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The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has been widely described as a bankrupt state, unable to meet the basic needs of its citizens. Nevertheless, many essential services – even in areas such as Kivu province, affected by violence – continue to be provided at the local level. This forces us to think beyond the idea of a "failing state".
For example, although public funds for education almost ceased in the mid-1980s, the average enrollment rate remained well above average in sub-Saharan Africa.
In our new book, Negotiating the Public Service in Congo, we describe how the functions of the state continue to be replicated by a wide range of actors. These range from churches to non-governmental organizations (NGOs), donors and ordinary citizens. We looked at various sectors, including electricity supply, waste management, public transit and the justice sector.
In each of the service sectors, we have encountered deeply hybrid forms of governance, in which central power has become secondary to localized arrangements, thus enabling public services to function.
Things that work
One of the examples we found related to "pay increments".
A lack of money means that the salaries of civil servants are almost never fully paid. They are therefore almost always supplemented by various salary supplements. These take a variety of forms. They can be negotiated within the public administration and take the form of institutionalized and formalized complements. Or they can take place outside of the administration, be informal and sporadic.
Some of these supplements are considered legitimate, while others would be considered by most illegitimate people. This is especially true of those extracted from ordinary citizens.
These supplements contribute to salaries, but also to the entire public service infrastructure.
Another example is the way parents pay various school fees. These are partly used to pay teachers' salaries. The money is also used to pay for school buildings and other infrastructure. It's a long time practice.
The end result is that public services are provided by a wide range of actors and through a wide range of practices. These take place at the national level, within the ministries, and at the very local level, between civil servants and citizens. It is these types of arrangements – in which resources are extracted and redistributed – that guarantee the provision of public services.
Consequences
But there are consequences.
The upward financing of the administration subverts the usual hierarchical mode of operation of command and control.
As resources are extracted at the local level, civil servants are paid upward, eroding the authority of the administrative hierarchy. In turn, it undermines the influence of the expertise of the highest placed people in the system.
For example, the school inspection services are deprived of their ability to monitor and control the system because they depend in part on the salary increase or transportation of those they are supposed to sanction.
This has a profound impact on the performance of the public administration. For example, in primary education, this dynamic has brought more children to school and opened more schools as each child generates additional income. But this has had a detrimental effect on the quality of education. By the end of elementary school, less than half of Grade 6 students can read a complete sentence in French, the official language of instruction.
Challenges of public service
The problem is that the state of the DRC is facing enormous challenges for the provision of public services.
In financial terms, it has virtually no funds. It has a $ 4 billion budget to fund a government of 90 million residents on a territory the size of Western Europe.
The history of this phenomenon dates back to the 1970s and results from the fall in copper prices, the end of the cold war and therefore the end of international support. This situation, combined with internal pressures for democratization, has led to economic, social and political unrest. In the early 1990s, the budget of the Zairian state (Zaire was renamed DRC in 1997) literally imploded.
Civil servants had to fend for themselves and make their position a source of income. For example, utility users have been asked to pay taxes and compensate for the disappearance of revenues paid on the basis of normal tax revenues.
A recent survey of informal taxes estimated that informal income generated 85% of the total officially registered state income. This occurs in the form of widely accepted fees for particular services, as outright extortion practices, or both.
In connection with this, a parallel circuit of candidates for public service has developed around the official state. About a third of Congolese civil servants are not paid by the state. They perform exactly the same functions as "normal" civil servants, with the difference that they do not receive a salary from the state.
Instead, they are paid in part with informal tax revenues generated by citizens, and hope to bypass the official recruitment system and get their name on the public payroll. This would allow them to earn an official salary and no longer depend on the lower wage compared to informal tax income.
In other words, the state and the public administration have not disappeared. Instead, they have been completely reorganized and adapted to the interests of citizens at the local level: junior officials, non-state service providers acting on behalf of the state or replacing the state, as well as users of these. services.
Change is possible
President Felix Tshisekedi has recently become the country's new head of state. This could be seen as an opportunity for change: the regime of former President Joseph Kabila was seen as a typical example of "bad governance".
In our opinion, change is indeed possible. But there are some important considerations.
The state of the DRC continues to exist from the bottom up, through arrangements at the local level rather than at the top. This means that a political reform simply can not be imposed. It needs to be negotiated with the lower level actors (service providers and users) who have appropriated the system and modified it according to their own programs.
It will take time. State-building is inevitably a long-term process, and simply bypassing it is not very helpful to the process. On the contrary, it reproduces the existing situation only by feeding the local structures without making them responsible to the higher administration.
It is important to remember that the political fate of the new regime is also partly fueled by large-scale corruption in transnational circuits around natural resources, usually with the complicity of American, Canadian or European companies. For example, it is estimated that illicit financial flows leaving the DRC are as important as the inflows of official development assistance entering the country.
At this level too, the international community has a role to play in determining the context in which a more responsible government can take root; a government whose destiny is more directly linked to the performance of the public services it provides than to the fixed assets it is able to mobilize in times of crisis.
Kristof Titeca, Lecturer in International Development, University of Antwerp and Tom De Herdt, professor, University of Antwerp
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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