By: Alex A. Bah, Ag. Public Relations Officer, ACC
“Kill dog before dog leh dog know say die dae”
It is a hard proverb, unforgiving by design. When the Commissioner of the Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC) Francis Ben Kaifala, invoked it during a recent interview on Independent Radio Network (IRN) with Tiana Alpha, he was not celebrating cruelty. He was articulating a theory of deterrence. In his words, Sierra Leone should consider the death penalty for corruption involving public resources.
At its core, the argument is not bloodlust, it is calibration. “Societies change by how they feel about a crime,” the Commissioner noted, “and how they feel is revealed by how they punish it.” The proverb captures that philosophy: punishment must leave no ambiguity about consequences.
This is the frame within which the Commissioner’s provocation must be read. His assertion that corruption may warrant the ultimate sanction, has split opinion. But more importantly, it has forced a long-delayed national reckoning.
Corruption in Sierra Leone did not spread by accident; it was learned. During the era of Siaka Stevens, the infamous refrain “Usai den tie cow na dae e fr eat” hardened into a governing ethic. Public office became a feeding trough; accountability became optional. Institutions weakened, inequality widened, and trust hollowed out.
The civil war deepened the damage. Survival displaced ethics. The post-war state inherited not only shattered infrastructure, but a fractured moral compass. Corruption became endemic, quietly taxing the poor, stealing from classrooms and clinics, and suffocating opportunity.
The creation of the ACC was meant to reverse this curse. Yet for years, laws not so punitive and social tolerance blunted enforcement. Corruption persisted because it remained low-risk and high-reward.
In the 2018 inflection, everything changed in with the appointment of Francis Ben Kaifala. From day one, his objective was explicit: to make corruption “a high-risk, very low-return venture,” an “unfashionable enterprise.”
The first battlefield was Parliament. In 2019, the Commission confronted the Parliament of Sierra Leone to overhaul the anti-corruption legal framework. It was not reform as usual; it was open conflict. Resistance cut across political lines. Comfort zones and long-standing immunities were threatened. Though the law passed, it emerged compromised, still powerful, but less lethal than envisioned.
Even so, the reforms were transformative in ensuring Mandatory restitution by making sure stolen wealth is returned in addition to increased fines and jail terms, raising the cost of corruption and a dedicated Anti-Corruption Court, accelerating trials and closing procedural escape routes, among others.
The results have been unprecedented. Conviction rates have exceeded 90 percent. Asset recoveries have reached historic levels. Conduct once whispered about is now prosecuted in daylight. What some perceive as “more corruption” is, in truth, more accountability.
And this is the paradox the Commissioner now highlights: when enforcement works, corruption becomes visible. Outrage intensifies. Society begins to question whether existing penalties match the damage inflicted.
However history is blunt: societies that defeated corruption did not moralize it away; they criminalized it into retreat.
In Singapore, under Lee Kuan Yew, corruption became rare not because leaders preached virtue, but because enforcement was swift, ruthless, and impartial. Certainty of punishment, not speeches, changed behavior. Public trust followed.
In China, grand corruption has at times attracted the death penalty. The policy is controversial, but the signal is unmistakable: stealing from the people is treated as a crime against the state itself.
Across Africa, countries that reduced corruption, Botswana and Rwanda among them, did so by elevating consequences and eliminating sacred cows. Where punishment is predictable and severe, corruption retreats.
The pattern is clear that: Corruption dies when fear replaces familiarity.
The Commissioner’s call is not, at heart, about executions. It is about moral calibration. It asks whether Sierra Leone is prepared to declare without apology that corruption is not cleverness, not survival, not culture, but violence by another name.
Because corruption kills too when hospitals lack medicine, when schools collapse and when futures are stolen before they begin.
“Kill dog before dog leh dog know say die dae” is not a threat. It is a warning, against half-measures that breed defiance, against tolerance that teaches repetition, against a society unwilling to shock itself out of gradual decay.
Whether Sierra Leone ultimately adopts the death penalty for corruption is a decision for the nation. But the Commissioner’s provocation has already achieved what polite reform could not: it has forced the country to feel, deeply, what corruption costs, and to ask how far it is willing to go to end it.
History’s final lesson is unforgiving but clear that "Societies change not when corruption is condemned, but when it becomes unbearably costly."
