Former Liberia President, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf has been welcomed by President Bio after she paid a courtesy call to him at State House Monday. Sirleaf told President Bio that the fragility report (which she is in the country to jointly launch) contains issues that are similar to her country, Liberia, because of the similar history, culture and tradition.
President Bio welcomed the former President, and maintained that the government is looking forward to learning from the Report to try to forge ahead and lay the foundations for progress. He stressed that they want to make the Sierra Leonean challenges a thing of the past.
The LSE-Oxford Commission on State Fragility, Growth and Development
The new report from the LSE-Oxford Commission on State Fragility, Growth and Development, chaired by former UK Prime Minister David Cameron and co-chaired by Donald Kaberuka, former President of the African Development Bank used Sierra Leone as a case study and has looked at the root causes of why the country remains one of the poorest countries of the world and why the country remains fragile.
Escaping the fragility trap argues that the Sustainable Development Goals will not be reached unless international donors stop asserting their own unrealistic priorities and instead take a more pragmatic, patient approach to addressing the ‘syndrome’ of fragility.
Kaberuka said, “Escaping fragility is by necessity, a slow, step-by-step, and often imperfect process. International support will be needed, but the chances of success are higher if the country and its people are in the driver’s seat. The first step is security which requires a large degree of locally-led rebuilding of trust. Escaping fragility is not always about money. Top-down, donor-led approaches with unrealistic, tight timetables have not produced enduring results. Early efforts will be needed to revive the local private sector which is often the lifeline for families and communities when the state can no longer assure its basic core functions. Confidence generated by domestic businesses is what will spur foreign investment, not vice versa.”
The report concluded that peaceful transitions out of conflict and fragility are most likely to succeed if there is a prolonged period of power-sharing, before elections are held, where checks and balances between different groups are steadily built, citizen trust is slowly anchored, and the path is paved for setting a ‘positive’ agenda of common purpose.
The report also says domestic actors need to be empowered and supported, including through better targeted use of overseas aid, to build safety, security, and stability in their own nations.
Rather than policy conditionality, the report stated that donors should ask for ‘governance conditionality’, which protects against corruption and ensures power is not abused by one political group at the expense of another.
Sierra Leone being part of the 20 countries used as a case study, the report “from fragility to resilience” pointed out that despite great opportunities, Sierra Leone is still facing fragility and have struggled to leverage their resource wealth to realize practical development gains for their populations.
The report further stated that the country is still hampered by widespread poverty, poor governance, weak administrative capacity, high perceptions of corruption, and challenging climates for doing business much of which relates to natural resource management.
Herbert M’cleod, co-author of the report stated that the persistence of historical dynamics underpinned fragility in Sierra Leone, in particular elite predation using the levers of the Government, and the extractive economy.
Four signs of positive change, M’cleod stated that could support moves to reduce and even end fragility.
“Greater freedom of the press, slowly but increasingly greater knowledge by citizens of their rights and obligations, progress in reducing the binding constraints to private sector development in the form of transportation, electricity, and energy and the holding of general elections regularly. Underlying all of this is the critical need to improve the legitimacy of the state. Elections are being taken more seriously by political parties as an opportunity to send better qualified representatives to Parliament, but this must be complemented by a radical change to the system of justice in order to impose the rule of law.”
SV/23/7/18
By Sylvia Villa & Betty Milton
Tuesday July 24, 2018.
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