All People's Congress

The All People's Congress (APC) is a Sierra Leonean political party whose history in the book illustrates how a party’s pursuit of power can shape state institutions and economic life. After narrowly winning the contested 1967 election, the APC, led by Siaka Stevens, built a violent one-party regime. Its rule brought the destruction of the railway linking Mendeland to the capital, the weakening of the national army, and the use of loyal security forces. The party lost power in a 1992 coup but returned to government in the 2007 democratic election, demonstrating the persistence of its political legacy beyond the end of Stevens’s rule.

Election and political base

When Sierra Leone became independent in 1961, Britain transferred power to Sir Milton Margai and the Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP), whose support was concentrated in the south, especially Mendeland, and the east. Sir Albert Margai succeeded his brother as prime minister in 1964. In the closely contested 1967 election, the SLPP narrowly lost to the opposition APC, led by Stevens, a Limba from the north. The APC’s support came chiefly from northern ethnic groups, including the Limba, Temne, and Loko. This regional and political divide formed the backdrop to Stevens’s later treatment of Mendeland and its economy.

The southbound railway had originally been planned by the British as a means of governing Sierra Leone and reaching Mendeland. By 1967, however, it transported much of the country’s exports, including coffee, cocoa, and diamonds. Mende farmers produced the coffee and cocoa, and the railway connected Mendeland’s economy to wider markets. Mendeland had voted overwhelmingly for Albert Margai in the election. Stevens regarded the political interests of the Mende as opposed to his own and therefore treated the railway not simply as infrastructure but as a potential source of strength for his rivals.

Stevens’s rule and the railway

Stevens dismantled the railway to Mendeland and sold both its track and rolling stock, making the decision difficult to reverse. The consequences remained visible in the dilapidated stations at Hastings and Waterloo, and trains no longer ran to Bo. The action severely damaged some of Sierra Leone’s most vigorous economic sectors. The book presents it as a choice in which political consolidation took precedence over growth: Stevens feared that a railway serving a region aligned with the SLPP would strengthen his opponents, and accepted the economic cost of stopping it.

The party’s electoral victory did not lead to continued competitive government. Stevens remained in power in 1985 not through popular reelection, but after establishing a violent dictatorship that killed and harassed political opponents, particularly members of the SLPP. He became president in 1971, and from 1978 Sierra Leone had only one legal political party, the APC. In this account, the party’s hold on government rested on coercion and restrictions on political competition rather than an ongoing electoral mandate.

Stevens also reshaped the security apparatus to limit threats to his rule. Concerned that a strong army might remove him, he reduced its strength and relied instead on specially created paramilitary units loyal to him. The Internal Security Unit became known to the public as I Shoot U; the later Special Security Division was called Siaka Stevens’s Dogs. The weakening of the army and the growth of personal security forces diminished the state’s capacity. In 1992, a group of only thirty soldiers led by Captain Valentine Strasser overthrew the APC regime, an outcome the book connects to the earlier hollowing out of the military.

Colonial inheritance and institutional continuity

The APC governed through institutions that had important precedents in British colonial rule. The British had used indirect rule, working through paramount chiefs who collected taxes, administered justice, and kept order. They had also required coffee and cocoa farmers to sell produce through the Sierra Leone Produce Marketing Board. Though presented as a means of cushioning farmers from fluctuations in world prices, the board increasingly paid them less than their produce was worth, allowing the colonial state to extract revenue. Post-independence governments retained the marketing-board system and used it to extract even more from farmers; they also continued to govern the countryside through the colonial framework of indirect rule.

There was a difference in how the British and Stevens treated the railway, but the book emphasizes a deeper continuity: both regimes used political power to control resources, with the consequences falling heavily on the hinterland. The British had regarded the railway as useful for governing Mendeland, trusting that the army could be sent there if rebellion broke out. Stevens instead saw it as a danger because it could benefit a political opposition. By dismantling it while preserving other extractive arrangements, his government changed the means of control without dismantling the underlying pattern of extraction.

The party’s history also belonged to a wider pattern in which independent governments inherited and strengthened colonial institutions rather than replacing them. Sierra Leone’s colonial authorities had built extractive structures upon existing forms of political power; postcolonial leaders, including Stevens, found those structures useful for maintaining control. The book describes this as a vicious circle: economic institutions that concentrate resources benefit those with political power, who can then use those resources to defend their rule. In Sierra Leone, the consequence was not only impoverishment but also a weakening of the state itself.

Collapse, overthrow, and return

By the time Stevens brought Joseph Momoh in to replace him in 1985, while ill with cancer, Sierra Leone’s economy was collapsing. The roads deteriorated, schools disintegrated, national television ceased broadcasting in 1987 after its transmitter was sold, and a radio tower fell in 1989, ending broadcasts beyond Freetown. The account links this breakdown to the extractive regime Stevens had built and to the state’s declining capacity. In 1991, when the Revolutionary United Front crossed from Liberia into Sierra Leone, the weakened state was unable to stop it.

The APC regime had already fallen in 1992, but its political inheritance outlasted the coup. After the civil war ended in 2002, the APC returned to power in the 2007 democratic election. Ernest Bai Koroma won the presidency without having been associated with the old APC governments, yet several members of his cabinet had ties to them. Stevens’s sons, Bockarie and Jengo, were appointed ambassadors to the United States and Germany. For the book, this return is evidence that a civil war and a change of government do not necessarily end the influence of extractive institutions or the political networks formed under them. Sierra Leone continued to move between periods of order and severe disorder, while the state remained weak and its institutions extractive.

Significance

The APC’s history is presented not merely as a succession of administrations but as a case study in the conflict between political survival and economic development. Stevens’s destruction of the railway makes that conflict concrete: a major export route was sacrificed because its benefits were associated with a rival political constituency. His government’s use of a one-party system, weakened army, and loyal security units further shows how political control shaped both institutional design and state capacity.

At the same time, the party’s return in 2007 complicates any idea that a coup or civil war automatically breaks with the past. Colonial practices of extraction had survived independence, and political actors continued to benefit from them. The APC’s trajectory thus connects a regional electoral base, the suppression of opponents, economic damage, institutional inheritance, state collapse, and political persistence in one account of how power can endure even when the institutions through which it operates impoverish the country they govern.