Koidu, Kono District. The long night of Sierra Leone’s civil war bred many monsters, but none has cast a longer commercial shadow than Executive Outcomes, the South-African private-military company better known by its stark initials, EO. What began in 1995 as a guns-for-hire outfit contracted by President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah to beat back the Revolutionary United Front re-emerged, barely three years later, as a glittering, government-sanctioned mining concern in the diamond fields of Kono. Today EO’s DNA pulses through a labyrinth of shell companies, Branch Energy, DiamondWorks, Energem, Koidu Holdings, OCTÉA, and is ultimately traceable to former field commander Tony “Dagg” Buckingham, whose Mayfair addresses and Cayman trusts now shelter licences worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Successive governments, red, green and khaki alike, have blessed those licences even while clinics lack bandages, classrooms sag under zinc roofs and the nation’s highways dissolve beneath monsoon rains. The journey from battlefield to boardroom is no miracle of entrepreneurship; it is a masterclass in how private violence is laundered into legal profit when the guardians of the state choose complicity over accountability.

By early 1995 the rump of the Republic of Sierra Leone Military Forces was exhausted. The RUF’s scorched-earth advance had sealed the rutile mines in Moyamba, torched plantations in Pujehun and, crucially, seized swaths of diamond-rich Kono. Facing bankruptcy, mutiny and international ridicule, the National Provisional Ruling Council reached for the private-security Rolodex. Calls landed in Pretoria, where Executive Outcomes (Pty) Ltd, a demobilised cadre of former South-African Defence Force special-forces operators, offered a simple tariff: 1.8 million US dollars per month, payable offshore, plus first refusal on “recovered” mineral zones. In 1996 civilian elections returned Kabbah, but the 1997 coup exiled him to Conakry. When Nigerian-led ECOMOG troops restored him in March 1998 he quietly renewed EO’s contract on identical terms and sprinkled it with a stabilisation bonus of five per cent of all future export revenue from any mine EO secured.

Armed with Mi-17 gunships, refurbished Soviet artillery and 150 Nepalese Gurkhas leased from the Hong-Kong-registered Security Advisory Services, EO cleared the rebels from Koidu in six adrenaline-soaked weeks. Western diplomats applauded the tactical brilliance, calling it a textbook case of counter-insurgency outsourcing. Citizens in Kono witnessed something darker. Villagers in Sandor Chiefdom later testified before Sierra Leone’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission that any male found with all ten fingers intact, evidence of not having suffered the rebels’ infamous mutilations, was deemed a suspicious courier and summarily detained, sometimes disappeared. EO lawyers deny the allegations, yet a 1999 United Nations Panel of Experts report documented forty-three extrajudicial killings “consistent with EO presence and weaponry.” Violence, in short, was not an unfortunate by-product; it was the operating system.

Wars end, contracts expire, calendars turn. How did a withdrawal clause in 1999 blossom into a twenty-five-year mining lease by 2002? Enter Tony Buckingham, a former North Sea saturation diver turned military entrepreneur who perfected the art of belt-fed capitalism. Buckingham never drew EO salary, at least on paper; he floated one tier above as a director of DiamondWorks Ltd, a Vancouver-listed exploration junior. In June 1998 he bundled EO’s Sierra Leone receivables, roughly eighteen million US dollars, into DiamondWorks, then convinced Kabbah’s shaky cabinet to convert the debt into equity in a brand-new joint venture: Branch Energy (SL) Ltd. Overnight the mercenaries acquired a controlling stake in the very pit they had liberated by force of arms.

The deal should have jolted every parliamentary eyebrow on Tower Hill. Statutory Instrument 14/98 capped foreign equity in large-scale mining at sixty per cent, yet Branch Energy strolled away with eighty. In exchange the state received a twelve-per-cent free-carried interest that has never been translated into dividends and a glossy brochure promising schools, clinics and feeder roads. Two decades later a single hand pump on the outskirts of Koidu Town is the only visible evidence of those promises.

Buckingham understood optics as well as ordnance. In 2000 he struck Executive Outcomes from the South-African company register, reincorporated the core staff as Sandline International in London and disavowed any link to the old brand. The faces were the same; only the letterhead changed. In 2001 Mines Minister Alpha Demby told Parliament, with straight face, that Sandline was a British investor of impeccable repute. Hansard notes audible laughter in the public gallery, yet the licence stood.

If the SLPP authored the original sin, the APC canonised it. In 2012 President Ernest Bai Koroma’s cabinet extended Branch Energy’s mining lease for a further fifteen years, citing “exceptional capital investment.” The Mines Advisory Board recommended that royalties rise from five to eight per cent; cabinet pared them back to six. Two months later Branch Energy donated two thousand motorbikes in party colours to the APC re-election campaign. In the language of auditors correlation does not prove causation; in Kono street markets the verdict is simpler: na one word.

Hopes that Julius Maada Bio would revisit the Koidu question evaporated quickly. A leaked memorandum of understanding dated 18 July 2019 granted enhanced fiscal stability to Branch Energy in exchange for “technical support” to the Ministry of Mines, support that materialised as a 350-thousand-dollar software package retailing for scarcely twenty-five thousand. The yawning delta? Call it facilitation, or more bluntly make-I-see.

While Freetown’s deal-makers feasted, Kono’s people inhaled dust. The Kimberley Process certificate may keep conflict diamonds out of Antwerp vaults, but it does nothing for the lungs of Tankoro residents, where open-pit blasts rattle zinc roofs five afternoons a week. A 2021 Njala University study measured airborne silica at five times World Health Organization limits within a three-kilometre radius of the pit. Rates of silicosis and chronic bronchitis in Gbense Chiefdom now eclipse national averages threefold. Compensation remains elusive: victims must navigate a grievance mechanism chaired, remarkably, by Branch Energy’s own community-relations officer. The Environmental Protection Agency blessed this arrangement in 2020 under a pilot “self-regulation” scheme, effectively asking a fox to mind the diamond-studded hen-house.

Those still doubting collusion should follow the paper trail. In 1995 the EO service agreement in Defence Ministry file EO/95/SL fixed pay at 1.8 million monthly and granted EO right of first refusal on secured mineral assets, all without parliamentary ratification or human-rights conditions. In 1998 the debt-equity swap with DiamondWorks breached the sixty-per-cent cap and omitted local-employment quotas. In 2002 lease ML 02/02 lodged in the Mines Cadastre granted a twenty-five-year term with a five-per-cent royalty, no escalation clause and no reclamation bond. In 2012 Addendum III extended the lease to 2037, trimmed royalty to six per cent and awarded a ten-year tax holiday without debate. In 2019 the Bio-era “Enhanced Stability” MoU froze corporate tax at twenty-five per cent and guaranteed expedited VAT refunds while omitting any community benefit fund. Each document bears a different coat of arms; the through-line is unmistakable: maximise foreign control, minimise state revenue, bury the details far from public scrutiny.

EO’s metamorphosis is not a solitary metamorphic rock in West Africa’s mineral belt; it forms part of a regional geology of exploitation. In Angola a sister company, Airborne Resources, parlayed combat sorties against UNITA into diamond concessions in Lunda Norte. In the Democratic Republic of Congo the same coterie surfaced as America Mineral Fields, dangling helicopters before Laurent Kabila in exchange for cobalt blocs. The formula never changes, deploy arms to acquire territory, convert the resulting debt into equity, convince fragile states that you are indispensable. Sierra Leone supplied the prototype and, tragically, the proof of concept.

Tracing the lineage from Executive Outcomes to today’s OCTÉA reveals a corporate matryoshka. Branch Energy became Koidu Holdings, registered in the British Virgin Islands. In 2008 the BVI-based OCTÉA Diamond Group became parent to Koidu Holdings. Energem Resources, a Toronto-listed firm once managed by Buckingham associates, briefly owned shares before they migrated to BSG Resources and back again through opaque private placements. A 2016 High Court filing confirmed that OCTÉA, Koidu Holdings and Branch Energy share identical beneficial ownership even as they present themselves to regulators as distinct entities. The mercenary brigade never left; it merely changed uniforms, swapped AK-47s for Articles of Association and marched on with the same commander.

What must change is painfully clear. First, publish every mining licence and contract. Section 27 of the 2009 Mines and Minerals Act already mandates a public register; ministers insist the server is perpetually down. Reboot it or resign. Second, impose a mercenary-to-miner cooling-off period: any company that has provided armed services to a state or to rebels should be barred from resource concessions for at least a decade. Ghana’s Petroleum Commission enforces a similar firewall; Sierra Leone can too. Third, seed a sovereign litigation fund because the Attorney-General pleads budgetary poverty whenever civil society sues OCTÉA. Divert a slice of the Extractive Industries Revenue Account to finance public-interest lawsuits; justice should not be a luxury good. Fourth, grant genuine community veto power. Residents of Koidu should decide whether blasting continues near their schools and water tables. A simple-majority referendum before any licence renewal would anchor constitutional talk of popular participation in lived reality. Fifth, request targeted sanctions on beneficial owners. Buckingham lounges in Mayfair town-houses purchased with Kono diamonds. The United Kingdom’s Magnitsky-style regime can freeze those assets tomorrow; State House should formally ask.

Executive Outcomes came to Sierra Leone wielding belt-fed grenade launchers; it stayed wielding bilateral investment treaties. The ordinance changed, the objective did not: extract value and externalise cost. Every administration since 1995, NPRC, SLPP, APC and SLPP again, has kissed the ring for a taste of the signature bonus. Meanwhile the people of Kono still walk barefoot over the world’s most valuable gravel, their water stained orange, their air gritty with tailings. The Krio proverb says wetin big pas yu, if e no kill yu, e gee yu mark. What is bigger than a private army turned mining titan? It has not killed the republic in one blow, but look closely at our coffers, our classrooms, our shortened life expectancy and you will see the marks, deep, shimmering and shaped like a diamond.

If President Bio, or any future occupant of State House, wishes to claim nationalist credentials he must start by prying open these contracts and returning to the nation what was stolen in plain sight. Until then Executive Outcomes, under whatever polite corporate alias, will remain the ever-present spectre at our negotiating table, reminding us that the wages of unresolved war are payable in perpetuity, plus compound interest.

By Alpha Amadu Jalloh

Sierra Leonean social critic and youth worker based in Melbourne, Australia. He is the author of Monopoly of Happiness: Unveiling Sierra Leone’s Social Imbalance and recipient of the 2025 Africa Renaissance Leadership Award.

Notes and references

1 Defence Ministry Contract Register, file EO/95/SL

2 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Sierra Leone, testimony of Sandor Chiefdom residents, vol III p 212

3 United Nations Panel of Experts on Sierra Leone, report S/1999/816 annex B

4 Cabinet Confidential Paper CP/98/17 released under Freedom-of-Information Act 2014

5 Sierra Leone Company Registry, Branch Energy (SL) Ltd file BE/98/002

6 Hansard, Parliamentary Debates 12 June 2001 col 423

7 Ministry of Mines and Mineral Resources, mining lease ML 02/02 and addenda I–III

8 Njala University Department of Environmental Health “Silica exposure in open-pit mining Kono District” 2021 field study

9 National Electoral Commission campaign donation disclosure 22 August 2012

10 High Court of Sierra Leone Civil Suit 371/2016 Attorney-General v OCTÉA Diamond Group