THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF PUBLIC PROCUREMENT REFORM IN SIERRA LEONE

Sierra Leone has rewritten its procurement law twice and amended it further, yet every annual audit still records recurring procurement losses; the binding constraint is enforcement and the political settlement that surrounds it, not the quality of the statute. This article argues that legal reform changes the form of rent extraction without removing the incentives that drive it, so rents migrate to whichever procedure remains least monitored after each new rule. The analysis uses four linked lenses: rent-seeking theory, the principal-agent problem, elite and state capture, and the reform-to-enforcement gap. It draws on Audit Service Sierra Leone (ASSL) annual and special reports, National Public Procurement Authority (NPPA) compliance and reform material, the Public Procurement Act 2016 and its current review, and named contract cases including the COVID-19 emergency procurement audited at NaCOVERC, the 2019 vehicle and motorbike losses across security institutions, procurement splitting at local government level, and procurement irregularities reported at the Sierra Leone Commercial Bank. The central finding is consistent across the evidence. Sierra Leone scores well on procurement design and poorly on procurement outcomes because discretion that the law removes from one stage reappears at method selection, evaluation, emergency exceptions, and asset management, where monitoring is weakest and sanction is rarest. The headline policy implication follows directly: reform should raise the cost and probability of sanction and protect oversight independence before it adds further procedural rules, because the rulebook is already adequate and the enforcement chain is not.