AUTHOR
Yoni Emmanuel Sesay: Sierra Leone Telegraph: 15 January 2026:
Sierra Leone’s 1991 Constitution was drafted to dismantle the 1978 one-party state and restore multiparty constitutional rule. That transition was necessary and widely welcomed. Yet, from its very inception, it was fragile.
That fragility soon became evident when, barely a year after the Constitution came into force, the country descended into a brutal civil war that lasted a decade.
Today—more than thirty years after the Constitution’s adoption and over two decades since the war ended—it is evident that the political transition it introduced was never fully consolidated.
The legacies of conflict and institutional weakness persisted: weak implementation, excessive concentration of power, exclusion, and the persistent mismanagement of national wealth continue to undermine democratic stability.
These patterns of instability reveal why this history matters. A constitution is not merely a procedural document for elections and offices. It defines how power is exercised, how national wealth is governed, and whether citizens are protected by the state—or exposed to its excesses.
Beyond its immediate political fragility, one of the most serious weaknesses of the 1991 Constitution lies not only in what it contains, but in what it omits.
This deficiency was widely recognised in 2013, when the Constitutional Review Committee (CRC), chaired by Edmund Cowan, conducted extensive nationwide consultations. I had the honour of serving as Chairman of the Sub-Committee on Natural Resources and the Environment. What emerged from those consultations was strikingly clear and remarkably consistent.
Sierra Leoneans—across regions, social groups, and political affiliations—demanded that the Constitution should contain a dedicated chapter on the Environment and Natural Resources, recognising them as the true source of the nation’s wealth, and should provide explicit constitutional protection for the management of public financial assets.
These were not abstract or elite concerns. They reflected lived experience: communities displaced by mining, forests depleted without accountability, rivers polluted, and public finances repeatedly exposed to political interference.
Yet more than a decade later, these core recommendations remain absent from the Constitution—including the amendment bill currently circulating in 2025.
This omission has consequences. Sierra Leone’s real wealth does not lie primarily in political offices or electoral arrangements. It lies in its land, forests, rivers, minerals, fisheries, and oceans. These are not private possessions nor political rewards. They are national assets held in trust for present and future generations. Without strong constitutional safeguards, such assets are easily mismanaged, exploited without accountability, or traded away with little benefit to ordinary citizens.
What Sierra Leone has neglected, others have confronted directly. Across Africa and the wider Commonwealth, constitutional practice has increasingly recognised this reality. Experience has taught many countries—often painfully—that ordinary legislation is not enough.
Where natural resource governance is left to statutes alone, it becomes vulnerable to political expediency, regulatory capture, and reversal. Constitutions, by contrast, set enduring national principles that outlive governments.
Ghana’s Constitution, for example, vests natural resources in the state on behalf of the people, subjecting their exploitation to parliamentary oversight and public accountability.
South Africa strengthened this approach further by recognising environmental rights as justiciable, affirming every citizen’s right to an environment that is not harmful to health or wellbeing, and obligating the state to protect natural resources for present and future generations.
Kenya’s 2010 Constitution represents one of the most ambitious modern constitutional responses to the challenge of governing national wealth, and it was studied closely during our committee’s work. What stood out was Kenya’s explicit acknowledgement that national wealth is wasted if it does not sustain human dignity.
By entrenching the right to food as a justiciable guarantee, alongside public participation in natural-resource governance and sustainability as binding principles, Kenya confronts the reality that unchecked extraction allows wealth to leak away from human wellbeing.
Our study also revealed implementation gaps and institutional strain, reminding us that constitutional ambition must be matched by political will and administrative capacity. Even so, Kenya’s experience demonstrates a vital lesson for Sierra Leone: control over natural wealth is inseparable from democratic legitimacy, and constitutional silence on this link carries a tangible human cost.
Similarly, other nations—such as Botswana and Namibia—have entrenched constitutional protections for national assets and key economic institutions, reflecting an understanding that resource governance and monetary stability are matters of national security rather than political convenience.
Taken together, these examples illustrate a consistent lesson. Where constitutions explicitly protect natural resources and public wealth, states are better equipped to resist predatory extraction, corruption, and short-termism. Where they do not, wealth leaks outward while instability spreads inward.
This lesson has particular urgency for Sierra Leone. In an era of climate change, intensifying global competition for resources, and powerful multinational corporations, leaving national wealth weakly protected is not merely outdated—it is dangerous.
Environmental degradation now translates directly into food insecurity, displacement, and conflict. Weak governance of resources is no longer a marginal policy failure; it is an existential risk.
These constitutional gaps are not abstract—they carry a human cost. For ordinary Sierra Leoneans, weak protection of natural resources results in environmental damage, lost livelihoods, and abandoned communities. The absence of clear constitutional principles allows exploitation without consent and development without benefit.
The 1991 Constitution succeeded in ending formal one-party rule. But it did not adequately secure democratic accountability, protect national wealth, or guard against excessive concentration of power.
The result has been a political transition that has remained fragile from the outset—dependent on personalities rather than institutions and vulnerable to recurring crisis.
Yet despite decades of experience and clear public demand, the 2025 amendment bill does little to address these structural weaknesses. Its focus remains overwhelmingly on political mechanics—rearranging offices, procedures, and power relationships—while neglecting the economic and environmental foundations upon which both the state and its democracy depend.
A renewed constitution should, at minimum, confront this gap directly by entrenching a dedicated framework for natural resources, environmental protection, and the stewardship of public financial assets as matters of constitutional principle rather than ordinary policy choice.
At its core, constitutional reform is about equilibrium—about finding balance between power and responsibility. Politics, like gymnastics, requires balance. And balance is impossible without stable ground.
Sustainable democracy depends on sustainable wealth and responsible stewardship of national resources. A constitution that ignores this reality risks repeating the mistakes of the past, no matter how often it is amended.
Reforming the Constitution is not a rejection of Sierra Leone’s democratic journey. It is an acknowledgement that the journey remains incomplete. The Constitution ended one-party rule, but only a renewed one can secure the nation’s wealth and its future. (Photo: Author – Yoni Emmanuel Sesay).
A modern Sierra Leone needs a constitution that does more than organise political power. It must protect what sustains the nation—its land, its environment, and its shared wealth. The people spoke clearly during the 2013 consultations. Comparative constitutional experience confirms their wisdom. And the world has moved on since 1991.
It is time our Constitution did the same.
