Sierra Leone Overcoming Devolution Problems

Bowenson F Phillips

The Chief Administrator  of the Freetown City Council (FCC),  the capital city of Sierra Leone which is about the oldest modern city in West Africa, Bowenson Phillips, on Monday, August 24, 2009, told NEWSTIME AFRICA  that Sierra Leone has made tremendous progress  in devolving power from the formerly over-centralized system in the country since Parliament legislated the Local Government Act-2004. He however pointed out that there is still some resistance from some central ministries, departments, and agencies to relinquish their monopoly on power, and this calls for more education, and more power-juggling so that all would realize that we are not in a zero-sum game.

The system of devolving some state functions to the local councils was abolished in Sierra Leone in the late 1970′s.  The reason for this was poor management and alleged corruption among the local councils.  However, the devolution of power was re-introduced in 2004.  They are now in the experimentation stage.   There are a total of nineteen local councils across the country

What had caused the local governments to be abolished in the 1970s is still a festering problem, Philips said, as too many of the local government councils are embroiled in diverse forms of mismanagement, and corruption.  Unlike the past, there is some progress made in the local government councils performing their roles as the law mandates them to, Phillips said, optimistically.

‘We have made significant progress in Sierra Leone with the decentralization process when compared to other countries that had had the system before us…However, we still; need to address the area of devolving some functions from Ministries, Departments and Agencies to the councils’, he said and revealed that about 60% of those functions supposed to be devolved to the councils are yet to be devolved ‘by Ministries, Departments and Agencies’.

The process of devolving state functions to the local councils calls for a stronger political will on the side of Ministries, Departments and Agencies, but according to Phillips, ‘the political will is absolutely absent among devolving ministries… there is complete refusal on the part of MDAs top release personnel necessary tom carry out some functions that are supposed to be devolved’’

The FCC has recently undertaken a robust means of collecting local tax from dwellers in the city, as stated by the Local Government Act-2002. This ‘aggressive’ means employed by the council – which includes accosting people right on the streets of Freetown; meeting people in small tailor, carpentry shops, etc. – is said to be yielding fruits as according to Bowen Phillips, ‘the area of tax payment in recent times has been very encouraging’; only that the council is expecting people to come forward and pay rather than been coerced to do so.

Speaking on projections by the Freetown City Council, he started that they are currently working on plans to get 36 Buses in the next three months for the city ‘all aimed at revitalizing the transport sector in the city’, and that  ‘ the council is planning a revolution… by building modern market structures in the city’

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