Transnational Resource Flow and the Paradoxes of Belonging: Redirecting the Debate on Transnationalism, Remittances, State and Citizenship in Africa

Abstract

The rise in the volume of known global foreign worker remittances to countries of origin has sparked considerable academic and policy interest. Much attention has been paid to the assumed ‘development’ potential of these financial remittances, an approach which encapsulates the tendency to envisage the consequences of remittance flows in overwhelmingly economic terms. This article takes issue with such an approach, arguing for a refocusing of the debate on remittances in recipient societies on the crucially important, yet largely neglected, political realm. It posits that in formations where a significant aspect of the population relies on external grants for everyday provisioning, questions on the possible implications of their reliance for civic engagement, social citizenship and political allegiance become imperative. The article proposes a conceptual framework for interrogating the effects of the emergence of a discursive ‘remittance class’ for notions of citizenship, state–society relations, and the changing patterns and forms of identity in African and other remittance-dependent societies.

Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge funding support from the MacArthur Foundation Writing and Research Grants (2005) for the research from which this article emanates. Different versions of the article and the larger research have been presented at various universities and colleges in USA and UK. The authors are grateful for comments and questions from faculty and students at these institutions but take responsibility for the views expressed in the article. Finally, the authors would like to thank Dr Janet Bujra, Dr Reginald Cline-Cole, Professor Michelle McKinley and the journal's anonymous reviewers for their useful suggestions – and difficult questions.

Notes

This is a concept used here with utmost reluctance, mindful of the many encumbrances that dog the path of the potential migrant. It is not denied that peoples and objects are in perpetual motion, just that the idea of ‘flows’ (and the smoothness inherent in it) tends to have the unwitting effect of obscuring the fact that delays, obstructions and ambushes are part and parcel of such ‘mobilities’ (Urry 2007).

Figures on the volume of remittances as a proportion of the GDPs of particular countries are a good indication of the rising importance of remittances for people in such societies. Counting only officially recorded receipts, remittances in 2002 represented 1.3 per cent of GDP in sub-Saharan Africa. The picture becomes clearer when figures for individual countries are considered. For example, remittances are 34.2 per cent of the share of GDP of Cape Verde; 48 per cent for Guinea-Bissau; 25.9 per cent for Liberia; 12.47 per cent for Mali; 4.71 per cent for Nigeria; and 16.99 per cent for the Gambia. For more on this, see World Bank Migration Factbook (2006–08). See also ‘The Global Scale of Migrant Money Flows’, New York Times, 17 November 2007.

Citizenship is a contested and hugely politicised notion. The authors' understanding of citizenship is Rousseauian in the sense of conveying a ‘contract’ between the state and its subjects, a relationship in which rights and privileges are counterbalanced by duties and obligations.

Bearing in mind that a large percentage of such financial transfers sent via unofficial channels go largely unreported and/or undetected, the latest World Bank estimates of US$400 billion are still staggering (World Bank Remittance Factbook 2008). Other sources estimate that about 50 per cent of remittance flows in Africa is through informal channels.

See ‘Reps set up committee for Nigerians in the Diaspora’, The Punch, Lagos, Wednesday 30 January 2008.

Some scholars (e.g. Kearney 1991) have explained how the logic of the ‘previous’ modern/imperialist age effectively foreshadowed the current transnational age. For Kearney (1991) while

the modern age, the age of imperialism, was driven … by the exporting of surplus capital from developed to underdeveloped areas of the world with subsequent destruction of non-capitalist economies and societies, processes which created wage labor, much of which was absorbed in these peripheral areas …, the current transnational age is, however, characterised by a gross incapacity of peripheral economies to absorb the labor that is created in the periphery, with the result that it inexorably “flows” to the cores of the global capitalist economy. (p. 57)