crept into the professional ranks of the civil service and the armed forces. The trend continued under President Siaka P. Stevens (1968-1985) and his handpicked successor Major General Joseph S. Momoh (1985-1992). For personal political gain, Sierra Leone’s political and military leaders cast aside the legal and constitutional constraints embedded in the 1961 Independence Constitution. In its place, they fashioned various constitutions that merely enhanced the power of the incumbent. In 1985, for instance, President Stevens went so far as to secure the amendment of the existing constitution to pave the way for Major General Momoh to succeed him as state president.

Initially, Momoh’s accession to the presidency raised high hopes and expectations among many Sierra Leoneans who had identified his predecessor, President Stevens, with the country’s socio-economic decline and political repression. But what many people did not pay attention to at the time was the fact that Momoh was the product of Stevens’ All People’s Congress (APC) regime and the officer most responsible for the decline of the army’s esprit de corps. Furthermore, Momoh’s tenure as commander of the Sierra Leone army is remembered as the worst in the institution’s history. In addition to the politicization of officers and the rank-and-file, the army labored under gross mismanagement, rampant corruption, nepotism, incompetence, and political intimidation.

True to form, Momoh’s tenure as president was characterized by an ailing economy and a groundswell of opposition to the continuation of one-party rule. On 29 April 1992, a year after Foday Sankoh’s Revolutionary United Front (RUF) launched its war; soldiers from the war front overthrew Momoh and suspended the constitution. As the leader of the coup d’etat, Captain Valentine Strasser, indicated in a radio broadcast on the day of the coup: "Our people are suffering, our children cannot go to school, our roads are in a deplorable condition."

It is not often in Africa that disaffected soldiers overthrow an unpopular regime for its inability to prosecute a war. In the case of Sierra Leone, young disaffected soldiers ousted a president who, as commander of the army between 1971-1985, had presided over the steady erosion of the army’s fighting capability through lack of training and equipment, corruption, mismanagement, and nepotism. Even though the soldiers could well have acted on behalf of the people whose standards of living had declined precipitously in the era of the APC regime (1968-1992), the coup d’etat itself represented an overall effort by the rank and file of the army to protect the "narrow corporate interests of the military."

Overnight populism gave way to the status quo ante. Instead of instituting long-term "revolutionary" reforms, as the rhetoric promised, soldiers embarked upon regime maintenance. While the NPRC established commissions of inquiry to determine the extent of official corruption under the Momoh regime and announced a timetable for a return to civilian rule by January 1996, more intractable problems such as the expanding RUF war in the eastern and southern districts and the resettlement of displaced persons and refugees remained.

In an article entitled "Revolution in Crisis?," West Africa magazine catalogued some of the shortcomings of the NPRC: "Six months after the NPRC seized power, its members are already realising that making promises with the help of the gun is easier than fulfilling them." Among other abuses, the magazine cited "the arrogant misuse of power and staggering display of wealth and opulence," the purchase of new and expensive automobiles, frequent travels by junta members at first class rates, personality clashes between Captain Strasser and his deputy Captain Solomon Musa, low morale among the front line troops, and curbs on the press. The editors of the magazine wondered aloud: "For a regime which regards itself as revolutionary and models itself on the Jerry Rawlings phenomenon, such waste and extravagance is questionable" especially in a country with a per capita income of less than $325 and tethering on the brink of collapse. Sankoh and the RUF made much capital out of the NPRC’s shortcomings, thus prolonging the civil war in Sierra Leone.