‘It has changed our lives completely in such a short time!’: Infrastructural relations and the ‘citizen-turned-private sector’ in Lomé,Togo's digital transformation

Abstract

This article explores the political economy of digital transformation in Lomé, Togo, and unpacks the relations and contradictions that animate the development of its digital infrastructures. Using the COVID-19 pandemic as the backdrop, I look at how the state, through its Plan National du Developpement (PND), promotes digital infrastructure development for its efficiency in delivering dematerialised state services, and to further attract investors through public–private partnerships. To do so, I argue that the state draws on the poetics of digital infrastructures to create a spectacle of its success and blur the lines between who constitutes the public and the private sectors. By unpacking what I call ‘infrastructural relations’, or the social relations of things that allow for the systems to operate, I illustrate how infrastructural relations are discursively mobilised by the state to justify privatisation and digital infrastructure investment, and to turn citizens in need of welfare to become private neoliberal subjects tasked to propel this digital transformation. I consider the turning of citizens to the ‘private sector’ as a way for the state to co-opt citizens’ vernacular engagements, but also as an opportunity to recognise the central role of citizens in Lomé's state-led digital transformation.