Idle Youth: Using Sport to Address the Youth Bulge in Sierra Leone

There is a growing consensus that the prevalence of a large youth population is not conducive to peace and that such a ‘youth bulge’ can even increase the risk of civil conflict and political violence.1 Richard Cincotta and Elizabeth Leahy argue that such a youth bulge within the confines of fragile or failing states where economic opportunities are few and horizontal inequalities are numerous raises the potential for violence significantly. Indeed they discovered that about eighty-six percent of all countries that experienced a new outbreak of civil conflict between 1970 and 1999 had age structures with sixty percent or more of the population younger than thirty years of age (figure 1). They also found that of the countries without recent civil conflict, twenty-four percent of all states with more than sixty percent of their population under thirty years of age experienced at least one incident of civil conflict during the following decade. Among countries with less than sixty percent under thirty years of age, just seven percent experienced civil conflict. This led Cincotta and Leahy to conclude that a quarter of all non-conflict countries with young age structures are likely to experience a new civil conflict during the next decade.2 This paper will therefore rest on the assumption that the quantifiable variable of population age structure ‘can be used to project risks of civil conflict a decade into the future.’3

Within an African context, and especially a sub-Saharan African context, this appears to be a worrying diagnosis to the conflict driven ills of many countries where youth populations can easily represent up to sixty percent of national totals.4 By 1990 more than half of all Africans were below the age of eighteen (hence classified as children) and growing up with world views that were radically different to their parents’. These children are now youths. With no experience of colonialism, their sole experience has been that of the African state itself, and as such if the youth wanted to engage in political opposition there was no foreign imperialist or exploiter to target– instead their antipathy was directed inwardly towards their own people and governments.5 Given their large numbers and prime physical state, this has led to violence with disastrous social, economic and political repercussions across the continent.

Yet to isolate this ‘youth bulge’ as something independently tangible and accountable for the violence is to fail to grasp the real breadth of the issue. The plight of youths in Sierra Leone and elsewhere in West Africa must be put within the wider context of ‘the socioeconomic and political breakdown of states in the subregion, the ensuing violent struggle over power and resources, and the spillover effects of conflicts into neighbouring states over the past decade.’6 Decades of political exclusion and conflict mismanagement has led to severe poverty, economic failure, unemployment, and the erosion of state and social structures in West Africa. As a result, many states have lost their capacity to stimulate the economy, provide welfare support, create jobs, ‘and most important, to control, discipline or rehabilitate juveniles.’7 With little or no access to education or paid employment, youths have long been excluded from their respective states in the region. In Sierra Leone the war merely exacerbated this societal disconnect and the problems at its root, and crudely exposed the youth of Sierra Leone to a kind of nefarious violence that traumatized a generation. ‘Funmi Olonisakin makes an excellent point when she notes that the ‘situation of children is all the more pathetic given their lack of skills, resources, and maturity to cope with the negative consequences of conflicts,’ adding succinctly that, ‘war has the potential of stunting the development and growth of children.’8 The most effective antidote to this disruption is to prevent conflict in the first place. This paper will attempt to show that sport for development programs in Sierra Leone are doing exactly that. In the wake of the political peace, sport has helped to provide a crucial service to the country’s youth population that has proved beneficial educationally, for their physical health and mental well-being, and for the wider goal of redeveloping civil society.

To understand the key to the apparent youth propensity towards violence it is necessary to place the work of Cincotta and Leahy next to that of Frances Stewart and Paul Collier in particular. Stewart is especially influential here in her conclusion that is not simply the existence of a youth bulge that heightens the potential for violence, but more exactly it is their marginalisation.9 Horizontal inequality and the lack of a meaningful social contract between the government and significant sections of its citizenry create a climate of disillusion with one’s political elite and resentment towards one’s supposed social peers. It is this social parochialism combined with the sheer number of youths that makes a youth bulge particularly potent. Therefore the challenge is to address this bulge, to engage and include youths in decision making processes, and to empower them in positive ways that serve to dissuade them from violence driven by disaffection. This paper will look to examine how sport is doing this in Sierra Leone. It will also take into account the implications of other social and economic drivers of conflict such as growing up in ‘bad neighbourhoods’ affected by spill over of regional conflicts;10 the youth reaction to the legacy of past conflicts;11 and their propinquity to natural or primary resources whose scarcity in more fragile economies give them a significantly heightened value.12 By considering all of these together, this paper will concern itself with how sport can work towards solving Charles Tilly’s overarching conundrum: ‘how to prevent the emergence of large scale collective violence and sustain human progress.’13

To reach this problematic balance requires mediation and other operational activities, and more crucially structural changes to address the roots of conflict. However ‘there is no single proved methodology for preventing violence and building peace’14 and indeed,

Given the reality of what we do not know, conflict prevention and peacebuilding evaluations in the coming years should be directed toward gathering evidence and learning from it, and on testing and challenging commonly held theories and assumptions about peace and conflict, rather than on establishing fixed universal indicators of peace/conflict. Clarity on indicators (and whether or not they can be generalised in a useful way) may emerge in the process, but the focus and approach at this time should avoid over-specification of anticipated indicators as benchmarks for evaluation. Upcoming conflict prevention and peacebuilding evaluations should focus on gathering experience and analysing it cumulatively and comparatively across contexts, to improve our collective learning. 15

As such this paper will look primarily to add some new ideas to the growing body of research into conflict prevention. However, whilst the need for originality is well understood, it would be neglectful to ignore previous studies. With this in mind, the Utstein Palette is a helpful starting point in how it shows so clearly the scope of problems that need attention. Placing Conflict Prevention and Peacebuilding in the centre, the palette consists of four overlapping sectors that require improvement in equal measure if conflict is to be averted. It calls for the provision of Security; the establishment of functioning Political Structures able to deliver effective policies; the establishment of Socio-economic Foundations for long-term peace; and the development of a Culture of Justice, Truth and Reconciliation. Within each of these four arms are more focused sub-categories, each of which demand attention (figure 2.).

Figure 2. The Utstein Palette.16

The paper will therefore assess how after the protracted civil war, sport worked towards these considerable challenges. From a narrower angle it will also look into how sport for development non government organisations (NGO’s) have been integral to providing the expertise and creating the environments for men and women from varied backgrounds to interact and mend the social fabric of the nation. The importance of this repair work is evident in that it served a dual purpose. On the one hand sport for development programs in Sierra Leone have worked and continue to work towards post-conflict reconstruction by kick-starting civil society and plugging gaps in education and exercise. On the other, and of more interest to this study, they have a particularly important conflict preventative role to play in how they forge and maintain social understanding and community harmony.