Everyday Corruption and the State

Citizens and Public Officials in Africa

Giorgio Blundo, Jean-Pierre Olivier de-Sardan, N. B. Arifari, M. T. Alou

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781842775639
• eBook ISBN: 9781848136649
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Daily life in Africa is governed by the 'petty' corruption of public officials in services such as health, transport, or the judicial system. This remarkable study of everyday corruption in three African countries investigates the reasons for its extraordinary prevalence.

The authors construct an illuminating analytical framework around the various forms of corruption, the corruptive strategies public officials resort to, and how these forms and strategies have become embedded in daily administrative practices. They investigate the roots of the system in the growing inability of weakened states in Africa to either reward their employees adequately or to deliver expected services. They conclude that corruption in Africa today is qualitatively different from other parts of the world in its pervasiveness, its legitimations, and its huge impact on the nature of the state.

PART I

Approach, Method, Summary

1

Why should we study everyday corruption and how should we go about it?

G. Blundo and J.-P. Olivier de Sardan

This book is based on two years of field and documentary studies carried out in Benin, Niger and Senegal from 1999 to 2001. The subject of the research was petty everyday corruption, which is widespread and systemic throughout the public – that is, administrative and political – sphere in all three countries.¹ The research focused on the following specific areas and sectors: transport and customs (in the three countries); the legal system (in the three countries); health (in Benin and Niger); public procurements (in Benin and Senegal); the local tax system (in Senegal); the way corruption is dealt with by the press (in the three countries); development-aid projects (based on the example of the scandal surrounding Italian–Senegalese development cooperation); and the policies adopted to fight corruption in the three countries.

The team consisted of six researchers of six different nationalities;² we also availed of the services of fourteen research assistants who were trained by us in the field.³ The findings of our research were first collated and debated in the three countries concerned and were then presented in a report⁴ and a thematic issue of the journal Politique Africaine.⁵ This book, which is being published simultaneously in French and English,⁶ differs considerably from these publications in terms of both its structure and its content and incorporates new analyses and an extended and updated bibliography. It is the first detailed and systematic anthropological study to be carried out in a group of countries on the specific topic of everyday corruption in Africa.

Why study corruption?

The individual members of our research team already had extensive experience in carrying out research on topics involving the anthropology of development and political anthropology – that is, the decentralization of local powers, public health, development projects and the management of local resources – in the three countries involved in the study.⁷ The topics of corruption and administrative dysfunction continually arose in conversations and interviews with informants in the course of these studies. Thus, without consciously seeking it out, we were constantly confronted with the issue of corruption in our previous work.

Despite this, we never considered corruption an autonomous field of research, a scientific construct per se. It was never our aim to establish a subdiscipline to be known as the ‘anthropology of corruption’; nor was it our objective to hunt down and investigate cases of illicit administrative practices everywhere. From the outset, we viewed corruption as a stepping stone leading to other phenomena, as a particularly useful way of accessing other realities and a way of penetrating further into the daily routine of the public services right to the core of the relations between public services and their users. Thus, productive perspectives emerged in the course of our research that could contribute towards the identification of an anthropology of the state, of professional cultures, of administrative conduits and of the ethics of the public service, or what could be described more generally as a ‘socio-anthropology of African public spaces’.⁸

Once we go beyond the organizational charts, legal and regulatory texts and political declarations, we find that the ‘real’ functioning of the state in these three countries is actually very removed from its ‘official’ functioning. Without expressing any value judgements, it is valid to refer to a ‘generalized informal functioning’ of the state here. Indeed, based on the laws and regulations in force, public discourse and the expectations of the users of state services, one could even go so far as describing it as ‘generalized dysfunction’. Of course, generally negative perceptions on the part of service users is the lot of all ‘interface bureaucracy’, even in Europe. Indeed, it is an almost structural characteristic of public services that they give rise to a disproportionate level of demand in relation to the actual supply available and that they show complete indifference to – if not disregard for – their users’ time (Lipsky 1980). Nonetheless, the concrete situations observed in the course of our study would suggest that our informants’ grievances should not be classified as mere local variants of the characteristic stereotypes of the world of bureaucracy (see Hertzfeld 1992). Of course, this ‘generalized informal functioning’ of the state does not mean that there is a complete absence of rules and regulations, or that the corrupt practices are merely a matter of the ‘law of the market’ or simple power relations. On the contrary, everyday corruption is a social activity which is regulated de facto and in accordance with complex rules, and tightly controlled by a series of tacit codes and practical norms. These tacit codes and practical norms differ significantly from public codes and official or legal norms and it was the main objective of our study and this book to identify and describe them – for they are never explicit and are often even unconscious and automatic.

The tacit codes and practical norms at work in the context of corruption largely exceed the scope of the latter and concern the habitual behaviours in the public services, and even the societies, studied. The ‘generalized informal functioning’ of the state provides fertile ground for the existence of corrupt practices, but does not fully merge with them. For example, it is difficult to identify a clear boundary between ‘favouritism’, clientelism and ‘string-pulling’, on the one hand, and ‘arrangements’ involving monetary compensations, on the other, and similarly between legitimate commission and tips and illegal pots-de-vin – bribes – and extortion. In order to take into account this overlap between corrupt practices and all of the ‘real’ everyday practices of state services,⁹ we adopted the broadest possible acceptation of the ‘complex of corruption’¹⁰ and one which is far removed from strictly legal definitions: that is, all practices involving the use of public office that are improper – in other words, illegal and/or illegitimate from the perspective of the regulations in force or from that of users – and give rise to undue personal gain.¹¹ Moreover, we were extremely wary of defining a clear distinction between what constituted corruption and what did not. This helped us understand the links between the apparently corrupt practices and apparently non-corrupt practices closely associated with them.¹² In ranging between the dimensions of exchange and extortion, as we shall see, these practices give rise to processes involving the informal redistribution of public resources and of forms of power and authority. However, they also generate mechanisms of inequality and exclusion in terms of the access to these resources. Thus, the study of corruption enables us to penetrate to the actual heart of modern African states, their administrations and their public services, and a phenomenon that is apparently peripheral in nature provides the key to the very centre of things.

This issue of knowledge is also a social and political issue. The topic of the war against corruption and the promotion of ‘good governance’ recurs like a leitmotif in the debates surrounding the reform of African states and the definition of new policies. Efficiency, accountability, transparency and the rule of law have become the keywords of this new form of aid conditionality which is inspired in particular by the neoliberal movement. The limits, ideological perspectives and paradoxes of these anti-corruption reforms and reforms for the establishment of ‘good’ governance have already been highlighted elsewhere and include: a normative and teleological approach that emphasizes ‘neutral’ technical solutions to problems stripped in advance of their ideological and political valence (Ferguson 1990; Polzer 2001); a barely dissimulated universalist claim; the uncritical and naive exaltation of a ‘civil society’ erected as a counter-power to a state that is permanently under suspicion of various downward spirals (Szeftel 1998); and a serious ignorance of the situations that they claim to be reforming. However, the criticism of ‘good governance’ mainly comes from post-structuralist authors or development deconstructionists (see Escobar 1991, 1995, 1997) who confine themselves to an analysis of discourses and, as a result, neglect actual practices and the processes of sidetracking and disarticulation of international campaigns for public integrity by local actors. It should be noted that doublespeak reigns supreme in contemporary Africa. In other words the political elites are past masters in terms of their capacity to produce an official discourse that fulfils the expectations and conditions of their donors and is extremely far removed from the realities that remain largely inaccessible to the donors¹³ – that is, the very people who wish to inspire or impose the ‘war against corruption’ as a condition for the granting of their support. On the other hand, the discourses surrounding the war against corruption among the power elites also constitute a response to ‘internal’ political issues (i.e. elimination of political competitors, the elimination of political groups that were defeated in the polls, the creation of scapegoats to satisfy public expectations etc.) involving the settling of old scores and not the real improvement of governance.

Corruption is also condemned, albeit in a different register, by the users of public services, by certain ‘reforming’ national officials and, more generally, by the African public, who are sickened by the decline of the states and the rapaciousness of the political classes. In other words, the debate surrounding ‘governance, the state and corruption’ is not limited to management contexts and neoliberal ideologies. It is our aim to participate in this wider debate through this book, however on the basis of our research. We believe that researchers can only make a positive contribution to the necessary reforms by producing well-documented, realistic and incontestable data that are as free as possible from normative judgements and ideological side-taking, in other words far removed from the hackneyed official formulations that dominate in the development, administrative and political sectors. For example, in this book we show that the war against corruption may not be divorced from a more general reform of bureaucratic and administrative practices and that the top-down creation of anti-corruption institutions on the instigation of external partners does nothing to halt corrupt transactions in the current context. Naturally, as researchers we are not in a position to be able to formulate ‘recommendations’ and direct activities, but we can at least make a modest contribution to informing the actors concerned – both ‘high up’ and ‘low down’ – about a reality that must first be known about before it can be reformed.

Nonetheless, it is only through the quality of the data produced and the interpretations made on their basis that we can make a worthwhile contribution to both the academic and the public debate concerning the state and everyday corruption. All social actors, both eminent and humble, all citizens and all decision-makers have their views on corruption and the state. The only comparative advantage enjoyed by the social science researcher is the possession of a documented point of view based on knowledge acquired through research. Therefore we should now explain how we carried out our research, in terms of both the research posture adopted and the methodological approach used.

A comprehensive research posture

Our initial and primary objective was to try to describe the habits, procedures and justifications involved in corruption and, furthermore, to understand how public services work ‘in reality’¹⁴ and how their users participate in or adapt to this mode of operation. For various reasons, which mostly concern the specific characteristics of corruption, the main studies carried out hitherto on the subject are based paradoxically on extensive quantitative surveys, which are not very suited to providing an explanation of the phenomenon. The most obvious of these characteristics is the fact that corruption is illegal everywhere and in most cases also illegitimate. Even if it is de facto tolerated or widespread (in the form of ‘white’ or ‘grey’ corruption as defined by Heidenheimer 1990), it is still at odds with the legislative and regulatory system, which is generally a Western artefact, and is condemned by numerous social and political actors. Thus all research on corruption concerns largely clandestine or concealed practices and highly normative representations. As a result, it encounters the problems faced by sociological research on petty and serious crime, on parallel distribution networks and the drugs economy. Therefore we face one difficulty and one risk here: on the one hand, we are dealing with an area that is not very accessible to the uninitiated, and, on the other hand, we could be tempted to ‘criminalize corruption’ excessively, in other words to divorce it from ordinary forms of sociability while in reality it is often embedded in them (Olivier de Sardan 1996a). Corruption has two faces: the first overtly illegal one is broadly condemned and the second, which is legitimized by social practices, is tolerated and sometimes even encouraged – albeit ‘unofficially’. Moreover, for the most part, the ‘facts’ of corruption are not established, substantiated and visible. Indeed, it is one of the characteristics of corruption that it is constantly condemned without major proof. Therefore in studying corruption we are essentially dealing with allegations, accusations, suspicions that are aired either in the press¹⁵ or in private conversations. In this regard, we are approaching a sociology of rumour (Blundo 1998) and face the risk of reducing corruption to what is said about it.

Finally, it is not possible to engage with the world of corruption and its practices without posing questions of an ethical and deontological nature. The first – and most obvious – concerns the distance that must be taken from such a research object. Even if we condemned corruption as citizens, it was important that, as researchers, we refrained as far as possible from all moral condemnation and normative judgement throughout the duration of the study. It would be simply impossible to carry out effective research on a phenomenon as widespread as petty corruption in Africa if we were to consider every customs official or every police officer we encountered a criminal or offender. Moreover, in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the authors
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• PART I Approach, Method, Summary
• PART II Sectoral Studies
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index