If you’ve spent any time in Sierra Leone, you already know the answer isn’t simple. You’ve probably also noticed that the question itself lands differently depending on who you ask, and which part of the country you’re asking it.
Spend a morning at Congo Cross market in Freetown and you’ll hear it in the way people talk about the price of rice. Spend an evening in a local bar in Bo and you’ll hear it in the jokes that aren’t quite jokes. There’s a kind of political exhaustion that settles into a country after decades of being let down and Sierra Leone has it. Whether that exhaustion has curdled into something more permanent or something closer to total disillusionment, is the real question worth asking.
The Feeling on the Ground Isn’t New, But It’s Getting Louder
Sierra Leoneans have always had a complicated relationship with their leaders. The country has been through enough which includes a brutal civil war and multiple corrupt governments. The back and forth switches between the SLPP and the APC often feel like swapping one set of problems for another.
But what feels different now, and I want to be careful here because “different” is a word people throw around too easily in political commentary, is the depth of it. It’s not just frustration. It’s something closer to disbelief. Not “our leaders are failing us” but “our leaders were never really trying.”
What the 2023 Elections Did to Trust
The June 2023 general elections were supposed to be a test. President Julius Maada Bio was seeking re-election, the opposition APC was campaigning on economic grievances, and the country was watching. What followed was one of the most disputed elections in Sierra Leone’s post-war history.
International observers raised questions about the process particularly around the use of a proportional representation system that was introduced with limited preparation time and even less public consultation. The Electoral Commission of Sierra Leone went on to declare Bio the winner and the APC said it was fraud.
Now, disputed elections happen all over the world. What matters is what comes after. In Sierra Leone, what came after was a period of serious political tension, some violence, and a government that responded to criticism in ways that made people nervous. Journalists were harassed. Opposition figures were arrested. The atmosphere in Freetown got tight.
The Ibrahim Index of African Governance had already been tracking declines in Sierra Leone’s governance scores. After 2023, the mood in the country reflected something those indices can’t fully capture: a sense that the rules of the game had changed, and not in anyone’s favour.
Young Sierra Leoneans Are the Ones Worth Listening To
If you want to understand where the country is heading, don’t talk to politicians. Don’t even talk to activists, necessarily. Talk to a 24 year old in Kenema who finished secondary school, can’t find work, and has a cousin in the UK who left two years ago and isn’t coming back.
Youth unemployment in Sierra Leone sits in deeply uncomfortable territory. The country has one of the youngest populations on the continent and one of the weakest labour markets. A university degree, which families sacrifice enormously to fund, doesn’t reliably lead anywhere. And when young people look at who’s getting the contracts, the appointments, the opportunities, they see the same networks, the same surnames, the same faces.
There’s a phrase I heard more than once during time spent in Freetown: “You have to know somebody to be somebody.” It wasn’t said bitterly. It was said like a fact of physics. That’s when you know something has gone deep into a culture’s bones.
The young people who are still engaged politically tend to be engaged through frustration, not hope. They’re following the news and sharing how they feel on social media, but the ones who’ve given up completely might be the more telling signal. When an entire generation decides the whole system isn’t worth engaging with, that’s not just apathy. That’s a verdict.
The Economy Is Doing the Government’s Reputation No Favours
Whatever your view on the 2023 elections, it’s hard to argue with the cost of living. The Leone has struggled. Inflation hit ordinary Sierra Leoneans hard, particularly on food prices and fuel. The subsidy removals that the government pushed through, partly under pressure from international lenders, landed brutally on households that were already stretched.
The government points to infrastructure projects, road construction, the Free Quality Education initiative, things that are real and worth acknowledging. But when someone’s daily hustle has gotten harder, when the bag of rice costs what it costs, abstract development indicators don’t have much traction in the conversation.
There’s a version of this story where Bio’s government is making long-term investments that will eventually pay off and is being unfairly judged against short-term pain. There’s another version where the rhetoric of “New Direction” never matched the reality on the ground, and people have noticed.
Most Sierra Leoneans I’ve talked to hold both of those things at once which is intellectually honest, but it doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in leadership.
Is This Specific to Bio, or Is It Bigger Than That?
This is the part where I think a lot of outside commentary gets it wrong. The question isn’t really “has Sierra Leone lost faith in Julius Maada Bio?” The question is whether Sierra Leone has lost faith in the entire political class, regardless of party.
Because here’s the thing about the APC: they had their turn. Ernest Bai Koroma’s years in office were not without their own serious allegations of corruption and mismanagement. The same families who struggle now were struggling then. The same young people who can’t find work now couldn’t find work then.
The disillusionment isn’t partisan. It’s structural. People aren’t angry at a specific leader as much as they’re angry at a system that seems to reproduce the same outcomes no matter who’s at the top. And that’s a much harder problem to solve, because there’s no election that fixes it.
Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index has consistently placed Sierra Leone in the lower rankings globally. That’s not a new problem. It predates this government and will likely outlast it.
What Civil Society Is Actually Doing
One thing that doesn’t get enough credit internationally is how active Sierra Leone’s civil society has remained, even under pressure. There are journalists still doing real work. There are NGOs and community organisations that haven’t given up. There are lawyers challenging things in court. The space is shrinking in some ways, but it hasn’t collapsed.
And actually, I think that’s the most honest counter-argument to total despair about Sierra Leone’s political trajectory. The institutions are weak, the political culture is troubled, the economic situation is genuinely difficult. But there are Sierra Leoneans, inside and outside government, who are still trying. That’s not nothing.
Whether that’s enough is a different question.
So Has Faith Been Lost?
Not entirely. But it’s been seriously damaged, in ways that will take more than a good election or a rising GDP figure to repair.
What I’d say to anyone trying to understand Sierra Leone’s political moment is this: the problem isn’t that Sierra Leoneans are too cynical. The problem is that they’ve been given good reasons to be.
The leaders who manage to rebuild that trust, if any do, won’t do it with speeches. They’ll do it by being boring about it, by showing up, being consistent, not stealing, letting journalists do their jobs, and doing that for long enough that people start to believe it’s real.
