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 underst
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 underst