The Ministry of Information and Civic Education, in partnership with the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, convened a seminar and symposium under the theme Building a Responsive, Resilient and Cohesive Sierra Leone bringing together young people from across the country to deliberate on something that independence anniversary events often gesture toward but rarely interrogate seriously: what citizens owe their country, and what the country owes them back.
The framing was deliberate and, for a government-hosted event, refreshingly honest. Development, facilitators told participants, is not exclusively the responsibility of the state. It depends equally on the conduct and active participation of citizens a statement that carries more weight when delivered to a generation that has grown up watching institutions fall short of their mandates and has every reason to be cynical about where responsibility for national failure actually lies.
Participants were divided into thematic working groups Gender, Media, Security, Artificial Intelligence, and Youth Empowerment — and tasked with genuine deliberation rather than passive attendance. Each group worked through its assigned terrain and emerged with contributions to a comprehensive roadmap presented to the Ministry, calling for increased civic engagement and concrete actions toward national development. Whether that roadmap survives the journey from conference room to policy consideration is a question worth holding. But the exercise of producing it was not without value young Sierra Leoneans being asked to think systematically about their country’s problems, and being given a platform from which to speak, is not nothing.
The evening symposium raised the intellectual register of the proceedings, drawing in national academics whose presence gave the event the grounding of serious thought. Dr. Cecil Blake, Professor Miriam Conteh-Morgan, and Professor Joe A.D. Alie brought to the floor a quality of engagement that civic education initiatives in Sierra Leone do not always manage to secure. Their contributions centred on nationalism and patriotism as active dispositions not sentimental attachments to a flag, but commitments to deliberate, concrete action in service of a country that requires its citizens to show up.
The specific concerns raised during discussions were telling in their range. Examination malpractice emerged as a recurring preoccupation a symptom of a broken educational culture in which integrity has been eroded by pressure and the perception that the system rewards shortcuts. The erosion of parental guidance was identified as a driver of rising social vices, with speakers drawing a direct line between the quality of homes and the quality of the society those homes produce. And the civic duty question what it means to participate, to vote, to hold institutions to account, to pay taxes, to refuse corruption at the personal level ran as an undercurrent beneath nearly every discussion.
Taken together, these concerns point to something the symposium’s theme only partially captured. Sierra Leone at 65 is not simply facing a governance challenge or a development challenge. It is facing a social cohesion challenge a fraying of the shared expectations and mutual obligations that hold a national community together. The decline in civic participation, the normalisation of institutional dishonesty, the retreat into ethnic and regional identity over national identity these are not problems that a government seminar, however well organised, can resolve. But naming them clearly, in a room full of young people who will live with their consequences long after the academics and ministers have departed, is at minimum a beginning.
The Konrad Adenauer Foundation’s involvement brought the kind of sustained international partnership in civic education that Sierra Leone needs more of not the transactional variety that funds a single event and moves on, but the kind that accompanies a country’s democratic development over time, contributing to the institutional culture that makes self-governance possible.
At 65, Sierra Leone carries the weight of a history shaped by conflict, misgovernance, and missed opportunities alongside moments of genuine resilience and democratic progress. The question being put to its young people is, “What role will you play?” is the right one. The honest answer requires acknowledging that they are being asked to build and inhabit a country whose existing institutions have often failed to meet them halfway.
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That tension does not make the question wrong. It makes it harder and more necessary to answer. The symposium at Miatta Civic Centre did not resolve it. But for one day, at least, it insisted on being asked.
