Rampant corruption played a central role with regard to the outbreak of the Sierra Leonean civil war (1991-2002), and still today, it poses a huge problem to the country’s development. Despite impressive growth rates related to its natural resources, Sierra Leone continues to be one of the poorest countries in the world, and the government’s neglect of basic social infrastructure has high costs, as the Ebola crisis has shown. After the war, governance reforms were given key importance. Based on field research conducted in Sierra Leone in 2013, the paper analyses two different donor approaches towards corruption: first, DFID’s strategy of institution building, supporting the Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC), early in the post-conflict phase; and second, UN peacebuilding, which first concentrated on stabilisation, postponing direct anti-corruption measures for a few years. The analysis shows that Sierra Leonean elites used the early post-conflict phase to sell most of the country’s surface area to international mining companies – murky deals from which those elites have benefited while the communities living in mining areas have not. Corruption, it is argued, is an integral part of the elite bargain between the national government and ‘traditional’ Paramount Chiefs, which contributes to stability and even the formal maintenance of democracy. The paper suggests two things: first, changing the formal rules by introducing new institutions such as the ACC is not enough. Rather, informal institutions and practices – the exclusive patronage networks between national and local elites – need to be addressed. Second, postponing anti-corruption measures for a while can contribute to political stability, but it entails medium-term risks as it may entrench political and economic structures which satisfy elites, but marginalise large parts of society. For peacebuilding to be sustainable, donors must go beyond current anti-corruption policies and address the underlying exclusive elite arrangements.
