Siaka Stevens
Siaka Stevens ruled Sierra Leone for seventeen years, from 1968 to 1985, the trade-union leader and police officer's son who won the election of 1967, was kept out of office by a coup for a year, came back on the shoulders of a sergeants' revolt, made the country a republic in 1971 with himself as executive president, a one-party state in 1978, and a private estate in which the diamonds went to the Lebanese traders and Afro-Lebanese businessmen who were his partners, the treasury went empty, the roads and the railway went to ruin, and the Organisation of African Unity summit of 1980, for which he built a village of villas and a conference hall, cost more than the country's budget. He handed the presidency to his army commander in 1985 and died three years later, and the state he hollowed out fell into the civil war of the 1990s. He was born in 1905 at Moyamba, worked on the railway and in the iron mines at Marampa, where he founded the mineworkers' union in 1943, went to Ruskin College, Oxford, and was minister of mines in the colonial government of the 1950s. He broke with Milton Margai's Sierra Leone People's Party in 1960 over the terms of independence and founded the All People's Congress, the party of the north and the poor of Freetown, which won the election of March 1967 by a seat. The army commander Lansana arrested him at the governor's house as he was being sworn in, and a second coup by junior officers replaced Lansana with a council that ruled for a year until the privates and sergeants mutinied in April 1968 and brought Stevens back from exile in Guinea. He governed with Guinean troops in Freetown, executed the officers who plotted in 1971 and the politicians who plotted in 1974, and in 1978 had a referendum make the APC the only party, with ninety-seven per cent. The diamonds were the state. The Selection Trust's monopoly was ended and the fields at Kono opened to licensed diggers whose licences his friends held. The official exports fell from two million carats to a hundred thousand as the stones went out through Lebanon, and by 1985 the government could not pay its teachers. He named Major-General Momoh, who had no politics, as his successor and retired to his house. Pa Shaki, the people called him, the old man, and by then it was not affectionate.
- Lived: 1905 CE – 1988 CE
- Nationality: Sierra Leonean
- Roles: president, prime minister, politician
