When the conflict in Sierra Leone was declared officially over, the process of consolidating the ONS structure came to the forefront, as did all the challenges that the task entailed. Obstacles started to emerge, including withholding of staff funding by the Ministry of Finance, difficulties recruiting new entrants and delays in passing of primary legislation. Concerns also emerged about the level of politicisation of these institutions, a continuation of past practices, including the fact that some of the staff members were political appointees. As the National Security and Central Intelligence Act was being formulated, political activities of ONS staff fundamentally undermined the neutrality of the national security architecture, which was being consolidated (see Figure 1).
Figure 2: The National Security Architecture160
In addition, ONS and CISU personnel in particular did not have direct professional experience with national security coordination and intelligence production, which prompted a number of training courses. Given these challenges and the concomitant need to build the capability of the intelligence architecture, it was particularly impressive that so much progress was made in this period.
Much of the credit for what was accomplished is due to the individuals that staffed the organizations.
By 2003, an ONS organization had begun to take shape, including structured management, which prompted reconsideration of the future of SILSEP. As noted by the National Security Coordinator serving at the time:
“I was in London in 2002-2003 and was asked a question about how long we would need advisers in the ONS. I said that we would need them for an extensive period of time – far beyond 2007. They were thinking about withdrawing in 2002. Our adviser had been fighting wars in the sense that much of their job was to protect the institution [from political interference] and allow it to grow. Election time [in 2007] showed security was still an issue and the entire system could have been thrown down”161.
The critical role of the adviser in opening political space within which the ONS could develop at its own speed is likely to be the single most important role that an external actor can play (which was also reflected in the role of the expatriate IGP). Indeed, in late 2002, elements within the Government continued to try to undermine the newly-established ONS by attempting to establish a parallel security apparatus.
Sierra Leone’s National Security Coordinator further explains:
“I will talk to one important, but elusive point of the SSR process in Sierra Leone: Creating the political space. As I saw it, if that space is not created, it is not going to work. I was the National Security Adviser for two days and then on the third day I became Coordinator.
People came in with their own views, five people who picked up
stories here and there. I wasn’t going to work with all of them, since some of them were clearly political and I had a problem with that. If interventions are going to be made by external actors, then there has to be a structure in place – advisers, and so forth – to provide the space so actors within the country can perform. We didn’t know how to do it, but Kabbah knew what he wanted to happen. The structures that are being put in place should be answerable to the President alone, but through committees, not through ministries. It should be apolitical. Maybe we need more than one adviser. There are wars around [of a political nature] to keep the process going.
Intelligence has to be brought to a central point first [not the President]. I was a victim myself when I was in the military, where officers would go straight to the President. Some were killed, some were put in prison. I was therefore very, very fuzzy about a central body, an assessment team, which Ghana did not have. We picked up the idea from the UK, which has a central body in the Cabinet Office. However, Kabbah clearly stated that he did not want it in Cabinet. Gradually, people who could do sound assessments emerged. In 2003 it started to make sense”162.
External actors would often emphasize the benefits of creating a wholly new organization from a blank sheet of paper. While the ONS and its functions were a novelty in Sierra Leone’s security architecture, the function of the National Security Adviser had existed. However, the critical shift from ‘personal adviser’ to ‘government agency’ was decisive, and a whole range of functions were introduced, including coordination, intelligence assessment and tasking.
Similarly, there had been no idea of how CISU should be structured or of how to recruit and train staff for an organization which dealt with matters of importance to national security. The functions of the ONS were thus a distinct break with the previous strategic direction of Sierra Leone’s security providing institutions. The focus became the education of security system actors, including discussion of a clear idea of the roles and responsibilities of the ONS.
The 2002 National Security and Central Intelligence Act had the potential to help in this regard. The Act was seen as a way of fully establishing the provincial and district security committees, PROSECs and DISECs, which at the time existed predominantly in name only. Equally, there was a need to clarify their reporting relationship with the national level. On paper, the Act is today seen as an exemplary piece of legislation for intelligence collection and handling and also for reporting to the political leadership and Parliament163. With the work of advisers and the passing of the National Security and Central Intelligence Act, a national requirement-setting system was gradually created. The core aims of the Act were designed to lead to a decrease of political pressure on security services, or at least its dissipation, through a series of intermediary structures. It was also designed to delineate the relationship between ONS and CISU and to boost the confidence of staff in terms of the permanence of these organisations as clearly stated in legislation, passed by Parliament.
The proposed Act was available and gazetted in late 2000, but continued to go through various review processes, including input from London-based experts until it was put before Parliament in October 2001. The length of time that it took for the law to be promulgated was not immediately explicable. However, because the Act would clarify the roles of the ONS and CISU, it was seen as having potentially significant political implications. The ONS had not only requested that the issue be treated with greater urgency, but also declared themselves available at any time to support the Act’s introduction164. The issue was critical at the time, as the delay in promulgation halted further development of the ONS, and from the perspective of the UK Government, progression of the SILSEP project specifically. Delays in recruitment and restrictions on operations were seen as a direct result of the absence of enabling legislation and without the passing of the National Security and Intelligence Act, a number of secondary pieces of legislation, such as those relating to Counter-terrorism and Money Laundering, were delayed.
Promulgation of the Act was important, not least in clarifying the roles and responsibilities of the ONS and CISU. However, its promulgation did not have
a direct impact on the critical issue of capacity in either CISU or ONS, both of which remained short of human and financial resources.
In the early stages of SILSEP (prior to 2002), a lot of emphasis had been placed on putting appropriate vetting procedures in place; work was carried out with the Public Service Commission to create a National Vetting Agency.
The aim at the time was to require that ONS and CISU appointments be made on recommendation from the National Security Coordinator and the Director- General of CISU after a transparent recruitment process overseen by the Public Service Commission.
Despite some successes in recruiting, in keeping with the dire financial situation of most of Sierra Leone’s government institutions, the issue of unreliable funding was surfacing as a destabilizing and stifling concern. While the staffing budget for the fiscal year may have been agreed to with the Ministry of Finance, in 2002, the Ministry of Finance would inform the ONS that there was no funding available for any further recruitment for at least the remainder of the first quarter (until April 2002). Such announcements would be made at the last minute and had a debilitating effect on other activities such as planned training of new intakes (and thus waste of funding).
Nonetheless, the ONS managed to continue the establishment of PROSECs/
DISECs across the country. The National Security Coordinator outlined the process for engaging the civilian population and paramount chiefs in the district and provincial committee system as follows:
“Civilians needed to start participating in their own security. We had a lot of problems with bringing in the paramount chiefs. We also met resistance to ONS coming in from the military and the police.
Colleagues who had served as District Officers before had certain ideas about what intelligence was, and this (PROSECs/DISECs) was not exactly it. They were designed as a forum to discuss security in the local communities. It was not very easy; the police, for instance, had had their structures before [and thus a point of departure for
building strength]. Over time, by 2002, when the war was over, we had recruited our second batch, divided between CISU and ONS.
At the end of 2002, we had quite a few people in ONS, but we couldn’t afford to have them up-country. In each of the DISECs we had the paramount chiefs. As long as the paramount chief agreed to share information with his colleagues, this worked well. From the onset, the chiefs were keen to be involved, but it took quite a lot of time for them to become comfortable sitting with soldiers. Here civil society was important, to convince them [paramount chiefs]
that they [the military] are not devils. The more you join in, the better. They started to discuss a wide range of issues, sometimes outside their mandate. In the beginning, it was about getting people to discuss”165.