Sierra Leonean Scholar Challenges Africa to Move Beyond the Ballot Box
By: Mustapha Momoh Esq
FREETOWN—Two groundbreaking new books by Joseph Momoh Conteh ask the questions Africa’s democrats dare not and offer answers that could reshape a continent.
Sierra Leone has held elections. It has produced winners and losers, inaugurations and concession speeches, international observers and glowing reports. What it has not produced, persistently, is development. Its citizens still rank among the least developed on earth. Meanwhile, China — a country that has never held a competitive multiparty election lifted 800 million people out of poverty in a single generation.
These are not comfortable facts. They are, however, the facts that drive two extraordinary new books by Joseph Momoh Conteh; a Sierra Leonean scholar, ICT specialist, and development practitioner who dares to ask the question that makes both African democrats and Western donors deeply uneasy: can a nation develop without competitive elections, and if so, what does Africa do next?
“Sierra Leone has held credible elections since 1961. It sits 148th on the Human Development Index. The gap between voting and living well has never been more urgent to explain.”
Book One: The Legitimacy Gap
The first book, A New Perspective on Democracy and Development in Sino-African Settings: Beyond Electoral Politics, emerges directly from Conteh’s doctoral research at Peking University’s Institute of South-South Cooperation and Development — an institution whose very existence speaks to the shifting gravitational centres of global knowledge and power.
Conteh introduces what he calls the “legitimacy gap” ; the chasm between procedural legitimacy, the kind won at the ballot box, and performance legitimacy, the kind earned through actually improving people’s lives. The distinction is deceptively simple, but its implications are seismic. Across twelve substantive chapters, he dissects the evidence in infrastructure, education, health, and digital governance, tracing why the two countries have diverged so dramatically.
Crucially, Conteh is not writing a manifesto for authoritarianism. He is writing a diagnosis. His conclusion is not that Africa should become China, but that African states must urgently invest in state capacity, institutional coherence, and political culture ; the foundations that make governance, democratic or otherwise, actually deliver. He also examines China’s engagement with Africa through FOCAC and the Belt and Road Initiative with what he describes as “honest attention to opportunity and risk” — a refreshing departure from the polemics that too often dominate this debate.
Book Two: Votes Without Foundations
If the first book asks whether elections are sufficient for development, the second asks something equally pointed: why do elections consolidate democracy in some African states and corrode it in others? Votes Without Foundations: African Election Competition, Patronage, and the Battle for Political Order answers through a meticulous comparison of Sierra Leone, Ghana, and Kenya — three Anglophone nations that share colonial inheritance, presidential constitutions, ethnic pluralism, and post-1990 multiparty commitments, yet have travelled strikingly different paths.
Ghana has consolidated. Sierra Leone has suffered progressive institutional erosion despite uninterrupted elections. Kenya has achieved partial consolidation alongside persistent ethnicised clientelism. The contrast between these three is not accidental and Conteh’s rigorous analytical framework, built on Afrobarometer surveys, governance indicators, and the Pedersen index of electoral volatility, reveals the structural logic beneath the surface.
His “conditional theory” rests on four interlocking mechanisms: bottom-up patronage networks, cabinet expansion as a tool of political bargaining, the degree of party institutionalisation, and the persistent gap between how power actually operates and what the law says it should do. The theory, he argues, supersedes both the third-wave optimism that greeted Africa’s democratic transitions in the 1990s and the pessimistic alternatives that have since replaced it.
“Elections strengthen or unsettle political order depending on the institutional foundations beneath them. Without those foundations, the ballot box is not a pillar of democracy — it is a stage.”
A Voice Grounded in Practice
What distinguishes Conteh from many scholars writing in this space is that he is not a distant observer. As Director of Administrative and ICT Specialist at Sierra Leone’s Justice Sector Coordination Office (JSCO), Ministry of Justice, he has spent nearly a decade driving institutional reform from the inside. His academic credentials ; a doctorate in progress at Peking University, an MBA from Dr D.Y. Patil Vidyapeeth University in India, a Master’s in Public Administration from Sun Yat-sen University in China are matched by the practical weight of a man who has sat in government offices and watched the machinery of the state either function or fail.
His stated purpose is to bridge policy and practice, and to offer African readers grounded strategies for long-term national progress. Both books succeed on this count. They are accessible without being simplistic, rigorous without being impenetrable, and perhaps most valuably honest without being despairing.
Why These Books Matter Now
Sierra Leone goes to the polls again. African democracies face mounting pressure from within and without. The optimism that accompanied the wave of multiparty transitions in the 1990s has curdled in many places into a weary cynicism — elections happen, governments change, poverty persists. Into this moment, Conteh injects not despair but intellectual rigour: a demand that we take seriously the question of what governance is actually for.
These are not books for the converted or the comfortable. They are books for reformers, policymakers, students, and anyone who has ever looked at a freshly printed ballot paper and wondered why the hospitals are still understaffed and the roads still unlit. They are the kind of books that, if read seriously, could change the questions that African leaders ask of themselves and that voters ask of their leaders.
Ballots, Conteh reminds us, are the beginning of the story. They are not the end.
WHERE TO FIND THE BOOKS
A New Perspective on Democracy and Development in Sino-African Settings is available in softcover and e-book on Amazon, Generis Publishing, Libroterra, and Bookfinder (ISBN: 979-8-89966-614-8).
Votes Without Foundations is available through Generis Publishing and Libroterra.