‘Municipal entrepreneurs’: local politicians and the delivery of urban sanitation in Kumasi, Ghana

ABSTRACT

The municipal government in Kumasi has been the focus of numerous reforms to improve local policymaking and delivery of public goods to the city’s dwellers. Yet, the reforms have spurred strategic reactions from local actors who exploit institutional ambiguities to pursue their interests. This paper draws on empirical data on the city’s sanitation franchising to show how ordinary local politicians exploit reform ambiguities; they establish themselves as local entrepreneurs to deliver urban sanitation services and also contest the municipal executive. The manipulations do not only undermine reforms proffered by the regime and external actors but the municipal government’s promise to deliver efficient public services also becomes problematic. Management of urban sanitation is a contested arena between bureaucrats and political actors all vying for their interests. The sanitation reforms are eventually subsumed under the ‘local politics as usual’ logic.

KEYWORDS:

• Local politicians
• municipal council
• municipal sanitation
• entrepreneurs

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Development Studies Association Conference on ‘Politics in Development’ at the University of Oxford, UK in September 2016. I particularly appreciate the insightful comments by Pablo Yanguas, University of Manchester. I am also grateful to two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Matthew Sabbi is Research Associate, African Politics and Development Policy, University of Bayreuth, Germany. He is interested in political sociology and development politics, particularly actors and their strategies in local political reforms in Africa. His papers have appeared in Studies in Comparative International Development, Third World Quarterly, Africa Spectrum, Urban Forum and Modern Africa: Politics, History and Society. He is currently researching everyday life of local politicians and their policymaking strategies.

Notes

1 A popular aggrandizing rhetoric posited the city as the gateway to paradise (Peil 1972, 7).

2 Other legislation includes the 1992 Constitution and the District Assemblies Common Fund Act, 1993 (Act 327).

3 A ‘district’ is a geo-political precinct where a DA (with over 75,000 inhabitants) governs and councillors are called Assembly Members. Urban eponyms to the DA based on population are: Municipal Assembly (over 95,000) and Metropolitan Assembly (over 250,000). Although Kumasi is legislatively a ‘Metropolitan Assembly’, the terms municipality, municipal government and municipal council are used interchangeably to describe the city’s political authority as a lower tier government.

4 Though very helpful in explaining the cloaking behaviour and disparity between promise and delivery of reforms, the approach is rarely used to explain institutional processes in the Global South. A few available studies include Helbardt et al. (2012) and Sabbi (2017).

5 The data come from the author’s extensive fieldwork in Ghana between 2013 and 2017.

6 Assemblyman, Asokwa SMDC, Kumasi, 20.08.2013.

7 The term ‘technocrats’ loosely describes bureaucrats with technical skills, e.g. engineers, planners, etc.

8 Assemblyman, Manhyia SMDC, Kumasi, 20.09.2013.

9 This is a pseudonym. The representative was a ranking member of the executive committee.

10 Assemblyman, Bantama SMDC, Kumasi, 18.09.2013.

11 A budget official, KMA, Kumasi, 11.07.2013.

12 A civil service job does not preclude one from being elected as a local legislator.

13 The nine SMDCs and the franchisees were: Asokwa: SAK-M Company Ltd; Bantama: Mesk World Company Ltd; Kwadaso: Waste Group Company Ltd; Manhyia: Mesk World Company Ltd; Nhyiaeso: Kumasi Water Management Ltd; Oforikrom: Aryeetey Brothers Company Ltd; Suame: Anthoco Company Ltd; Subin: Zoomlion Ghana Ltd; Tafo: Zoomlion Ghana Ltd. For details on their expenditure, see JICA (2013).

14 Legislatively, the appointees should not exceed 30% of the membership but depending on the extent of manipulation, that could exceed 70% as shown in Table 1.

15 Assemblyman, Bantama SMDC, Kumasi, 18.09.2013.

16 National Democratic Congress (NDC) and New Patriotic Party (NPP) have been the major political parties in Ghana since 1992. A critique by NDC elites of the new legislation in 2007 (LI 1805), which was crafted by the NPP, made it obvious that the SMDC would be manipulated once there was regime change.

17 Assemblyman, Kwadaso SMDC, Kumasi, 13.09.2013.

18 Assemblyman, Manhyia SMDC, Kumasi, 20.09.2013.

19 Administrative official, Suame SMDC, Kumasi, 19.08.2013.

20 Assemblywoman, Oforikrom SMDC, Kumasi, 20.08.2013.

21 Toilet and sanitation are less interesting topics for most ordinary people. This allows local political elites to intervene and mess it up.

22 Some private, small-scale operators (e.g. Clean Team Ghana) offer house-to-house services to low-income households.

23 Between 1994 and 1997, the head of the DA arbitrarily rewarded his favourite local legislators with toilet facilities (Devas and Korboe, 2000). That practice has persisted as franchisees are mainly appointees on the local councils (Table 1) or those with local political connections.

24 Kumasi Ventilation Improved Pit; an inexpensive and acceptable form of public pit latrine that was piloted in Kumasi by the UNDP and the World Bank in the 1990s.

25 I witnessed an aggressive and near-bloody confrontation at the Bantama SMDC on 19.08.2014 when one local legislator entrusted with public toilets vehemently refused to account to the finance department.

26 Unit committee member, Suame SMDC, Kumasi, 09.10.2013.

27 MLGRD (2003, 12).

28 Another piece of legislation in 2015 (LI 2223) only managed to re-assign the franchise arbitrarily to pro-regime political elites.

29 Assemblyman, Asokwa SMDC, Kumasi, 02.10.2013.

30 Correspondence from E. O. Asafu-Adjaye to the Chairmen of Local Councils, June 13 1952.

31 Assemblyman, Kwadaso SMDC, Kumasi, 13.09.2013.

32 Some of the fee-collecting companies were either illegitimate or set up by the bureaucrats and operated from the municipal offices (Boadu, 2013).

33 This was over US$1 million in 2012 (JICA 2013, 6 of chap. 6).

34 Environmental health official, Oforikrom SMDC, Kumasi, 09.09.2013.

35 Senior administrative official, Manhyia SMDC, Kumasi, 19.09.2013.

36 Assemblyman, Bantama SMDC, Kumasi, 03.08.2017.

37 Assemblyman, Asokwa SMDC, Kumasi, 14.08.2017.

Additional information

Funding

Part of the research for this paper was generously funded by the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung through research project number Az. 40.17.0.002EL on municipal councillors in Ghana.