Is Sierra Leone Losing Sovereignty? How the Drug Crisis Reveals a Captured State Destroying Generations

by Fatima Babih, EdD

An examination of sovereignty, state capture, and why the fight against drugs in Sierra Leone is designed to fail.

For months now, we have watched Sierra Leone descend deeper into a drug epidemic that is killing our youth while Julius Maada Bio and his cabal in power appear more disturbed by exposure than by deaths.

The Kush crisis is no longer just a public health emergency. It has become a test of Sierra Leone’s sovereignty, and the State is failing that test.

To understand why, we must stop treating this drug crisis as isolated scandals and start examining it through the lens of international law and state responsibility. When we do, an uncomfortable conclusion emerges: Sierra Leone may be sovereign in name, but it is increasingly compromised in function.

What Sovereignty Means

In international law, sovereignty is not symbolic. It is practical. A sovereign nation must:

• Exercise effective control over its territory and institutions
• Enforce its laws without fear or favor
• Protect its population from large-scale harm
• Prevent non-state actors, especially criminal drug networks, from capturing state power

This standard is not my invention. It is codified in the Montevideo Convention (1933), affirmed by the United Nations Charter, and reinforced by political theory from Max Weber to modern governance scholars.

Therefore, claiming sovereignty without accountability is not sovereignty. It is an illusion.

This illusion cracked publicly when Mayor Aki-Sawyerr of Freetown went on national television and revealed horrifying statistics:

220 bodies collected from the streets of Freetown between January and October 2025, many of them believed to be victims of the deadly drug Kush.

The response from Julius Maada Bio’s government was not compassion, coordination, or emergency action. It was intimidation.

The Ministry of Local Government issued a letter that was more concerned with how the Mayor’s report made the government look than with the fact that young people are dying in unprecedented numbers in Sierra Leone. The tone was threatening. The deadline was punitive. The subtext was unmistakable: stop talking.

This is what a defensive state looks like, not a sovereign one. But the strategy failed because the mayor had something the government did not expect: Evidence.

Her response laid bare a pattern of governmental indifference and neglect:

• She produced detailed records of the 220 bodies collected
• She demonstrated that corpse collection had risen from fewer than 50 per year to more than 220 in ten months
• She showed that she had been raising the alarm since 2022, writing repeatedly to the Ministries of Interior and Local Government
• She revealed that those letters went unanswered

In the end, she made a decision no competent leader takes lightly:

Freetown City Council will no longer collect corpses without clear direction from central government.

That statement was not defiance. It was accountability.

And it exposed the truth: the Julius Maada Bio government has shown no sustained interest in curbing the drug plague in Sierra Leone, only in controlling the narrative.

A Sovereign State Fears Not Transparency

Under the Weberian definition of the state, sovereignty requires a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. That monopoly collapses when:

• Laws are enforced selectively
• Culprits connected to power are shielded
• Whistleblowers are pressured or persecuted

A government that silences discussion of a drug epidemic in Parliament, intimidates a mayor for revealing mortality data, and fails to secure seized narcotics does not exercise full sovereign control.

It exercises selective authority, the hallmark of a captured state.

A Pattern Too Consistent to Ignore

At this point, the Kush crisis cannot be separated from a growing list of drug-related scandals involving the Julius Maada Bio led government itself:

• A convicted European drug lord, Jos Leijdekkers (aka Bolle Jos, Omar Sheriff) allegedly living freely in Sierra Leone, appearing in proximity to President Julius Maada Bio and his Family
• A Sierra Leonean ambassador in Guinea allegedly caught with large quantities of cocaine in an embassy vehicle
• A former Immigration Minister, Alusine Kanneh, filmed allegedly receiving gifts from the same fugitive drug trafficker Jos Leidekers
• Speaker of Parliament barred opposition MPs from discussing the drug epidemic in Parliament
• A seized Kush container mysteriously disappeared from Queen Elizabeth II Quay sea port

Individually, these are scandals. Taken together, they form a pattern of protection, silence, and impunity.

Sovereignty Erosion

Political scientists have a name for this condition: state capture.

It occurs when criminal networks penetrate state institutions so deeply that the government:

• Protects traffickers instead of prosecuting them
• Punishes truth-tellers instead of criminals
• Prioritizes reputation management over human life

At that point, sovereignty becomes ceremonial, not real.

The flag still flies.
The anthem still plays.
Citizens still recite the pledge

But the law no longer governs to protect the state or citizens.

This is no longer about Kush alone. The real question the nation must ask is this:

Is Sierra Leone exercising sovereignty, or renting it out to criminal networks at the cost of its youth and the country’s survival?

Because a state that cannot, or will not, protect its young people from mass addiction, while aggressively policing speech and dissent, has inverted the very purpose of governance.

The Only Way Forward

If Sierra Leone is truly sovereign, it must prove it. That means:

• Extradite Jos Leijdekkers (aka Bolle Jos, Omar Sheriff) to the Netherlands.
• An independent, internationally supervised investigation into drug trafficking and institutional complicity
• Transparent accounting for seized narcotics and missing evidence
• Protection for citizens, journalists, and civil servants who speak out
• A national drug response rooted in action, not intimidation and secrecy

Anything less confirms what many now fear: that Sierra Leone’s sovereignty exists only on paper, while the state itself has been hollowed out.

A sovereign nation is not defined by who holds office. It is defined by whether the law holds power. And today, in Sierra Leone, the law is losing.

References

• How a fugitive drug lord found a home among West Africa’s elite
• Sierra Leone’s alarming plunge into international drug trafficking scandals
• Dutch Drug Criminal Jos Leijdekkers Spotted at Birthday Party at LOR Restaurant

Authoritative References

• Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States (1933)
• United Nations Charter (1945)
• Max Weber, Politics as a Vocation (1919)
• Oxford Public International Law, Sovereignty
• The Responsibility to Protect (2001). International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS)