Globalization, Social Movements, and Peacebuilding

6. Poisoned Patronage: Appropriating Aid and Pulling Down “Big Men” in Northern Sierra Leone

159 6 Poisoned Patronage Appropriating Aid and Pulling Down “Big Men” in Northern Sierra Leone Catherine Bolten Political power in democratic countries may be vested in the state itself, but in Sierra Leone, politics is personal. In a country with a political history built on patronage networks, only “big people,” those who can harness the economic means to surround themselves with loyal clients willing to support them in any endeavor, can expect to maintain power or hold office for even a single term. In the aftermath of an eleven-year civil war, universal suffrage, democratically elected councils, and a sudden influx of aid money as a reliable resource have altered the power base of big men. A big man’s ability to gain and maintain power depends on his willingness and ability to harness these institutions to support his socioeconomic networks. In this chapter I use the case of the deposition of a town council chairman in the wake of an embezzlement scandal to examine how the project of the liberal peace to promote liberal democracy within the context of patronage networks poisons the political process and stymies postwar development. Through a discussion of the emergence of the “half-baked youths” as a political constituency, the infusion of development aid as the only source of revenue for a beleaguered and impoverished town council in the wake of the war, and the manipulation of social leveling as an instrument of political power wrangling, this chapter illustrates how the patronage system moved into an essentially unworkable conflict with 160  Global Models and Local Conflicts democracy in the decade after the war. Here, democratic processes are harnessed in the service of traditional systems of power and inequality. Given the emphasis on channeling aid and development money through democratic structures in international development policy, this case provides a warning against assumptions that a country’s embrace of democracy as part the postwar development process ensures that democracy will function as intended.1 Popular mobilization is linked with political contexts and networks in current research on social movements and collective action. While the case I examine here is not a social movement per se, the processes of localized collective action, and the way public mobilization is channeled , are conditioned by larger national and global structures. Youths feel that their actions have the power to influence government to improve their opportunities, whether or not those actions are either sustained or aimed at political transformation. The constraints on social welfare and employment opportunities that stem from Sierra Leone’s marginal and yet dependent position in the global economic system feed the disaffection among youths. These youths have been mobilized by politicians/big men seeking access to public coffers as a means of generating individual benefits for their own supporters, while still remaining marginal to those networks. Moreover, the concentration of financial resources at the global level structures international aid flows in ways that contribute to the “unfreedoms” of Sierra Leoneans, perpetuating competition and conflict that undermine efforts at postwar peacebuilding (see Sen 1999). The phenomenon of the “half-baked,” and the power that an alienated , dispossessed section of youths have in influencing the deposition of a chairman, draws on two interrelated themes of social mobilization . The first, that all forms of social mobilization, whether positive or negative, resonate with and have their origins within the social norms or parent culture to which they pose a challenge, is widely documented 1. Though relevant, this is not the space for a discussion over whether donor organizations and countries should continue providing aid to African countries. For the purposes of this argument, suffice to say this is one of the reasons aid may end. Poisoned Patronage  161 in dissimulative forms of action across Africa and elsewhere (see Branch 2006; Edelman 2001; Mooney 1998; Useem 1998; West 1998). The “halfbaked youths,” by being mobilized to challenge the authority of the chairman, hoped that they could prove themselves worthy of being incorporated into existing forms of power, specifically the new political patronage networks. Therefore, their action was motivated and molded by their social norms with the goal of achieving gains within those norms, rather than working on a broad form of cultural transformation. In essence, they were working to empower themselves within existing systems of inequality , rather than emancipating themselves from the system altogether. By being successful in their short-term goal of ousting a chairman but failing to gain...