Chapter 4: Governance, Urban Services, and Justice in African Cities

Introduction

My first experience in Sub-Saharan Africa came just after a 1982 coup attempt in Nairobi against the government of Kenya’s President at the time, Daniel arap Moi. When the coup failed, Moi’s government crushed his opponents with a vengeance. The elite western suburbs of Nairobi seemed undisturbed for the months I was there, save for the minor inconvenience of a dusk-to-dawn curfew in the city center. Meanwhile, wholesale evictions and demolitions characterized the response to the coup in the poor and under-serviced informal settlements where the city’s overwhelming majority resided, the government justifying its actions in the name of environmental health (Otiso 2002; Myers 2008b). More than 25 years later, Nairobi erupted in political violence again, after a highly corrupted national election in December 2007 returned Moi’s former Vice-President, Mwai Kibaki, to a second term as Kenya’s President. This time both the death toll and the urban population left homeless and dislocated were far higher than they had been in 1982. A year after that violence, President Kibaki launched a major, US$ 412 billion initiative for making Nairobi a world class global city by 2030 (Gathanju 2009).

I begin this chapter with these events for several reasons. First, they bring up the politics of governance. Like postcolonialism and informality, the words at the heart of the last 2 chapters, governance is a very contested and complicated term. The word started out meaning something about the ‘manner of governing,’ but it has come to be linked with decision-making processes that are not limited to the state, ‘measures that involve setting the rules for the exercise of power and settling conflicts over such rules’ (Hyden 1999: 185; Hyden et al 2004; Hendriks 2010; Davies 2008). The last 3 decades have seen the steady rise of a discourse of ‘good governance’ in African cities, ideologically deployed in both the rhetoric and practices of democratization, privatization, decentralization and liberalization. My memories of Nairobi in 1982, coupled with the post-election violence there in early 2008 and the bold plan for making it into the West’s idea of a modern world class city, lead me to wonder at what seems to me to be a growing gap in Nairobi, and in many cities of the continent, between the rhetoric of good governance and the political and economic realities most residents face in their daily lives. Nairobi has one of the world’s leading think-tanks on urban policy, UN-Habitat, in its Diplomatic District of Gigiri, and (both because of Habitat and outside of its influence) it has seen major large-scale experiments with its governance regimes come and go for 3 decades while its famous slums like Mathare and Kibera grow larger and more deprived (Hendriks 2010; Njeru 2006; Mitullah 2008; Murunga 1999 and 2007; Kinuthia 1992). What good is this good governance Nairobi residents are experiencing? How can African cities like Nairobi move toward the ‘hybrid governance’ of chapter 3 (through finding common ground between formal and informal rules of the game) in the face of this kind of glaring political-economic gap – why does it seem that there is a ‘deep difference’ between the state, elites, and the urban poor majority, a difference that turns to brutality?

Second, the most tangible discussions of good governance in African cities have been in regard to the delivery of urban services (sanitation, water, electricity, solid waste, land management and the like). We have seen some of this already in chapter 3. In most African cities, urban service delivery had been seen primarily as a responsibility that governments performed, however unevenly or inadequately, through the 1980s. In Fall 1982, the Moi government performed the service of building control: it demolished a sizable area of Mathare Valley and loaded its residents onto dump trucks to take them out to rural areas like they were solid waste, after a fire that the municipal authorities blamed on cats destroyed many homes. A daring letter to the editor that I remember reading as a 19 year-old college student scoffed at the blame heaped upon the cats and wondered aloud why the government could not see the connections between Mathare and Muthaiga, the elite enclave just across the highway from the impoverished squatter valley where its residents worked as maids and gardeners. The gulf between the 2 neighborhoods in the services provided (including those of the fire brigade along with building control, electricity, water, and the like) caused the fire, and caused it to be so damaging, the letter-writer argued. People without electricity used candles and oil lamps to see by at night. When a candle or a lamp was kicked over, the highly flammable impermanent materials of the houses caught fire, and the fire spread from house to house because the houses were so close together and had no water supply network with which to put out the flames. Dumping the fire victims in the countryside would solve nothing; it would merely relocate and diffuse a disgruntled and potentially unruly group of people. That relocation and diffusion seems to have been exactly the strategy deployed after the election violence a few years ago, as it has been over and over again in Nairobi (Kinuthia 1992; Murunga 1999; Otiso 2002).

Finally, this leads me to the question of socio-environmental justice in Nairobi, and in urban Sub-Saharan Africa. The years since 1982 have seen the blossoming of a vast literature dedicated to questions of sustainable urban development (SUD) in Sub-Saharan Africa, and a slew of policies for implementing SUD that have largely emanated from Nairobi, or rather from its posh suburban UN offices, under the banner of good governance. President Kibaki’s multi-billion dollar initiative for Nairobi is couched in the language of SUD (Gathanju 2009). By contrast, these decades have brought much less critical attention, particularly in terms of scholarship or policy, in most of Sub-Saharan Africa to questions of urban socio-environmental justice, in terms of equity and fairness in the distribution of both outcomes, opportunities and capabilities in the city (although there are some exceptions, notably in South Africa, as I discuss below). I find this absence strange considering the starkly obvious and interconnected social and environmental injustice evident in many African cities, like Nairobi in 1982 or 2010, given growing inequalities between elites and the severely poor, along with the inequitable distribution of negative environmental consequences of development.

In this chapter, I first discuss governance, service delivery and justice as they have been debated in African cities. I highlight how good governance and justice concerns play out in service delivery in a few settings, and then in a longer case study on Zanzibar. Ultimately, I am testing out the routes to the relational city of Pieterse’s (2008a) diagram, and suggesting that we may need to change the map of discussions about governance in urban studies toward nuanced empirical analysis to get us there.

Urban Governance

The term, governance, stretches around many meanings. In urban studies, it is most commonly understood as a term for getting at the shifting power dynamics of decision-making in an era when the roles of states are in flux. Just how these power dynamics have shifted has generated considerable debate. Much of the debate centers on the degree and character of change in the role of the state, with the theorized ‘shift from government to governance,’ where the nation-state has been hollowed out ‘as functions are dispersed to supranational entities, localities, and non-state actors’ (Davies 2008: 24; Stren 2003). As a number of scholars have noted, debate on governance and service delivery in African cities can be broken down into several camps around this question about the state.

Neoliberal Good Governance

For one camp, the conventional World Bank version of good governance is assumed to be the goal. To those holding this view, governance has been and is at present severely flawed in most African cities, a point with which most scholars would find it hard to disagree. The World Bank view argues that urban governance is therefore in need of reforms that bring it in line with neoliberal ideals: in sum, the more that urban service provision is governed by market forces, the better. In fact, this is not so much an argument as it is a deeply held assumption that most western experts and local elite policy makers have ‘steeped’ in so long that this is seen as ‘the only pathway to development’ (Yeboah 2006: 50). For at least 20 years, the rhetoric has been loud and strong in Africa advocating this shift away from government or state-dominated urban management. Foreign donors and local leaders alike have heavily emphasized strengthening the private sector, opening the door to transnational capital, enabling democratic, municipal governments, and empowering community groups at once in creating new networks and partnerships for urban development across the whole landscape of city management, from land (Brown 2005) and water (Yeboah 2006) to transport (Rizzo 2002), electricity supply (McDonald 2009) or solid waste services (Adama 2007).

Good governance, as the idealized agenda for cities in Africa put forward in different but related ways by the World Bank Cities Alliance, the United Nations Habitat program, and western donors, has come to the fore coterminous with the neoliberal development agenda. The neoliberal good governance approach is essentially that which I discussed in chapter 3, as in de Soto’s approach to land. In reference to western urban neoliberalism, geographers Jamie Peck and Adam Tickell (2002) distinguished between what they termed ‘roll-back’ and ‘roll-out’ neoliberalism. Using the US-UK experiences as examples, the former was characteristic of the Reagan or Thatcher ‘roll-back’ of state engagement in urban management and service provision, while the latter is associated with the Clinton-Blair re-introduction of state institutions in ‘Third Way contortions’ that created ‘neoliberalism with a human face.’ Urbanists Neil Brenner and Nik Theodore (2002: 362) note the ways in which these 2 versions of neoliberalism stop and start, and go back and forth in terms of which has the lead in any given context. In European cities, Patrick Le Galès (1995: 60, cited in Stren 2003: 17) noted a ‘greater diversity in the organization of services, a greater flexibility, a variety of actors, even a transformation of the forms that local democracy might assume’ as urban neoliberalism took root, in line with Brenner and Theodore’s argument.

To the World Bank in Africa, though, good governance certainly started as a one-size-fits-all idea, ‘presented as a commonsensical notion that requires no definition’ (Blundo and Le Meur 2009: 7). African cities have seen an increase in the significance of private sector, civil society, or other non-state actors in service delivery in the last 2 decades, with what seems to me like a surprising lack of widespread active and organized popular opposition (other than in South Africa). Roll-out neoliberalism would appear to have had the upper hand for most of the last 2 decades, albeit with many variations in institutional maps of implementation. In other words, the Cities Alliance/Habitat/Western donor line of approach has involved making and remaking state institutions that can work in partnership with a new array of private sector and civil society entities in facilitating the delivery of urban services, but exactly what institutions or entities, and exactly how the implementation processes have evolved vary on the ground.

These neoliberal approaches to good governance, sustainable urban development and urban environmental management have risen to prominence for a number of reasons, but the most important one is donor dependency, and a related dependent mindset (Yeboah 2006). Rarely, if ever, are these initiatives coming from African urban communities recognizing this form of planning or management as being in their best interests. Most are heavily donor-driven, and local engagement is elite- and state-dominated (Nnkya 2007). The playbook, in many instances, can be traced to the World Bank’s Urban Management Program that was a crucial force in the creation of the United Nations Habitat’s Sustainable Cities Program (SCP) which introduced many cities to the new governance regime in the first place (Dahiya and Pugh 2000; Myers 2005). Certainly, state-delivered urban services that had been reasonably effective in the 1960s and 1970s were faltering in cities across the continent in the 1980s, and city and national governments as well as citizens were seeking improvements (Mitullah 2008). In most cities, though, the residents themselves had very little to do with the policy decisions made, even in the most politically democratized (i.e. in electoral terms) countries (Yeboah 2006; Fredericks 2009).

This is particularly ironic because many neoliberal governance reforms in Africa are rhetorically built around decentralization, collaborative visioning, and stakeholder democracy (Mitullah 2008). The participatory lingo that sounds so good within these programs often ends up being a form of that rollout neoliberalism with a human face; to wit, the World Bank urban agenda - state withdrawal, privatization, and private investment coupled with new or re-engineered government institutions to facilitate the transition - was central to solutions offered by the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg (Middleton and O’Keefe 2003). There and elsewhere, the stakeholders, the vision plans or action plans, and even the political decentralization efforts are ironically highly centralized in donor and state-elite hands (Hendriks 2010; Mitullah 2008). Any possibility for neoliberal SUD actually prioritizing themes such as the ‘freedom to participate in national and local decision-making processes’ depends a great deal ‘on the particular balance of socio-political forces which must be determined in each concrete case’ (Kipfer 1996: 122). There is surely variation, but in most Sub-Saharan African cities, the balance is tipped against the interests of the urban poor majority. Two decades of neoliberal good governance have done little to re-balance that equation in most cases; many argue that inequalities and injustices within African cities have increased under neoliberalism. Some even argue that ‘good governance’ is in effect a replacement for real democracy – what matters to it is the effective maintenance of control and a welcoming stance toward foreign direct investment (Abrahamsen 2000). In any case, donors clearly sought to ‘depoliticize the reform process,’ which in practice actually made ‘reform’ into a heavily politicized set of ‘dance steps’ (Murunga 2007: 277). The donor-driven character of much urban policy and urban research in Sub-Saharan Africa keeps the neoliberal governance approaches to the fore in the dance, regardless of injustice or the absence of urban democracy in decision-making.