World Bank’s New Memo, Old Mindset: Why Sierra Leone Must Break Free from Dependency

by Chernor M. Jalloh

Lecuturer of Governance, Leadership & Development Studies

IPAM – University Of Sierra Leone

Reading through the World Bank’s 2025 Country Economic Memorandum (CEM) for Sierra Leone, I felt a mix of cautious hope and déjà vu. The document, titled “From Potential to Progress: Structural Transformation and Job Creation,” promises a shift—from past portrayals of fragility and conflict toward a future marked by demographic dividends and middle-income ambitions. At first glance, it offers an encouraging narrative: Sierra Leone’s natural resource wealth, youthful population, and increasing access to education are framed as drivers of prosperity.

But as I read deeper, I recognized a troubling undercurrent. The language may be polished, the charts updated, and the tone measured, but the logic—its very skeleton—is still eerily familiar. This, I realized, is yet another iteration of what dependency theorists like Raúl Prebisch and Samir Amin warned us about: policy blueprints that gently reinforce structural subordination within the global economic order.

A Reform Agenda or a Reinforced Status Quo?

The report prescribes four strategic pillars: macroeconomic stabilization, redefined state roles, private sector empowerment, and human capital development. On paper, they sound rational—even urgent. But in practice, they rest on a development model that has long prioritized integration into global markets over building internal economic sovereignty. As I examined the emphasis on foreign direct investment (FDI), austerity, and liberalized trade—especially in extractives and agriculture—I couldn’t help but think of the Washington Consensus playbook. The memo’s proposed path to prosperity is paved with old stones: reduce state intervention, open markets, attract external capital. In effect, it expects Sierra Leone to keep exporting raw materials and importing finished goods, just more efficiently. But this is not transformation—it is optimization within an exploitative structure.

Dependency in a New Dress

What struck me most was the subtle but persistent messaging: that Sierra Leone’s best hope lies in selling cheap labor and raw resources to the global North. The memo acknowledges our low productivity and limited capital but sees the solution in “competitive advantage” through mining and agro-processing—sectors notoriously vulnerable to commodity cycles, foreign control, and environmental degradation. This is precisely the dependency trap. In Samir Amin’s words, “Peripheral capitalism cannot replicate the development of central capitalism.” Sierra Leone, like many others on the periphery, is offered a staircase that never reaches the top floor—because each step is shaped by exogenous interests. The Bank’s advocacy for shrinking state-owned enterprises and favoring market forces sounds modern and efficient. Yet we know from the experience of South Korea, Malaysia, and Rwanda that strategic state involvement is essential during early-stage industrialization. Why should Sierra Leone be denied the same path?

My Frustration with Extractive Optimism

The memo champions mining and agro-processing as growth engines. But as someone who has seen firsthand the devastating social and ecological cost of extractive operations in the provinces—broken communities, displaced farmers, polluted rivers—I find this optimism naïve at best, complicit at worst. Even the Bank’s own data reveal that our export basket is still dominated by low-value minerals with weak linkages to the domestic economy. We’ve been down this road before: from rutile and bauxite to diamonds and iron ore. And each time, the cycle ends the same—boom, bust, bailout. How, then, can we speak of “diversification” without confronting the extractive paradox head-on?

Toward a Bold, Endogenous Future

It became clear to me as I read the final chapters of the report: Sierra Leone must reclaim agency over its development trajectory. We cannot afford to be a laboratory for donor-prescribed reforms any longer. What we need is not a recycled model—but a sovereign development strategy that emerges from within.

That means:

• Renegotiating mining contracts to retain value locally and investing those revenues in health, education, and infrastructure.
• Incubating indigenous industries through state-supported entrepreneurship, technology transfer, and targeted subsidies.
• Breaking food and energy dependence through smart agricultural policies and renewable energy investments.
• Forging regional value chains, especially within ECOWAS, to shift from extractive to transformative trade.

The lessons of developmental state theory tell us that transformation is not a market miracle—it is the result of deliberate, state-led strategy that nurtures domestic capabilities. The likes of Ha-Joon Chang and Dani Rodrik have argued this convincingly. It’s time we stopped treating African economies as exceptions to this rule.

My Final Thought: This Mirror Still Distorts

The 2025 CEM tries hard to be different. It avoids the colonial caricature of Sierra Leone as a chaotic state. It speaks of opportunity, talent, and reform. But when I finished reading, I was left with a hollow sense of déjà vu. It still reflects Sierra Leone through the lens of what we lack—not what we have. As Frantz Fanon warned, “The colonized is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country’s cultural standards.” The same applies economically: we are elevated only when we conform to the development norms of those who once colonized us.

So let us stop chasing illusions of “middle-income” status by 2032 through extractives and FDI. Let us instead define development on our own terms—one that values self-sufficiency, industrial ambition, and democratic ownership of resources.

It’s time to break the mirror and build a new window.

Copyright –Published in Expo Times News on Friday, 27th June, 2025 (ExpoTimes News – Expo Media Group (expomediasl.com)