Dynamics of Everyday Life within Municipal Administrations in Francophone and Anglophone Africa

Abstract

Decentralisation in sub-Saharan Africa promises to build responsive institutions, hold officials to account and promote popular participation. Still, existent studies ignore the everyday interface between decentralised structures and citizens, as well as how decentralised institutions function in relation to their local contexts and other “authorities” on the margins. These contexts shape service provision and the impact of local power structures on local communities. Against this backdrop, our conference in Dakar, Senegal, on “Dynamics of Everyday Life within Municipal Administrations in Francophone and Anglophone Africa,” which took place in May 2019, demonstrated three key points of interest: namely, how actors within local bureaucracies interface with those who are outside; how ordinary citizens appropriate the bureaucratic techniques of the state and how these actors negotiate and adapt to the daily practices of municipal administrations. In general, decentralisation is not simply implemented, rather, it creates new frameworks and spaces for both formal and informal public action.

Introduction

Decentralisation is a long-standing topic in development policy and research. At least since the 1980s, numerous attempts have been launched in Africa – with the official aim of making local administrations more effective and bringing them closer to the people (Cheema and Rondinelli, 1983; Rondinelli et al., 1989; Leonard and Marshall, 1982). With emerging debates on democratisation in the 1990s, decentralisation was expected to facilitate local political participation and local accountability (Rothchild, 1996; Wunsch and Olowu, 1992). Additionally, decentralisation has been presented as the panacea for local development (Bierschenk et al., 2003; Crawford, 2009; Hagberg, 2010).

However, there are now doubts about the development impact of decentralisation and indeed regarding willingness to cede authority to local actors (Asiimwe and Musisi, 2007; Crawford and Hartmann, 2008; Macamo and Neubert, 2004). Despite the policy studies accompanying the different decentralisation programmes, we still as of now scarcely understand the apparent mixed results of such reforms. Already, there are critical studies on bureaucratic practices in Africa (Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan, 2014; Blundo, 2006). These works present different ethnographies of how bureaucrats behave in public service. This partly coincides with Bayart’s (2013) notion of “everyday bureaucratisation” in urban settings. The research shows how a range of informal practices and normative expectations affect African bureaucracies. However, their object of analysis is professionals working in public services and state bureaucracies, but not African municipalities per se.

Again, most of the research on decentralisation focuses on the local administration itself, on legal regulations and on their implementation. However, we learn mostly from ethnographic studies that neo-traditional leaders play a crucial role in local politics and interact with the local administration (Bellagamba and Klute, 2008; Lund, 2006; Van Rouveroy van Nieuwaal and van Dijk, 1999). In this regard, we need to consider a point often missed in the debate. From the outset, decentralisation was inherently conceived by central government officials and by policymakers as an instrument of state control in remote rural areas. Populist development rhetoric was deployed to stem rural opposition (Barkan and Chege, 1989; Crook, 1999; Vengroff and Johnston, 1987). However, the legitimacy of this outside interference, seen from a local perspective, is challenged by competing claims from neo-traditional leaders, religious actors, local associations and local “big men.” They all make claims to represent or complement state authority. This implies that current debates on decentralisation need to go one step further. Analyses thereof should reach beyond the administration and include the wider local context within which projects are undertaken in the name of decentralisation (Hagberg, 2010) , as well as consider the actors who contribute to local authority on a daily basis (Englebert, 2002; Ray, 2003). We need detailed analyses highlighting the interfaces between and bureaucratic practices across local administrations, elected officials, non-state associations, local entrepreneurs and ordinary citizens.

Rationale for the Conference

Our conference on “Dynamics of Everyday Life within Municipal Administrations in Francophone and Anglophone Africa” followed an interdisciplinary approach and sought to overcome the identified shortcomings in the decentralisation debate – with its focus on the administration itself and on its development impact alone. It was also inspired by recent studies of decentralised bureaucracies (Ayeko-Kümmeth, 2015; Doumbia, 2018; Sabbi, 2017) that present particular points of interest regarding the practices of municipal administrations. First, there are tensions between municipal officials and elected representatives with regard to who has control over local political resources. Second, there is unease between municipal officials, local political actors and residents regarding urban renewal projects and land tenure – particularly relating to concerns over the tenure security of local land owners. Third, expectations regarding the concept of decentralisation differ fairly widely: seen as either local decision outlets or job opportunities for municipal officials.

Strikingly, these everyday misunderstandings and contestations have not been adequately addressed in the literature. Against this backdrop, key questions addressed during the conference focused on local meanings of politics, interactions between municipal officials and residents, councillors’ emolument and on demands for accountability. Thus the conference aimed to shed light on the daily practices of municipal administrations, and how they are, in turn, influenced by their constituencies. This allowed us to widen our perspective so as to include the view from outside local bureaucracies and to foreground the interface (Long, 1989) between state and local actors.

The conference took place from 16 to 19 May 2019 in Dakar, Senegal, at the Faculté des Sciences et Technologies de l’Education et de la Formation (FASTEF). It was organised under the auspices of the 2019 Programme Point Sud (funded by the German Research Foundation, DFG), in co-operation with the Deutsches Historisches Institute Paris (DHIP) and Centre de Recherches sur les Politiques sociales (CREPOS) based in Dakar – and convened by the authors of this article. Our approach builds on socio-anthropological research offering new insights into local administrations, either with a focus on the everyday life processes inside local administrations (Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan, 2014) or on local power structures (Bellagamba and Klute, 2008) – including municipal councils. The aim was to understand the everyday dynamics inside and outside of municipal councils, and between their respective actors.

The participants were representatives for very different approaches, positions and topics with regard to their respective disciplines, such as Political Science, Social Anthropology, Sociology and History. Their experiences emanated from francophone and anglophone countries with different historical and colonial legacies. Additionally, practitioners from local administrations and civil society activists contributed papers and held discussions within the interdisciplinary setting present. A special praxis forum facilitated extremely fruitful dialogue between practitioners and scholars. Not only did practitioners learn from the approaches and analyses of scholars, they also challenged the perspectives of the latter – especially on questions of social justice in municipal administration programmes. Moreover, our excursion to the municipal government of Gorée Island, Dakar – facilitated by the deputy mayor, Annie Jouga – shed light on the daily routines of the administration, and on their interactions with both the public and the central state. Conference participants gained rare insights into what practitioners go through in order to deliver local services.

Decentralisation as a Negotiation and Contestation Endeavour

A number of contributions centred around the varying meanings, interferences, tacit contestations and instances of cooperation vis-à-vis the actions of municipalities, as well as the local political arena more generally. One key interference in the work of municipalities comes from the state and national politicians seeking their own political gains. This interference affects the daily functioning of the bureaucracy. Elieth Eyebiyi’s paper on corruption and accountability at the municipal level showed, through daily land transactions, how bureaucratic corruption is part of everyday manoeuvres imported from the central state to the municipal bureaucracy via decentralisation. This interference also affects the daily functioning of local political authority. George Bob-Milliar aptly pointed out partisan interference in Ghanaian municipalities in his paper on the political party capture of municipal councils there. Though municipal elections legislation prohibits the involvement of political parties, the dominant parties still clandestinely manoeuvre in favour of and sponsor particular candidates who run for local office. This party-tainted interference shapes how elected representatives subsequently serve the local population.

Another issue is the tussle between municipal officials and residents over land access and tenure security. Sometimes these tensions emanate from the fragmented and conflicting roles of municipal institutions. Collins Adjei Mensah’s paper on institutions that manage urban green spaces in Ghana showed how complex power configurations and the fragmented roles of municipal departments regarding green spaces create confusion not only over tenure security but also engender non-compliance and trespassing onto such designated spaces. Drissa Tangara’s paper on land management in peri-urban Bamako, Mali, shed even greater light on everyday strategies of circumvention and non-compliance. While the multiple actors involved in land administration inhibit efficiency of governance, ordinary citizens use different legal and customary narratives to defend their access thereto and their tenure security. Yet these decentralised municipal institutions offer a social space for dialogue between the different institutions interfacing with the local state. Aïdas Sanogo’s paper articulated the social role played by the Town Hall of Bouaké, Côte d’Ivoire, mostly as a public domain for resolving land and social conflicts between different traders’ associations.

Unsurprisingly the interference of the local administration in local matters generates stand-offs, particularly when it attempts to regulate local and private businesses. Oscarine Mela’s contribution analysed the difficult interactions between municipal security agents and privately owned motorcycle-taxis in urban Cameroon. The municipal council’s agents, commonly known in the daily parlance of Yaoundé as Awara, are part of a specific security service that aims to ensure the maintenance of order in urban areas with unregulated spaces and parking slots for traders and motorcycle-taxis. Despite heavy-handed policing by Awara agents, motorcycle-taxi drivers craftily evade traffic regulations to deliver timely services to their clients – often despite tussling with the agents on duty. Adama Cissé’s paper traced the origins of the brute force used by municipal agents to erstwhile colonial administrative structures. Brutality was central to the colonial government’s apparatus of control, and was subsequently passed onto postcolonial ones as the means of keeping urban residents in check. Despite the threat of force, decentralised structures create democratic possibilities for organised local actors to resist specific programmes of municipal governments. Local movements that pursue social justice projects are one example hereof. This was captured in Antje Daniel’s paper on the varying modes of cooperation and contestation between the local activist group Reclaim the City and the municipality of Cape Town, South Africa. While demanding affordable housing through the “illegal” occupation of municipal buildings, the group still compels municipal officials to protect them on the grounds of social justice.

Decentralisation as the Dual Legitimation of the State and the Margins

An important point raised in the respective contributions was the legitimation of local authority specifically by referencing or even reinventing precolonial concepts and practices. Some of these reference points were directly called upon to induce responsive services. Others are mimetic replications of the state’s bureaucratic practices, deployed in order to gain greater credibility. Kamina Diallo’s paper showed how Dozo traditional hunters’ associations have managed to reconfigure power relations at the local level in Côte d’Ivoire. In the municipality of Korhogo, communal associations providing local security in the post-conflict reconstruction process have craftily taken on the label of “Dozo traditional hunters.” Dozo members not only conform to the state’s security apparatus, but also present themselves as a bureaucratic organisation in possession of its own offices and with an official register for identifying their legitimate members. Their organisational structure has earned them recognition from state and municipal officials alike. In the same vein, John-Baptist Ndikubwimana’s paper drew attention to the legitimation of new institutions of decentralisation in Rwanda by linking them to certain precolonial concepts. The paper pointed out how gains from Rwanda’s decentralisation have been craftily linked to precolonial practices. In particular, the cultural term Imihigo, translating roughly as “performance contract,” induces municipal officials to deliver responsive local services. Similarly, Jane Ayeko-Kümmeth’s paper highlighted the references made by state and municipal authorities to precolonial concepts in order to whip up credibility regarding accountability programmes in Uganda. Municipal authorities there have compensated for weak accountability by referring to the cultural term Baraza, roughly “communal fora,” so as to enhance the enthusiasm for their related programmes.

That notwithstanding, citizens’ rights and obligations may also be strengthened by newly invented semi-formal local institutions, as described in Anthony Agyei’s paper on public budget hearings and decentralised decision-making in Ghana. Despite the challenges that inhibit greater public participation in these fora, the embedded guidelines on municipal budgets engender quality control and social inclusion through the Town Hall meetings that ensure societal control and appease demands for accountability. Modou Ndiaye’s contribution was a clarion call for local residents in Senegal to actively exercise their rights vis-à-vis control over local policies and to demand responsive local services.

Attempts to ensure citizens’ rights and concerns inform the content of municipal projects connect directly with the ongoing struggles over public authority occurring between local administrations and local political actors. This view was analysed in the keynote speech delivered by Katja Werthmann, which focused on decentralisation in Cameroon and Burkina Faso, respectively. Typical actors herein include chieftains and related institutions, which command enormous local influence. Koly Fall’s paper on southern Senegal identified the practical dialogue between chieftains, municipal figures and community organisations in the promotion of local socio-economic development. Farima Samaké’s paper described further how members of the rural municipality of Sanakoroba, Mali, reconcile daily practices with current legislation. Despite the strong emphasis on formal functions, successful development actions have been those jointly undertaken by customary authorities and the municipal council of Sanakoroba. Relatedly, Jimam Lar’s paper on communal security provision in central Nigeria revealed the, at first, inherent tensions between the state police and communal agents. Still, communal security agents have invoked state authority to justify their actions while simultaneously filling the void left by its absence. Hence, their actions have gained them recognition while concomitantly legitimising the state as security provider.

Cross-Cutting Debates: Linking Conceptual Arguments with Case Studies

Generally, the respective contributions identified the opposing logics of actors outside and those inside municipal administrations. However, the papers were skewed in favour of perspectives from non-state, local political actors and from among the local population. It was clear that despite expectations of improved services, quite often the intensified presence of the administration at the local level is experienced more or less as a brute force that restricts both individual and collective liberties. This point was underlined during the discussion of the papers by Susann Baller and Ndiouga Benga from a historical perspective. They held that this perception obviously contradicts the political aim of decentralisation being a means to improve democracy and local participation. In that regard, the discussions accompanying the contributions generated more fundamental and cross-cutting analytical insights. While some of the latter followed the arguments of earlier publications, others opened up new perspectives entirely (as described in more detail below). In part at least, these new topics and perspectives were introduced by the discussants.

The concept of “travelling models” (Behrends et al., 2014; Olivier de Sardan et al., 2017) played an important role in the discussions. When we think of decentralisation as a travelling model developed in the Global North and transferred to the Global South, we can better appreciate the contradictions that accompany the policy’s related processes. The stated aims of decentralisation – such as improved service delivery, local participation, democracy, accountability, as well as the fight against corruption – correspond to the global notion of “good governance.” Decentralisation programmes follow the assumption that new legal rules and formal structures need to be established in order to guarantee the accomplishment of set aims.

In hindsight, the numerous attempts at decentralisation in Africa show that the typical answers to problems and failures are new, (supposedly) improved rules and increased efforts to implement the latest system. However, that assumption often gives rise to new failures and generates fresh amendments to existing rules (more below). If we follow the concept of travelling models, we need to consider how translation and adaptation to the new local context works exactly. Everyday life shapes the actions of both municipal institutions and external actors. The simple but crucial conclusion here is: context matters.

As Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan pointed out in the open discussion session, parts of the Political Science and Development Studies literature often disregard contextual issues, which leads to a description of African political institutions as weak. However, this ignores how the continent’s political systems operate on a daily basis. In reality, local political institutions blend with neo-traditional practices and formal rules. This interplay between formal institutions and local counterparts depends on the dynamics existing within particular local contexts. While local actors – and especially neo-traditional ones – are still “twilight institutions” (Lund, 2006), their roles and strength vis-à-vis state institutions vary, and cannot be reliably generalised. Local contexts differ greatly, even between neighbouring municipalities according to the disparate persons involved.

At the same time, the conference discussants – particularly Alexander Stroh and Anja Osei – underlined the fact that in processes of decentralisation we cannot ignore the wider context of state strength. Indeed, the papers and discussions revealed that the state and the political system set the political and institutional frameworks for public action. While they might be challenged or criticised, these frameworks cannot simply be ignored. This process of blending state power with local political action is highly personalised; it is marked by close personal relations in the local setting and between local and national actors. Formal regulations crucially establish the framework within which personal ambitions and obligations can be negotiated. How these personalised relations play out does not follow systematic and standardised procedures. Obviously, decentralisation cannot be implemented as a set programme anchored merely on technical expertise.

To legitimise new administrative rules, the state sometimes refers to precolonial “tradition.” This happened during the colonial era too, when the concept of the “chieftain” was included in systems of local administration. However, even in strong chieftaincy systems, this inclusion changed these individuals’ roles. Thus, we refer to them as neo-traditional institutions. This tendency to refer to precolonial systems can still be found today, for example with the cases of the Baraza in Uganda and Imihigo in Rwanda. The concept of “performance contract,” per the Kinyarwanda term Imihigo, claims to refer to the precolonial one concluded between warriors and the king. Interestingly, neither classical ethnographic studies (see Vansina, 1962 or Maquet, 1954) nor the older Kinyarwanda dictionaries mention this concept at all. A reference to “tradition” may also be made by local authorities, as in the case of Côte d’Ivoire regarding precolonial hunter societies, Dozos, as a system of communal security provision. These cases underline how precolonial concepts and new institutions may complement each other in the delivery of public authority. Additionally, references made to “tradition” may work even when the concept is re-interpreted or re-invented, because the idea can enhance positive attitudes towards institutions.

Another overarching topic was accountability. Several contributions analysed efforts to improve the public perception of accountable municipal institutions. But as the papers hinted, there remain several “grey zones” through which residents and clients access and circumvent municipal services. These spaces, according to Förster and Ammann, take on shape and meaning through their actors’ “agency and practice” (2018: 3). This underlines the fact that in the general debate, accountability relies solely on official norms vis-à-vis the multiple forms thereof that we observe in everyday life. In his comments as discussant, Olivier de Sardan referred to the multiple demands for accountability faced by tax collectors in Niger based on the different modes of governance there. A tax collector is supposed to strictly enforce related regulations. However, their affected relatives expect to be exempted therefrom. They are not only accountable to the municipal tax office, but also to the chief,to their family, and to other relations too. From a strict legal perspective, this daily practice, simply put, is corruption. Practically, however, that obscures the multiple forms of accountability. Indeed, this normative analysis of clientelism only reinforces the official version of corruption. Yet the above-mentioned actions are embedded in everyday life practices in local arenas, and follow the frameworks of the different modes of governance (see Olivier de Sardan, 2011).

Conclusion: Decentralisation as a Framework for Controlling and Orchestrating Public Action

The foregoing has revealed that processes of decentralisation and changes in administrative rules might not lead to the intended outcomes, but they certainly do have consequences. We need to understand processes of decentralisation also as ones of changing or introducing new rules. The latter provides space for local public action, especially within relations between municipal administrations and their citizens.

More generally, changes in rules often revitalise local political processes. They may reorganise power relations between strong actors, and open up spaces that offer new formal frameworks (and sometimes even successfully support bureaucratic modes of governance). This action occurs in the local arena, coming with state and other outside interference. It also opens up options for local associations, and opportunities for spontaneous protests and claims too. Sometimes, the triggered processes may lead to greater democracy; in other cases, however, local power-holders may take advantage of the newly opened political space. The type of actors that capitalise on this opportunity depends on (1) the distribution of power, and its recognition by ordinary people; (2) the degree of trust in established local leaders; (3) the perceived freedom of action, existing grievances and on expectations with regards to possible changes and (4) the degree to which leaders channel such claims into public action.

This does not mean that the community takes control – as often implied by promotors of local participation. The newly opened space for political action also gives way to particularism and local conflicts inside the so-called community, and between neighbouring communities harbouring notions of micro-nationalism too. There is still the chance that, in the long run, these frameworks may open up spaces for greater democratic participation and people’s control of power. However, these are just two possible developments; a contrasting scenario is the consolidation of stronger local-power-holder bases.

Throughout the discussions, it became clear that municipal accountability mechanisms and general public participation represent “a bureaucratic paradox”; more and conflicting rules allow public action outside of official channels. In his remarks, Georg Klute mentioned the importance of these open moments or windows of opportunities via reference to Graeber’s (2015) work on “the utopia of rules.” Indeed, the different papers highlighted the never-ending introduction of new rules that, in reality, hardly ever change existing practices. Klute urged us to analyse the state as a massive organisation, and thus the citizen as one part of it. Emphasising this point further, Alfred Ndiaye held that local administrations act as the intermediaries between the local and the metropole – as seen per the notion of the “command state” (Elwert, 2001).

This also shows the ambiguity of the administration; the many rules from the state and its red tape create confusion for bureaucrats and their clients alike. The administration believes its problems can be solved merely by introducing more and new rules. Essentially, fresh and ambiguous rules offer space for political action both inside and outside the administration. From the neo-institutional sociology perspective, this is another striking example of “decoupling” (DiMaggio and Powell, 1991). Even if new rules are formally adopted, they are often ignored in daily organisational routines. Thus, we need to understand decentralisation as a process in which specifically a certain concept thereof is implemented. The decisive elements herein are hardly the concept or programmes of decentralisation. Rather, they are the wider setting established within the national political frame as well as the local context, its actors and the dynamic interpretation and use of this new political space.

The various insights that have been briefly presented in this article were only possible to acquire through the consequent interdisciplinary approach adopted. Mainly ethnographic-style research unravelled how local political processes are articulated through interfaces between local bureaucrats, citizens and other local authorities existing on the margins of the state. The presence of local activists and practitioners underlines the importance of local self-organisation, constraints and pressures in everyday life as well as of pragmatic solutions – even when experiences with them revealed both the limits of self-organisation and the resistance generated from local power-holders or state representatives. At the same time, it is obvious that the bigger picture regarding state structures, policies and legal frameworks – and, of course, the historical background and related processes – cannot be ignored either. What we learnt from the conference – and now intend to explore further – is how decentralisation processes open up and strengthen the local political arena to a number of actors, such as the bureaucracy, local councillors, neo-traditional authorities, as well as local “big men” and movements. This also implies that research in this field will benefit tremendously from the taking of an interdisciplinary approach going forward.