Classify, Exclude, Police. Laurent Fourchard
I agree that ‘urban neoliberal order’ is marked by more systematic surveillance, the development of urban enclaves, and the delegation of security to citizens, it may miss other dimensions of urban policing in a poorer urban space that has not received the same scholarly attention (Jaffe 2012). Secured urban enclaves are common in wealthy Nigerian or South African neighbourhoods, but private security companies are rare or absent in low‐income neighbourhoods and if residents are involved in community police programmes, in Nigeria and South Africa, such programmes have often taken over earlier systems of security mobilisation by local residents. The neoliberal urbanisation argument marginalises or ignores other forms of urban transformation (Le Galès 2016; Pinson and Morel 2016). In our cases, the longer colonial and postcolonial trajectories of urban vigilante groups indicate that vigilantism cannot be fully explained by neoliberalism or weak state analysis.
In articulating comparative history and comparative ethnography in two specific large urban areas in the cities of Cape Town and Ibadan, I inform how policing is the product of a very specific urban environment of police of subalterns by other subalterns. This specific genealogy has roots in the colonial and apartheid periods during which the administration delegated or ‘discharged’ (Hibou 1999) its security functions to very large number of groups and organisations at conditions that they did not challenge the overall colonial order. These groups were tolerated or supported by the administration but enjoyed a large autonomy. In many instances, policing the neighbourhood often appears to be the other side of the classifying colonial obsession: youth, migrants or people unknown from the local residents were the main targets of vigilante groups. These power relationships between groups and those threatening the community have strongly persisted in the everyday routine of urban policing. New unexplored issues have also come up since the end of the colonial or apartheid periods such as politicisation, commodification and feminisation of vigilantism. In other words, scrutinising daily anxiety in urban areas neglected by the state opens up new avenues for empirical and theoretical research on low‐cost and harsh forms of urban policing.
Part Three moves from a genealogy of exclusion at the city level and police at the neighbourhood levels to dispositifs of power at the micro level on the streets and in office from the 1990s to date. It explores everyday relationships in bus terminals referred to as ‘motor parks’ and in local government offices between individuals in positions of authority (political leaders, civil servants, trade union members) and a host of subordinate actors (bus drivers, tax collectors, unemployed workers, ordinary citizens seeking a document) in three main metropolises of Nigeria (Lagos, Ibadan and Jos). Focusing on these places offers an opportunity to analyse everyday practices of exclusion and inclusion in a clientelistic network, a political community, or access to employment and forms of violence that such an exclusion might trigger.
A world of a dominant urban precarity has become the norm in many African and Asian countries (Simone and Pieterse 2017, pp. 33–36). With the implementation of IMF policies in the 1980s, public sector retrenchment and cutbacks in social programmes and subsidies eroded the number of wage earners while making the lives of the majority of workers increasingly precarious (Barchiesi 2019, p. 68). In the face of these policies, state governments and even more so municipalities, that were ill‐equipped to cope with the continent’s demographic challenge, could not have prevented the growing exclusion of poor populations from basic services and the wage job market (Koonings and Kruijt 2009). Nigeria is no exception in that regard: the level of urban poverty and extreme urban poverty dramatically increased in the 1980s and 1990s.11 Petty trading and petty craft have become the dominant sectors of employment for men and women in a city like Ibadan (Akerele 1997, p. 39; Guyer et al. 2002), transforming streets and public spaces into a major place to make a living.
In Nigerian metropolises like in many other cities of the south, relations between economic actors and state agents commonly labelled the ‘informal economy’ – usually refers to self‐employment, i.e. either non‐wage work or to activities that are not subject to taxation or state regulation – have acquired very different political meanings over time. Many studies on urban informality have emphasised the vitality of horizontal ties and tended to overlook vertical relations even if the literature has informed crackdowns, evictions and brutal harassment by local and national authorities (Lindell 2008; Potts 2008), stronger control of CBDs, sometimes by re‐enacting old colonial measures (Morange 2015; Steck et al. 2013). Less has been said on hierarchical social relations within networks of informal actors and political leaders (Lindell and Utas 2012), the ambivalent politics of street trader organisations (Bénit‐Gbaffou 2016), the fragmented mobilisations to access services or collective resources and urban spaces (Bayat 1997, 2000) and the complex interplay between politicians, urban population and their intermediaries in the city (Auyero 2000; Haenni 2005; Solomon 2008).
The politics of the street in Chapter 5 is not an additional chapter on urban informality but an attempt to account for the ambivalent role of bureaucratic and political domination in creating exclusion, in producing violence and uneven forms of politicisation. What is happening in streets and motor parks does not easily fit what a number of scholars would qualify as ‘political’ in its emancipatory dimensions. Following Weber (1978), Hibou (2011) and Lüdkte (2015a) it looks instead at politics as participating in power. This chapter explores how Lagos and Ibadan political leaders have used their networks to provide infrastructures and services to the urban population and how the thousands of motor parks in the two largest cities of the county have become central places of illegal tax collection. It scrutinises how subaltern actors in the parks participate to this collection and became politicised through conflicts and more daily practices. It tries more generally to understand the porous border between the legal and the illegal, state and non‐state actors, the circulation of petty cash in and out of official circuits and forms of daily policing and violent mobilisation for the control of urban resources. Chapter 6 interrogates the politics in office in looking at daily interactions between civil servants and citizens seeking a certificate of indigene in local government front offices in Ibadan and Jos, Plateau state capital in the central part of the country. A quota system that was started in the 1980s guarantees the representation of citizens in the various administrations according to their origin certified by local governments. Certificates of indigene embody the official – in its original meaning, produced in office – and illegal discrimination in Nigeria. In Jos, this process of delineating who is truly indigene of the place have led to mass violence claiming several thousands of deaths in the 2000s. In this final chapter, I will examine conflict and negotiation required to procure this document, what such transactions tell us about the forms of inclusion and exclusion that are approved by the local administration, and the extent to which this practice is perceived as discriminatory by the non‐indigene. I follow Matthew Hulls’ suggestion that bureaucratic documents are both constitutive of bureaucratic activities and of forms of urban sociality that extend beyond the office (Hull 2012). The last chapter links this detailed topic of producing documents from within the office to wider politics of urban exclusion. Behind the politics of exclusion of non‐indigenes, which is especially embodied in the graphic artefact of the certificate, there is a very unclear legacy of the past: in both cities, competing ancestral claims are rooted in the history of the city, in colonial urban planning and postcolonial administrations. Coming back to these different historical layers in a comparative approach helps to see the ways in which history has been used in more recent times as a political and bureaucratic tool to exclude non‐indigenes to access limited state resources. Changing the scale of analysis in looking at detailed places of encounters such as motor parks and local government offices allows to observe ordinary social practices and mass violence, to interrogate the legacy of a colonial past and to explore the thin, blurring and often invisible borders between civil servants and unofficial tax collectors and the embeddedness of state bureaucratic practices in urban society.
Notes
1 1. A glossary at the end of this book explains