Army History - Independent Sierra Leone
At independence in 1961, the Sierra Leone Regiment was named Royal Sierra Leone Military Force and later re-named Republic of Sierra Leone Military Force (RSLMF) in 1971 when the country became a Republic State. However, a lot of significant events took place within this decade-long post-independence period involving the new Army. Post-independence politics polarized the country between two divides: the dominant ethnic group in the north (Temne) rallied around all other northern tribes and formed the All People’s Congress Party (APC) which strongly challenged the then incumbent south-eastern party; the Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) spear-headed by their own dominant tribe (Mende), in general elections in 1967 and won.
The Head of the Army (Brigadier David Lansana) who hailed from the Mende Tribe staged a coup d’état on 21 March 1967, the very day the Prime Minister (PM) Siaka Stevens was sworn into office; to prevent the north from assuming power. He named his group the National Interim Council (NIC). Two days later, another group of senior officers comprising westerners and northerners headed by Colonel AT Juxon-Smith, who named themselves the National Reformation Council (NRC), staged a counter-coup and suspended the constitution. They ruled the country for a whole year while the beleaguered PM and his government sought refuge in neighboring Republic of Guinea and were training dissidents for a come-back.
The small size of the Sierra Leone military establishment, ethnic rivalries, and differences in backgrounds and educational experiences operated to divide the army, particularly the officer corps. In 1965 and 1966, for instance, the army went through an unstable phase characterized by several conflicts among its officers. After an incident in which a senior army officer, Colonel Ambrose Genda, was retired for disagreeing with the force commander, Lansana, the latter became a target for a coup by young army officers who petitioned the prime minister for his removal, charging him with “nepotism, tribalism, immorality, drunkenness, and the inability to administer.”
Under the leadership of Brigadier David Lansana in the mid-1960s the army’s morale was at a very low ebb. The new young officers, most of whom were trained at Sandhurst or Mons, seemed to resent the fact that Lansana, a primary school graduate when he joined the army, had risen to the highest position in the armed forces. Some members of the army felt that the commanding officer’s close friendship with Sir Albert Margai enabled Margai to exercise control over the army and thus compromise its neutrality. Promotions and pay were also constant sources of discontent.
During the army’s control of the country from March 1967 to April 1968 the military junta used no more than ten members of the armed forces at any one time at the decisionmaking level. Most of the officer corps and the entire rank and file thus felt alienated, the latter because the junta did very little to improve the army’s conditions of service. Capabilities and morale suffered acutely as a result of the succession of coups.
The military junta started indulging themselves in corrupt practices aimed at enriching themselves and cared less about the Army. This triggered resentment among the lower ranks in the Army who organized a mutiny en-masse and arrested all senior officers both serving and in government; thus overthrowing the junta in April 1968. They called themselves the Anti-Corruption Revolutionary Movement (ACRM) and were led by a retired senior officer Brigadier John Bangura, who at independence was the most senior northerner in the Army; but had been retired and offered a diplomatic job by the then south-eastern government, as he was regarded as a potential threat. The imprisonment of the entire officer corps after the 1968 countercoup and the losses of key personnel and after three subsequent coup attempts was particularly disastrous.
The ACRM restored the democratic constitution and invited the PM from exile to assume his rightful office. The PM reinstated Brigadier Bangura, leader of the ACRM, into the Army and appointed him Commander. He (the PM) then made a lot of effort to develop the country and reunite the people, but was swayed into dictatorship by few other coup scares until he lost popularity. The reinstated Army Commander, who was a stunt democrat, lost confidence in the PM and started opposing some of his undemocratic decisions.
Mindful of the entire Army’s devotion to this commander and the potential danger he posed, a conspiracy scam was set-up against him leading to his arrest, trial and execution in March 1970. Exactly one year after this, a group of soldiers loyal to the executed commander conducted a failed mutiny leading to the arrest and detention of several of them including Corporal Foday Sankoh, the leader of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebel group in the 10 year gruesome insurgency in Sierra Leone.
On attaining a republican status in April 1971, Sierra Leone adopted a new republican constitution and Premier Stevens was sworn in as the first President. During the years that followed, Stevens did everything humanly possible to perpetuate himself in power: he invited Guinean troops for personal protection, transformed the country into one party rule, created a para-military force5 as presidential guards and heavily stuffed the Army with his party loyalists. As a result, the Army became heavily politicized and poorly equipped for fear of subversion; the presidential guards were even more equipped than the Army.
Since the return to civilian rule important changes were made in the armed forces. After a pay dispute in 1974 the army received general increases in pay. Pensions were also made available after ten years of service. The appointment of the army commander to the House of Representatives and to a ministerial position enhanced the army’s image of itself. Thus under the leadership of Momoh Sierra Leone’s army seemed to be gaining in morale and discipline. All salary and pension benefits that have accrued to the army also apply to the navy and the air force. The latter services were inadequately trained in part because they were so new.
The RSLMF remained a single-arm organization until 1979 when a small Navy was established. Upon retiring from presidency in November 1985, Stevens handed over power to the then Army Commander Major General Joseph Saidu Momoh whose loyalty to him had been clearly unquestionable; side-stepping his Vice President (Sorie Ibrahim Koroma) in the guise of ill-health. The newly transformed President however later proved politically weak as he basically upheld his predecessor’s autocratic leadership style. The country’s economy continued to dwindle while less attention was paid to improving the Army until the rebel war struck in 1991.
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