Everyday Corruption and the State: Citizens and Public Officials in Africa

301 Pages·2006·14.75 MB·English

by  Giorgio Blundo

Everyday Corruption and the State
Citizens and Public Officials in Africa
Giorgio Blundo & Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan
with N. Bako Arifari & M. Tidjani Alou
Translated by Susan Cox
Everyday Corruption and the State was published in 2006.
Published in Southern Africa by David Philip
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Editorial copyright © Giorgio Blundo
and Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan 2006
Individual copyright © individual authors 2006
Translation copyright © Susan Cox 2006
The right of Giorgio Blundo and Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan to be
identified as the editors of this work has been asserted by them in
accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988
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isbn 10 i 84277 562 6 Hb
ISBN 10 i 84277 563 4 Pb
ISBN 13 978 I 84277 562 2 Hb
ISBN 13 978 I 84277 563 9 Pb
Contents
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 3
2 Corruption in Africa and the social
sciences: a review of the literature
Giorgio Blundo 15
3 Everyday corruption in West Africa
G. Blundo and J.-P. Olivier de Sardan 69
4 The popular semiology of corruption
G. Blundo and J.-P. Olivier de Sardan no
PART II Sectoral Studies
5 Corruption in the legal system
Mahaman Tidjani Alou 137
6 ‘We don’t eat the papers’: corruption in
transport, customs and the civil forces
Nassirou Bako Arifari 177
7 An ordered corruption? The social world of
public procurement
Giorgio Blundo 225
Notes 263
Bibliography 275
Index 291
PART I
Approach, Method, Summary
I
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 car­
ried 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 develop­
ment cooperation); and the policies adopted to fight corruption in
the three countries.
The team consisted of six researchers of six different nationali­
ties;* 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? This book, which is being published
simultaneously in French and English,6 differs considerably from
4 Everyday Corruption and the State
these publications in terms of both its structure and its content and
incorporates new analyses and an extended and updated bibliogra­
phy. 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 anthro­
pology 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 cor­
ruption 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 cor­
ruption’; 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
Why should we study everyday corruption? 5
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 199a). Of course, this ‘generalized infor­
mal 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 compensa­
tions, 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’1" and
one which is far removed from strictly legal definitions: that is, all
6 Everyday Corruption and the State
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.'1* 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 govern­
ance’ recurs like a leitmotif in the debates surrounding the reform of
African states and the definition of new policies. Efficiency, account­
ability, 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 decon­
structionists (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