STREET markets and informal settlements that are part of many African cities do not mean that Africans just enjoy disobeying authority and disregarding rules.
Politeness and respect are a fundamental part of Ubuntu and other values ingrained in Africans from birth.
Such people-oriented values are extended to how people conduct their businesses and co-exist. They would not set up informal markets and squatter settlements if there were no push factors.
They would not depend on their financial models if national financial policies were more inclusive and relevant.
Why would farmers part with their grain for US$250 per metric tonne in the informal market if a government marketing institution offered US$500 per metric tonne paid on time?
The farmers know the value of receiving US$250 promptly compared to receiving US$500 after three to four months, when opportunities have disappeared.
All these actions and decisions are a response to policy failures that end up fuelling informal trade and other types of informality.
Informality can be defined as an activity, performed by an individual, a group of individuals, an organisation, a family or a clan that bypasses the State or formal regulation.
In many African countries, informal practices emerge in areas that the State has not managed to regulate.
For example, if the State fails to regulate housing developments, informal settlements and informal markets mushroom everywhere. When that happens, informality replaces ineffective State mechanisms.
Eventually, it becomes difficult for government to regularise settlements and markets that have been neglected for decades. That is why informal markets and squatter settlements now shape the urban socio-economic landscape in many African countries.
When neglected to their fate for many years, citizens end up influencing governance practices through petty and uncoordinated acts of insubordination or rebellion that, repeated millions of times, change the way urban planning is implemented.
This is shown by how many African municipalities and local authorities are enduring the pain of regularising settlements and markets that have emerged on their own because they have been slow in monitoring trends and meeting the growing needs of poor people.
By promoting formal markets and selected value chains like wheat at the expense of traditional grains, indigenous chickens and tubers that anchor ordinary people’s livelihoods, State institutions abandon the majority in ways that create space for private initiative like informal marketing channels as well as self-management of markets or residential space by the people.
Ignored for many years, these actors and entrepreneurs end up supplementing or substituting the State.
When this happens, the State becomes the primary producer of informality by simply not taking care of some aspects of social life and allowing unco-ordinated initiatives to thrive.
African economies are not just about money and the formal economy.
The extent to which an environment is business-friendly also tends to increase ordinary people’s reliance on personal connections that are built through Ubuntu and solid friendships through which people help each other in everyday life and survival strategies.
The more informality is present in certain spheres of public life, the more it is likely that citizens perceive government institutions as weak, incapable or ineffective.
People become used to relying on fellow citizens more than the State and thus construct new moralities that have little in common with State morality. This situation gets worse when governments propose regulations that strangle entrepreneurship through excessive regulation or inadequate public services.
Due to the colonial legacy, most African economies are structured in such a way that formal structures are only one component of a more complex economic system.
In most cases, formal structures tend to be in urban centres where government departments have offices, while rural areas operate informally through traditional governance systems.
That means African economies may not be adequately understood through formal monetary statements.
They should be understood through Ubuntu-based relational aspects that enable people to survive, build trust and sociability networks. When people are trapped in unstable conditions, social relations become dependent on indebtedness, help and support networks that function beyond mere redistribution of cash.
They generate both dependency and reciprocity leading to the consolidation of strong ties between marginalised and weak actors.
When the absence of State support makes conditions unfit for orthodox economic development, business is no longer about growing and generating but is instead about survival, social bonding and invention.
The meaning of success is widened and comes to include the capacity to generate revenue, respecting social rules and obligations, gaining esteem or respectability and a blurring of the boundary between formal and informal practices.
When people in a weak position feel it is moral to resist the formal government system, they will not do it openly but in guerrilla-like fashion. Their resistance will be informal, petty, minimalistic, contextual and occasional.
Informality as a reservoir of innovation
Evidence from African territorial mass markets is beginning to show the extent to which informality is an immense reservoir of creativity.
To sustain co-existence between formality and informality, informality should not be allowed to become so big that it hinders the expansion of modern institutional structures.
On the other hand, modern formal institutional structures should be domesticated as opposed to being rigid, standardised, homogenised, Western-centred structures.
When modern institutional structures are imposed by government from the top, ordinary people resort to informality as an attempt to resist Western neoliberal institutions in favour of Ubuntu-based and other relational values, where social and environmental concerns are prioritised.
The fact that informality continues to thrive signals the existence of alternative economic models that can work to the advantage of the weak and the poor, where profit is secondary to equality and justice.
Integrating informal responses to policies into formal political dialogue can encourage a broadening of the scope of policy-making and planning in ordinary cities. When that happens, informality becomes a tool to redefine the relationship between governance, the State and its institutions.
The power of alternative currencies
Informality is sustained by alternative currencies such as trust, respect, dignity, integrity, relationships and social capital that can be easily accessible and still be exchanged with money.
This is also how informality offers access to services that usually money alone cannot buy.
These currencies are becoming part of alternative welfare mechanisms that are replacing State structures in ways that could help policymakers to identify novel modes of governance.
They enable citizens to create their social protection mechanisms without challenging the State’s symbolic power or invading what the State declares as its competence areas.
Such tendencies replace the State in areas of governance where its welfare distribution or social protection mechanisms are weak.
When citizens use public spaces like roadsides and streets to conduct vending activities, it is a way of contesting spatial policies and planning.
They are demonstrating an everyday innovative governance framework that can help in revisiting the way power and agency are regarded at the everyday level.
Poor people are using their social relations to construct an alternative socio-economic web of interdependencies that are quietly replacing the State as part of resistance to extreme laws.
It is also a way in which citizens regain control of spaces that have been claimed by the neoliberal State, which is giving too little to its citizens in exchange for their services and contributions to economic resilience.
Towards corrective measures
A deeper grasp of informality can help the African government to improve its capacity in providing services and addressing urgent social issues before they spiral out of control.
Having gained sufficient knowledge from studying dimensions of informality, States can ease control over some areas of life, allowing informality and self-management to emerge towards a more participative and inclusive management of some public spaces like markets.
The State can also take advantage of informal welfare tools to make up for the lack of formal ones.
Ultimately, a better grasp of informality can point to alternative ways to improve State and business performance, improve regulatory performance and predict market trends with implications for tax morale and citizens’ willingness to comply with tax legislation.
In many African countries, citizens are aware that lack of development results in low productivity, limited capital, low levels of education and structural conditions that negatively affect growth and sustainable exploitation of abundant natural resources.
- Charles Dhewa is a proactive knowledge broker and management specialist.
