Africa: Engaging Citizens In Re-Building Failed States

September 2003

Engaging Citizens In Re-Building Failed States

Dr. Norman Reynolds

The United Nations, the US led Allies and new bodies like the African Union are faced with the task of re-building society and economy in countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq, and Liberia – and soon hopefully in Zimbabwe, the DRC and other failed states.

They typically attempt to do so by taking prime responsibility, directly or indirectly through a weak transitional government, to “supply” security, infrastructure and services. This method seldom works. As a ‘supply-side’ model, it is encumbered by ‘patronage’ and hence is open to local elite capture be it by warlords or opposition groupings or to disruption by “terrorists”.

Its main weakness is that it ignores the condition of society. The best definition that captures what has happened in such countries is that in each case there has been a “massive loss of competence” by citizens. Competence is here used in the old English sense of the ability to look after oneself, one’s family and to contribute to society. The need, therefore, is to “restore the competence of all citizens”.

The old orthodoxy of “supply”, which has often in the past been the means to control populations, acts to further marginalize citizens. After years of civic trauma, politically inspired violence and mounting poverty, the supply model asks populations to ‘wait’ for improvements; that is, to remain dependent. Passivity often becomes anger. It is this resultant vast gulf between inactive citizens and frustrated donor / emerging new government that leaves space for resistance and warlord and political / religious machinations.

It also fails to build local demand and economy; thereby punishing those who try to produce but cannot sell locally.

The answer is to move to a higher conception of local renewal and local responsibility in partnership with the central authority facilitated by the UN and allies.

The key is to shift from ‘supply’ to demand-side management, and from patronage and central control / responsibility to economic rights programming that enables, resources, partners and builds competent citizens.

Citizens can be ‘offered’ membership in programmes that confer rights and responsibilities upon them within programme rules. Programmes can be designed that confer community investment (and thus work) rights to build citizen ownership, management and access to productive resources. Other programmes can confer child, health, school and training rights and help to realise the right to live in a working local economy.

As demand-side measures, they also swell local expenditure and, together with other pieces of a localisation strategy, can raise the local multiplier, that is effective local demand, two or three times within a few years.

Programme membership is placed on “offer” to all citizens who organise locally to register to become ‘programme members’. This places the responsibility for implementation on communities of citizens formed for each programme purpose – and rewards local initiative, organisation and the acceptance of responsibility.

Programme rules define the broad aims, the rights and responsibilities of ‘member’ community groups, internal democratic ordering, and attach the related resources. The latter is a fundamental right, to know the available resources. All businesses, agencies and wealthier families enjoy such a basic right in the form of an annual budget. Why not include communities for different purposes as ‘constituent units of society’ with the same resource rights as official departments?

The ‘offer’ of programme rights engages all adults – the best form of politics – and sets out to make them competent in the sense of being able to look after themselves, their families and to contribute to society. It, moreover, allows the authorities to stand back, to “see the wood for the trees” and to assume a supportive, facilitation role.

Citizens organise as communities against known programme rules. These communities will often overlap and can be re-ordered as members decide and experience suggests.

Citizens are rewarded for organising: they qualify to manage the different programmes’ rights, to take responsibility and to receive the associated resources so that they can ‘act’. In doing so, they form and build institutions, perhaps upon existing bodies, such as democratic property companies, Child and Health Societies and the like that give strength to civic society.

This method quickly ‘calls forth’ a dynamic civic society and a local economic, service and community business system to partner the weak state and foreign powers. It also provides capable civic partners for the renewal of local government. It shifts responsibility, as loosely promised in all the current UN and allied rhetoric, to enabled, mobilised and organised citizens. This is the surest foundation for democracy. It also engages citizens in creative and mutual ways so that other and disruptive forces are ignored.

Three Programme Rights

1. Child Rights become the primary responsibility of all adults within a Child Rights Society formed at street, neighbourhood or village level in an “Ubuntu” formulation that is often common to traditional societies; that is that “All children are my children”. The programme provides a grant to each child. These grants are assembled at the ‘Society” so that effectively all adults come to guarantee the rights of all children in their communities.

The rights may flow from country constitutions or UN resolutions but, as programme rights, can be set at country, programme or community level. Early Childhood Development, including the moral and intellectual growth of the child, good parenting, safety, shelter, nutrition and primary health would be the core aims of the programme.

2. Investment Rights are a form of sophisticated community public works programme. A Community Investment Programme (CIP) issues annual investment rights to all adults registered within Community Development Associations (CDA).
The CIP provides roughly US$300 per adult per year registered in a CDA at street, neighbourhood or village. The transfer goes to form a combined ‘community investment budget’ and thus costs little to transfer.

This sets up a state funded civic society investment programme to inter-act with the public expenditure of local governments. Municipalities, for instance, build main roads and irrigation canals when CDAs in those areas agree to build the related minor roads and field channels.

The CDA investment budget belongs to all adults equally. It creates the fundamental economic right that all businesses, employed people and agencies enjoy but no communities are provided - the right to know the available resources. This is the start to ‘help people help themselves’. They explore the options and the costs; learn to invest across a front and over time; and to become democratic owners and managers of joint assets.

The result is a ‘learning society’ in which tens of thousands of experiments occur at the periphery. If something goes wrong, it is a chance to discover why, to correct it and to broadcast the learning. At present failure of all kinds is far too common and mostly hidden. Most poor countries have learnt almost nothing about local development for many years, including the last decade.

The poor are great investors when they have some cash to which they can add their considerable under-used labour. The simple institutional and administrative model allows them to convert the broken down village into an asset holding, investing and managing democratic and economic body, essentially a property company with equal adult – men and women - owners.

Members begin and remain equal as owners, investors and managers. Each year they issue equal ‘use rights’ over gardens, irrigation, grazing, orchards, grinding mills etc. that they trade amongst themselves, allowing each to optimise their economic activity as against others whilst achieving prices over their assets.

The Chinese village, for twenty years, has enjoyed the greatest and longest economic growth known to man upon the back of an informal, locally managed form of rural industrial co-operative. There are strong parallels with the CIP.

The members choose investments and from those decisions construct a labour budget at a wage they agree to pay themselves. In the 1992/93 hundred-year drought in South Africa, a similar economic rights based US$15 million ‘Relief and Development Programme’ (RDP) granted communities investment budgets for the first time ever. Villagers paid each other an average of US1.00 per day when the going official casual wage was US7.00. Why? Because they paid each other, they asked of each other, “How much will you give to earn the total labour budget?” Members sought the maximum investment result.

That programme, beginning with one staff member, reached 940 rural communities, generated 940 great people and development stories, spent the fund using just 25 staff within two years and ‘lost’ some US$1,000 misappropriated. Sadly, a new government, new political turf battles, and the rapid rounds of fashionable development approaches, often driven by donors, drove that expereince from the agenda – until now when it is making a comeback under local economic development driven by residents and local councils.

The CIP adds an investment loop to state expenditure before members earn wages and fees for local services. This raises the local circulation of cash considerably. In the model coming through, CDAs can enter into a social compact with the province. They ‘borrow’ from the province against their ability to raise the local multiplier and to enhance the local productive base and thus future incomes and welfare. They repay these loans by agreeing to pay higher school and health fees. Why? Because school and health form 70% of provincial budgets and, if paid directly as salaries, leak out to central cities. CDAs can use the money better in the first instance, enabling the state to become primarily an investor in and through citizens.

The CIP is affordable. If paid in local currency that in turn can pay all fees and taxes to the local government, it is especially economically dynamic.

3. The Right to Working Local Economies can be fostered by a programme that helps regions to install effective rotating markets, service delivery and intra-district transport systems so that economies of scale and low transaction costs, with access to services, are brought to each locality on market day. This can be once or twice a week within cities and, perhaps, fortnightly in the countryside. A hierarchy of spatial and temporal planning emerges so that each neighbourhood is linked to market and administrative centres and to regional economies regularly and on other days the market is known and can be visited. This programme may build upon an existing market system or pension payout points. It fits in well with sectoral production programmes, such as irrigation and small farmer dairy as it provides the means to bring seller, buyer and payment agents together and to swell local cash circulation.

The model produces a developmental and a ‘learning society’ with numerous local experimentations so that, if things do go wrong, they can be isolated, investigated and corrected without threat to the whole. The result is a positive joint learning opportunity, the results of which are sought by all programme communities to avoid wasting their time, effort and budgets. Programme rules and policies can then be reviewed in a broad participatory manner with the member communities.

Moving from supply, and often control and central dictation, to economic rights opens up citizen participation, responsibility and experiential learning of sectoral management but also of democratic action. It also builds local demand fast, as it places all expenditure in local hands so that the local multiplier is higher than otherwise and local economies gain strength, leading to greater national performance. Community members will give enormously of their time, labour, local knowledge and responsibility; something seldom ‘bought’ by higher authorities!

The model has been used in South Africa in the drought of 1992/93 and is now emerging as the key reform to instituting Local Economic Development amidst the devastating legacy of racial apartheid, 40% unemployment rates nationally but far higher in marginalised areas, and high dependence on central places.

It has been used in the UN Country Team’s Relief and Recovery Plan for Zimbabwe – which I wrote and which awaits the political decisiveness of the African Union to get rid of Mugabe and to move to new elections.

Economic rights under-pin citizens as democratic and as economic ‘actors’ and thus provide the citizen partner to local government success and to international efforts everywhere.

Appendix 1.
Busiesvlei

Getting Community Support Right

Norman Reynolds

The drought of 1992-94 saw the then South African government provide R15 billion to commercial farmers, mostly to cancel debt due to its own Land Bank. Very little from any source was provided for small black farmers and for farm labour which lost jobs.

The Independent Development Trust (IDT) asked me to design a drought relief and development programme. This was approved and R100 million set aside to run it for one to two years.

Calamities are often the best, maybe the only time to introduce significant reforms. The main reform introduced in this programme was that each community received a budget designed, upon flimsy information after a first visit, to employ themselves on community public works for about three to four months; i.e. a wage and a materials, transport and services budget to be used to build or maintain worthwhile structures, roads, wells and the like.

A legal letter on a proper letterhead was sent to each community days after the visit. The letter offered support and announced the budget provided to each community. The letter did not necessarily go to the “right” party as one visit could not reveal much beyond rough numbers of families without regular income – wage, remittance or pension. It was presumed, and worked in practice, that a public letter, nailed as it were the church door, which placed funds on the community table (albeit within a budget) would mobilise all members of a community. The letter required the community to organise to gain control of the budget. The community had to: -
· Hold a democratic community meeting, audited by two local dignitaries like a priest or headmaster, which elected or nominated an existing committee or chiefs council or whatever to run the programme
· Committee members had to accept operational portfolios like Treasurer
· Open a bank account
· Accept the controlling role of Annexures to the letter on procedures etc.

The programme set aside 7% to monitor and audit the use of monies. Funds were passed to the communities in tranches related to planned work for the next month or so. The same professional firm transferred funds to community accounts as tranches were approved upon field reports of expenditure and activity. This outlay guaranteed that there was practically no fraud and gave confidence to all the players, especially the community committees. A further 10% was set aside for management and technical support. The total administrative cost, 17% of R17 million, was provided over and above the R100 million for community budgets.

The aim was to prove two economic and constitutional points as central to development management: -

A. That, given the same economic rights as most households and all businesses enjoy, communities would show a new level of capability and financial know how. The rights are: -
1. To know the available resources – the budget. Unlike many official and donor programmes, the communities received their “drought” budgets as theirs – for all time. There was no closing date.
2. Having a budget, the communities knew the resources available. Holding the budget, they were able to explore alternative uses. This is a great improvement upon the fashionable but fallacious concern of donors with “needs assessment” separate from a budget. With the budget, the communities were able to exercise the most powerful economic conception of all, opportunity cost. That is, the opportunity foregone if one chooses to spend funds in a particular way is the real cost of that choice, not the cash cost.
3. To invest on a broad front – not just what the donor gives you, like a community hall; e.g. to paint a house and to build an extra room and from the savings against a new house to invest in education.
4. To invest in a sequence over time so that returns rise. To open the bar first and from its profits to build the hotel.
5. To explore how to keep monies active in the community, circulating for as long as possible. This is the local multiplier. To do that means hiring and buying locally whenever possible and first investing in projects which bring a return that can pay for social expenditure like the salaries and materials for early childhood development.

B. If a community has a budget and the freedom to optimise its use across a front and over time, it gains another right that communities have never been given: the right to define and manage its business boundary.

All the 940 odd communities that received budgets ranging from R40, 000 to R1, 000,000, illustrated these two inter-related forms of basic economic rights.

Busiesvlei, which received a R40, 000 budget, is a small farm labour township set amongst farms in the old western Transvaal. Most families who lived there, about 90%, lost their jobs as many surrounding farms went into the hands of the Land Bank.

We followed our normal procedures: -
· Two of us, an engineer in charge of that region and I dropped in to Busiesvlei after spending some time finding it.
· We asked if we could meet residents and any committee or other community body.
· They were suspicious. About twenty people of all ages slowly arrived in a classroom.
· We explained that we came from a Trust that wished to assist them survive the drought and the loss of jobs. The Trust was not prescriptive. It needed information in order to engage the community. Would they tell us about themselves, how many families lived there, how many had regular income and anything else we should know.
· Some senior people arrived during the meeting and stated that the community wanted a clinic. We accepted that but countered that the Trust would provide a budget that the community would use as best it could to solve income and other problems. We would hand deliver a legal letter shortly informing the community about the budget provided and the procedures and a staff member would then help them work out how best to use the funds. This did not satisfy some present: a clinic or nothing was their attitude. We explained that the budget probably could not build a clinic. A clinic could only be built if the authorities accepted it and agreed to man and service it. We left after about two hours, leaving behind an unhappy group.
· A legal letter awarding them R40, 000 was hand delivered three days later. With it were annexures that spelt out the procedures. With money on the table, as the theory stated, the community did meet and did elect a committee for the purpose. And a social audit confirmed the same.
· The engineer and I returned a couple of weeks later together with the local facilitator. We faced considerable anger. How could R40, 000 build a clinic? Why were we wasting their time? Did we not hear what they had said? Slowly, over several hours, working through the Committee, we turned the meeting around. We had them playing simple role model and other games that showed that they had more than R40, 000; they had rights that would reward imagination, courage, persistence and discipline. They had a crucial element of autonomy, something they had never had before. Not once did we prescribe what they should do – just questions and games about who they were, what was their surrounding and internal economy, their management boundary, how they related to agencies, farmers and the like.
· After about six weeks the facilitator began to report interesting activities of the kind that the programme predicted.
1. The Committee hired a taxi and travelled to see the Provincial Health Department at its headquarters. This cost R640. The officials were intrigued by a rural labour group that sought a clinic but “put on the table” as their negotiating piece some R39, 000. This had never happened before. It was agreed that a follow up meeting would take place in the nearest “white” town, nine kilometres away, in a month with the Town clerk and the Sister who ran that clinic.
2. When they returned there was a celebration; for the first time they were working with the authorities.
3. Because of the uncertain timing of any official solution, the Committee then spent R260 to travel in a taxi to a hospital to see a white doctor who had a good reputation. They travelled past two other hospitals to see him in the third hospital. It turned out that he was the Hospital Administrator. He was taken with their concern to obtain a health service for the community and that they had a budget to use. He invited them to treat his hospital as their clinic cum hospital for the next few months until they achieved some more efficient solution.
4. On its return, the Committee called a meeting to announce their success; the community had a clinic cum hospital. The celebration was spoilt when someone asked how anyone could afford to visit that distant hospital. The Committee then phoned the doctor. “Don’t worry,” he told them, until a particular date, his ambulances would fetch them on a regular basis and answer emergency calls. For R900 they had a complete health service, at least for a short while.
5. A month later, the meeting took place in the Town Hall of the nearby town. The Town Clerk was adamant. His over stretched clinic could not take people from another place for which his town had no responsibility. The Sister suggested that she could work extra hours on two days a week if the people from Busiesvlei could organise to come at those times. The Town Clerk would have none of that “infiltration”. The town could not afford it. The Sister then enquired if there was a place at Busiesvlei where a clinic could be run. She would come out on her own if the community could provide a suitable place. Like the song about Henry and the hole in the bucket, the Committee reminded everyone present that the lack of a clinic was what had started the whole business. Then an administrator from Head Office remembered that there was a manager’s house at Busiesvlei. Could a part of that be used for an occasional clinic? “No”, said a Committee member, “It has been locked for years. There is no manager.” A phone call followed to Head Office and the manager’s house was made available for the clinic. The community, after spending R980 of R40, 000, now had a permanent clinic. It had taken just four months from the time the letter with the budget had been delivered to Busiesvlei!
6. Two months later a manager in the IDT wrote a letter to the Committee noting that little money had been spent and threatening, which was illegal in terms of the programme rules and the letter conferring the budget, that if the balance of R39, 020 was not spent soon it would be cancelled, lost to Busiesvlei. The Committee then organised the building of a simple youth centre. By now they had so many friends that most of the material was donated by the Department of Health and the Police which at the time, prior to the first “national” elections of 1994, were given community development funds. Labour cost R12, 000. At the opening, the Police came in two big trucks and lifted everyone from their homes the few yards to the Youth Centre!
7. The Committee then invited the engineer and myself to a meeting to discuss how best to spend the balance of R27, 000. We reminded them of the games we had first played, particularly two that involved analysing the local economy that created jobs and business opportunities and the principle of investment rather than expenditure. After some time members began to explore, with rising excitement, the fact that the nearby commercial farmers, their previous employers, could not plant the next crop of maize because they were too indebted to raise loans. But Busiesvlei had funds. It did not take long for the community to instruct the Committee to choose the three or four best farmers – not the nicest – to enter into negotiations about joint farming ventures. Busiesvlei, with a R27, 000 deposit could raise additional funds with which to finance crops. In return for finance, farmers would hire labour from Busiesvlei, pay wages and interest and share the profit. Looked at another way, Busiesvlei was hiring the farmer as manager, renting his land and equipment and sharing some of the risks inherent in raising their own crops and employing themselves. R40, 000 had bought an economic, organisational and service revolution for about R240 per family.

All the 940 odd communities that received budgets had successes. The most common was that, paying themselves, they paid very low wages, around R7 per day. Work on official sites, like road building, paid R55 per day. Knowing the total wage bill, they gave as much as possible for the total, not the daily wage, that could be earned.

Some communities completed projects without paying wages. They knew that they had earned the total wage bill. The task was to match the output to that expenditure. Hence, as labourers and as community members, they were able to lift their sights to aim for the greatest output for a given total wage.

The programme became highly popular. Committees began to ask if they could take more responsibility for the running of the programme by forming a League of Reform Communities. Numerous issues had arisen about the workings of communities, investment in and the management of common properties and how investment in individual productive capacity, like a well or pigsty, could be undertaken. They sought regional and then national workshops. A key idea was that in a second round of budgets, a bank might advance an additional 30% as a loan to each community. As they gained confidence in their abilities to invest well, so they were prepared to face a rising cost of the funds provided, knowing that that opened up the far larger resources of the financial institutions. The aim that was discussed was to achieve 60% loan, 40% grant after four years.

The only unresolved problem was that in some communities those who were selected to work tended to form a protective monopoly over the right to work. The answer, from the second year, was to distribute the labour budget equally to all adults as work rights with a monetary face value for a days work. These would be bought and sold within the community. In that way no group could capture the right to work. The work right has been developed theoretically and offers a dynamic mobilising way to invest in people organised in communities and groups. This allows the state to partner communities, suitably organised, which invest in themselves, accepting, as financially competent bodies, in return an obligation to pay school and clinic fees. This sets up a high local multiplier, releases the state from the limitations of budgetary expenditure to the dynamics of finance, and propels the whole economy to higher levels of performance and of participation. There is a separate paper on the subject.

The drought programme ended in what, if publicly known, was a disgraceful and self-serving decision. Just as the programme was reinventing itself, so the head of the IDT was informed by the head of the South African National Civic Organisations (SANCO) that it was too popular. It must either pass the funds to SANCO or leave the field. The IDT passed a ridiculous rule that no community could receive a budget twice, stopping in its tracks the most innovative and successful rural programme ever, not only in South Africa but at least as good as anything elsewhere. And that to save a few individuals careers.

It is time that such a programme is re-launched with work rights and a growing component of loans, mainly for private asset creation but also for commonly owned and used infrastructure. There are moves in this direction, including turning the broken down tribal village into a Trust Company, converting a meaningless birthright “of access to a free good, land” into a community of equal, male and female, adult owners of the common properties. Again there are papers available on the subject.

* Dr. Norman Reynolds