Ahmad Tejan Kabbah
Ahmad Tejan Kabbah was president of Sierra Leone from 1996 to 1997 and from 1998 to 2007, the United Nations development official who came home after twenty-two years to win the first election since 1967, in March 1996, five years into the Revolutionary United Front's war of amputations. He was overthrown fourteen months later by a group of junior officers who invited the RUF into Freetown. He was restored in March 1998 by a Nigerian-led West African force. He survived the RUF's assault on the capital of January 1999, Operation No Living Thing, in which six thousand died. He signed the Lomé accord that July that made the RUF's leader Foday Sankoh vice-president and gave him the diamonds. He saw it collapse when the RUF took five hundred UN peacekeepers hostage in May 2000. He was saved by the British paratroopers Blair sent that month, who broke the RUF and the West Side Boys and rebuilt the army. On 18 January 2002 he could declare the war over in a ceremony at Lungi in which the weapons were burned. He was born in Pendembu in 1932, a Mandingo Muslim whose mother was Mende, and studied economics at Aberystwyth and law at Gray's Inn. He was a district commissioner and permanent secretary in the 1960s, was dismissed by Siaka Stevens, and spent 1970 to 1992 at the UN Development Programme, ending as its director for eastern and southern Africa. The second term, won in May 2002 with seventy per cent, was the reconstruction. There was the truth and reconciliation commission, the special court that tried the RUF's commanders and Charles Taylor, and the disarmament of seventy-two thousand fighters. The UN's largest peacekeeping mission was drawn down in 2005, and the elections local and national were held. There was a corruption and a poverty that stayed, with the country last on the human development index and the electricity in Freetown on for a few hours a day. He handed over in 2007 to Koroma of the opposition, the country's first change of party by ballot since independence. He died in Freetown in March 2014, a year before Ebola, having been the man the war ended under rather than the man who ended it, which he acknowledged.
- Lived: 1932 CE – 2014 CE
- Nationality: Sierra Leonean
- Roles: president, politician
