By Ishmael Sallieu Koroma
Freetown, Sierra Leone — Every day, traffic slows at the Wellington–Masiaka toll gates as drivers pay to use one of Sierra Leone’s most important highways. The road is busy, profitable and unavoidable. But according to a new governance report, it is also emblematic of how public revenue in Sierra Leone quietly slips beyond the reach of the state.
In Di Hade Pa Di Case: Politics and Revenue Failures in Sierra Leone, the Institute for Governance Reform (IGR) argues that the toll road has become a textbook example of how major public contracts are structured to generate wealth for private operators while delivering minimal returns to the public.
The report estimates that the Wellington–Masiaka Toll Road raises an average of 21 million US dollars every year, amounting to roughly 172 million dollars over nine years. Yet during the same period, only one million dollars has reportedly been paid to the government’s National Revenue Authority.
The discrepancy, IGR says, exposes deeper failures in oversight, transparency and political accountability.
A concession that pays early — and keeps paying
The toll road operates under a 27-year Build-Own-Operate-Transfer (BOOT) agreement, a financing model designed to allow private investors to recover costs before transferring ownership to the state.
However, IGR’s analysis suggests that the concessionaire recovered its full investment in about 10.8 years — far earlier than the end of the contract. This leaves an estimated 16 years of surplus revenue flowing entirely to the private operator, despite the absence of unrecovered financial risk.
From a public finance perspective, the report describes this as a material transfer of surplus value from the state to private interests — particularly troubling in a country where road maintenance, transport infrastructure and social services remain underfunded.
Secrecy and weak oversight
Despite the scale of revenue involved, basic operational data remains hidden. The report notes that the toll road operator has never published revenue figures, while oversight institutions have failed to independently verify collections.
The Sierra Leone Roads Authority has acknowledged that it has not conducted any vehicle counts since the road was constructed. Parliamentary scrutiny and audit oversight have also been limited, allowing secrecy around toll operations to persist.
Successive Ministers of Works — across both the APC and SLPP administrations — are said to have adopted a similar posture: withholding toll data from the public while approving or increasing toll fees without clear explanation.
For commuters, the lack of transparency fuels frustration.
“You pay every day, but nobody explains how the money is shared,” said a commercial driver who regularly uses the road. “It feels like we are paying, but the country is not benefiting.”
Not an isolated case
According to Di Hade Pa Di Case, the toll road is not an anomaly but part of a broader pattern in Sierra Leone’s political economy.
Drawing on data from more than 3,400 state contracts issued between 2016 and 2023, the report finds that major revenue-generating agreements routinely deliver little benefit to the state — regardless of which political party is in power.
One parallel example is the national e-passport contract. Sierra Leone issues between 60,000 and 70,000 passports annually, generating an estimated 7 to 9 million US dollars each year. Yet IGR says it found no evidence that passport royalties are paid into the Consolidated Revenue Fund.
Despite costing between 100 and 180 dollars, making it one of the most expensive passports in West Africa, the e-passport contract has reportedly been renewed several times without competitive rebidding or rigorous value-for-money assessments.
Power beyond elections
Rather than focusing on individual wrongdoing, the report argues that Sierra Leone suffers from an entrenched system that normalises revenue loss in public contracting — one that survives elections and changes of government.
IGR identifies four strategies used by business elites: financing leading political candidates across party lines, structuring contracts around institutions rather than individuals, exploiting newly appointed officials with limited institutional knowledge, and influencing sections of the media to limit public scrutiny.
The report also highlights the absence of strong economic governance reform agendas among current presidential aspirants, interpreting this silence as a sign of low political will to confront vested interests.
Calls for structural reform
IGR is urging Sierra Leone to rethink its approach to corruption and public finance. Instead of focusing solely on prosecutions, it calls for fraud prevention, full transparency in revenue contracts, and criminal sanctions for officials who knowingly enter agreements that cause systemic financial losses.
It also argues that civil society organisations and media actors must build stronger coalitions focused on revenue governance, warning that without dismantling what it describes as an “extractive machinery” embedded in public contracting, Sierra Leone will continue to struggle to fund public services — no matter how busy its toll roads remain.
For now, the toll gates stay open, commuters keep paying, and the question raised by Di Hade Pa Di Case remains unresolved: how can a road paid for daily by citizens deliver so little to the nation itself?
