Freetown, Sierra Leone’s capital, appears in the account of Joseph Momoh’s rule as both the seat of government and a measure of how far the state had receded. Roads and schools deteriorated, civil servants and teachers went unpaid, and communications beyond the capital failed; the collapse left the government unable to stop the Revolutionary United Front from entering the country in 1991.

Capital amid state collapse

By the end of Momoh’s rule, the central government had collapsed. The account describes the unpaid as including civil servants, teachers, and Paramount Chiefs, while border incursions and weapons entering from Liberia accompanied the disappearance of effective government. Freetown remained the capital, but the institutions nominally governed from it could no longer reliably pay public employees or sustain basic services.

The breakdown was visible in the country’s communications network. National television broadcasts stopped in 1987 after the information minister sold the transmitter. In 1989, a radio tower relaying signals outside Freetown fell down, ending transmissions beyond the capital. These episodes distinguish the continued functioning of a capital from the increasingly limited reach of the state: information could no longer be relayed across the country through the existing system.

Political context and consequences

The deterioration followed the extractive rule of Siaka Stevens and his All People’s Congress, which had taken over and intensified institutions inherited from colonial rule. Stevens, ill with cancer, brought Momoh in to replace him in 1985, when the economy was already collapsing. Stevens’s weakening of the military, driven by fear that it might overthrow him, further reduced the state’s capacity to confront armed opponents.

In 1991, the resulting incapacity made it easy for a relatively small number of armed men in the Revolutionary United Front to create chaos across much of the country. The book presents their arrival not as the origin of Sierra Leone’s problems, but as a consequence made possible by a government that had lost the ability to maintain its authority. Freetown’s failed communications links and crumbling public services belong to that larger portrait of state collapse.

A measure of reach

The account uses Freetown as a geographic reference point for the limits of government: when the radio tower fell, transmissions outside the capital ended. That detail gives the city significance beyond its status as the seat of government. The contrast between the capital and the places it could no longer reach makes institutional collapse legible in everyday infrastructure, and helps explain why border incursions and armed rebellion met so little effective resistance.