Category: Africa

When economists shut off your water

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Researcher Irene Nduta in Kayole-Soweto.

By Adrian Wilson, Faith Kasina, Irene Nduta and Jethron Ayumbah Akallah

In August 2020, people all over the development world started talking about water in Nairobi. There was a lot of anger, and some calls for sending people to the guillotine. The reason: the publication of results from a development randomized controlled trial (RCT), run by two American development economists, working together with the World Bank. In order to compel property owners in Kayole-Soweto—a relatively poor neighborhood in eastern Nairobi—to pay their water bills, this experiment disconnected the water supply at randomly selected low-income rental properties.

There’s no doubt that water is a problem in Nairobi. As Elizabeth Wamuchiru tells us, the water system in the city has a built-in spatial inequality inherited from the British colonial era. Visitors to the city can readily see the differences between the cool, leafy, green neighborhoods of Kilimani and Lavington—segregated white neighborhoods under colonialism, now home to rich Kenyans, foreigners, and NGOs—and the gray and dusty tin-roof neighborhoods of Mathare, Kibera, Mukuru, and Kayole, home to the lower-income Kenyans excluded from Nairobi’s prosperity.

Today’s water system reflects this history of inequality. Nairobi’s water is harnessed from a combination of surface and groundwater sources; however, the city’s groundwater is naturally salty and very high in fluoride. Piped water systems, provided to upper- and middle-income housing estates, do not exist in the vast bulk of the city’s poorer neighborhoods, where people must instead buy water from vendors—often salty water pumped from boreholes, or siphoned off from city pipes through rickety connections that are frequently contaminated with sewage. In the richer neighborhoods, Nairobi Water Company, a public utility, sells relatively clean piped surface water for a fraction of the price paid by poorer Nairobians—a disparity that research has shown to often be the case in other cities in the global South. As the Mathare Social Justice Centre puts it, in poorer neighborhoods such as Kayole-Soweto, “water provision costs more, is less safe, and is less consistent than in other richer parts of the city.”

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The three-stage process through which African resource sovereignty was ceded to foreign mining corporations

Ben RadleyLeave a comment

In the 1960s, newly independent African governments asserted sovereignty over their metal and mineral resources, in a reversal of their prior colonial exploitation by European mining corporations. In this excerpt from his new book Disrupted Development in the Congo: The Fragile Foundations of the African Mining Consensus, Ben Radley shows how transnational corporations have once again become the dominant force assuming ownership and management of industrial mining projects. Radley argues this latest reversal has taken place through a three-stage process grounded in a misguided reading of African economic stagnation from the mid-1970s onwards. Recent mining code revisions in several countries have been heralded by some as marking a new era of resource nationalism. Yet the new codes remain a far cry from the earlier period of resource sovereignty. The first three chapters of the book can be downloaded for free here.

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The city of the evicted: lives under pressure in the margins of an urban fantasy in Benin

Joël Noret1 Comment

by Joël Noret & Narcisse M. Yedji

Since 2017, Cotonou – the economic capital of Benin – has witnessed several urban development projects. Aiming to showcase the city as the new face of a new Benin, attractive to both businessmen and tourists, the plans have involved extensive tarmacking projects, the development of the city’s first shopping malls, the rebuilding of several markets to ‘modern’ standards, the erection of emblematic statues – notably that of ‘the Amazon’, branded as an ode to feminine courage and a national emblem –, and the design of a new coast line. The urban poor have paid a disproportionate price in the implementation of this new urban fantasy – that is, a shiny urban renovation project disconnected from the sociological realities of the city and from the needs of whole swathes of its population, especially in the urban precariat.

In what follows, we argue that the successive waves of evictions of thousands of poor urban dwellers have pressurized in multiple ways and in the longer run already fragile existences. As neighbourhoods and livelihood were dislocated, their ex-residents were simultaneously witnessing their life chances shrinking for the foreseeable future, and faced with the traumatic aftermath of dislocated homes. A ‘generative’ process in itself, as Gunvór Jonsson recently argued on this blog about evictions in Dakar, there is no doubt that state pressure grounded in neoliberal urbanism affects the urban poor in multiple ways. The following paragraphs explore such multi-layered consequences, from degraded economic conditions to tarnished senses of one’s place in the social world.

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What Pressure Produces: The Generative Aspects of Pressure amidst Urban Displacement in Dakar

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Figure 1: The old terminus building in Dakar, known simply as “La Gare”

During my early days of fieldwork in the old city centre of Dakar, Senegal, I was sitting with the trader Fatim in her tiny market stall under a tattered, weather-worn parasol. Fatim watched over her goods that were balanced on top of some old, repurposed metal drums. The rusty tracks of the former Dakar-Niger railway line stretched out on the ground behind us, forming the backdrop to this small outdoor market. A few dozen other rickety stalls were lined up along the old platform that led to the abandoned terminus building known simply as “La Gare” (Figure 1). Fatim thrust her arm out to indicate the space around her and exclaimed, ‘Often, when people come here, they look around and say, “There is nothing here! …Some people think the market at the Terminus (Marché de la Gare) doesn’t exist anymore, so they don’t come’.

The Terminus (La Gare) was the last station at the end of the Dakar-Niger railway line. The line had formerly connected the landlocked Malian capital, Bamako, to the Senegalese capital on the Atlantic coast. During the first decade of decolonisation a thriving Malian wholesale and retail market – le Marché de la Gare – had emerged at the Dakar Terminus. When I arrived in Dakar in 2013 to conduct fieldwork, however, the passenger train, on which the Malian shuttle traders supplying the market had travelled, was no longer running; and the flourishing Malian market at the Terminus no longer existed. In 2003, under pressure from the World Bank, the Malian and Senegalese governments had privatized the formerly State-owned rail network. In 2009, the Senegalese passenger train running between the Malian border and Dakar was discontinued. In the same year, the Malian market at the Dakar terminus was bulldozed by Senegalese authorities, supposedly to make way for “The Seven Wonders of Dakar” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1O1wNsfmaM, accessed 7th of June 2023) – a prestigious, but as yet unfinished, construction project.

In this blog post I explore how the traders evicted from the Terminus had responded to persistent uncertainty and economic pressure following the demolition of their market. Rapid and unequal urban developments are occurring across the world, and particularly in the fast-growing cities of Africa. Such developments lead to disruption, uprooting and disorientation, creating immense economic and psychological pressures on urban traders whose livelihoods depend on working in a specific location in the city and accessing certain infrastructures and networks in that space, to connect with suppliers, customers, and middlemen. The following analysis explores what is produced by these pressures – not in a naively optimistic sense of “good things emerging” from pressure, but in a temporal sense of understanding the long-term outcomes produced by pressure. Specifically, I argue that the economic uncertainty and sense of disorientation and uprootedness associated with eviction from the Dakar Terminus had led to a kind of urban diasporic formation among the displaced traders. The analysis thus contributes a temporal perspective on pressure, showing what urban dwellers’ responses to pressure may generate in the longer term.

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Review:* Special issue of Africa Development by Post-Colonialisms Today**

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A new calendar year ushers in the usual array of tropes on Africa. They include why the continent is failing, what it should be doing better and why it has so much resilience in dealing with its own frailty. Overwhelmingly, Western institutions (NGOs, credit rating agencies, etc.) repeat tired mantras of the international financial institutions, ignoring the insights of African scholar activists and the historical backdrop to the continent’s contemporary crises. Neglect of such analysis leads to the failure to understand why and how different African countries are in the mess that they are and why the mess has structural continuities and conjunctural discontinuities. The antidote to Western-centric analysis is the superb collection of essays in a special issue of Africa Development, a journal of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA), which emerged from the Post-Colonialisms Today project. The range and insight of the collection is difficult to capture in a short review, but there are two continuous themes among contributors: the importance of revisiting the historical past and the significance of sovereignty, or the absence of it.

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Combining dependency theory and the regulation school: Understanding economic rents in Burkina Faso

Juliette AlendaLeave a comment

Dependency theory is experiencing some kind of comeback and has been discussed at length on the Developing Economics blog. However, one criticism that often comes up when researchers work on the phenomenon of dependency is the fact that the separation between the spheres of periphery and centre may be too simple, insofar as the working class is also exploited in the countries of the centre, and the elite also benefits from such a system in the periphery. While some strands of dependency theory may provide important angles for analysis of trade between the Global North and South, such analysis also risks pitting development in the center against underdevelopment in the periphery. It is worth noting, however, that many dependency theorists did not think of the world in such binary terms, but rather centered class analysis in their frameworks.

In our recent work, we approach the problem of dependence slightly differently in an attempt to nuance our analysis. Dependence is linked to the country’s international insertion, marked by both political and economic relations of domination with the industrialized countries of the “center”, and is reflected in unequal economic specialisations and unfavourable terms of trade. However, ‘dependent’ countries have followed varied trajectories, which need to be analysed in their context, as dependency is not black and white. Let’s zoom in on West Africa. There, dependency is mainly based on rentier-type economic regimes. A rent is defined as obtaining income without contributing to the production of additional goods and services. In a paper dedicated to the situation in Burkina Faso, we have sought to understand a very specific historical case, representing an important rentier economy that was also well integrated into the global economy. We have sought to combine dependency and regulation theories to understand the stability of such a rentier economy. Let’s explore the economic history of Burkina Faso.

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Everyday Politics in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya: Q&A with Matteo Capasso

Farwa SialLeave a comment

In Everyday Politics in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, Matteo Capasso provides an alternative analysis of Libya’s history and regime under Colonel Gaddafi leading up to the 2011 events that sanctioned its fall. The book offers a compelling counterargument to the mainstream narrative of Libya as a stateless, authoritarian and rogue state by focusing on international and geopolitical dynamics impacting Libya’s governance.

Q.1 Your book argues against the dominant western analysis of Libya under Colonel Gaddafi as a dictatorship, completely dependent on its economic legitimacy from oil. To quote:

‘This book has cautioned readers from rushing to define the Jamahiriya as an umpteenth authoritarian regime in the Arab world that crushes and controls its people. The significance of this issue lies in how the increasing repressible characteristic of the regime inevitably reflected wider power’. 

What do you mean by wider power dynamics?

When you pick any book on the political history of Libya, you are bound to encounter the argument that Qaddafi’s Libya (not the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya or the Libyan government) was a stateless society, governed ruthlessly by a dictator who was aiming to disrupt the US-led international order.  In the book, I define these arguments as a conceptual tryptic, including the ideas of statelessness, authoritarianism and rogue state. The book starts off questioning the use of these analytical frameworks and instead proposes to address questions of political legitimacy and authority via the study of the everyday. To do so, however, brought me to face another problem, namely the fact that most academic studies approach the ‘everyday’ with an overemphasis on the agency and power of the people. This, in turn, has led to dismiss a bit too quickly the impact of global and structural factors; and this is where I come to answer your question. While the everyday gained prominence and became a privileged site for studying politics in the Arab region, especially in the aftermath of the 2011 mass uprisings, these analyses  remain disconnected from long-standing international dynamics of politics and political economy. In other worlds, how were these states integrated in the wider international political economy? Did the political projects pursued by the Libyan government, especially in the aftermath of the 1969 revolution, challenge the interests of Western geopolitical forces? Why was Libya progressively subject to military assaults and geopolitical pressure?  If one ignores—rather conveniently—these aspects, it ends up to square one, basically explaining the politics of the country as the result of internal factors. In this manner, one not only delinks the socio-political formation of countries in the Global South from the international world, but also ends up flattening out its hierarchies existing.

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The Salaried Man and His Others: Rethinking Pressure in the Longue Durée

Jordanna MatlonLeave a comment

Colon statue, Côte d’Ivoire. Author’s collection, 2023.

The burgeoning scholarship over the past several decades documenting youth stalled in their quest for adulthood, the scholarship on waiting, on restless underemployed laborers buying time in the informal economy, on the crisis of African masculinities, on the accumulating material and psychic pressures of unmet familial and community responsibilities – all these are ways of depicting the longue durée of failure best contextualized within the beguiled patriarchal promise of colonial civilizing missions: the breadwinning wage.

In this blog, I draw from my recent book, A Man among Other Men: The Crisis of Black Masculinity in Racial Capitalism, to explore how socioeconomic forces particular to the postcolonial African city induce a permanent state of pressure among young men at the interrupted point of social becoming. Observing that the crisis of work is also a crisis of masculinity, I historicize the pressures of late capitalism in African cities – namely, surviving in informal economies – within the longue durée of the wage economy. I show how the introduction of wage labor during European colonial rule produced at its outset an overwhelmingly unachievable male breadwinner norm. The salary was both an entitlement and a source of intense pressure as it produced a novel form of patriarchal privilege but also the social and domestic responsibilities that came to collapse manhood with this exceptional, and exceptionally rare, form of economic activity. Examining these pressures within the long shadow of colonialism critically illuminates the role of race-making and racial difference in the emergence of financial expectation and deeply personalized societal failure among contemporary urban African men.

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