Cameroon: Lack of Responsiveness in the Social Contract

relative power in ways that can alter social contracts. Urbanization, for example, can strengthen collective action, as can digital technologies, but these are not panaceas. Efforts to strengthen state capacity and responsiveness to these pressures can be important to mitigating instability and repressive tendencies. • Elite bargains.The nature of elite bargains is also not static, shifting as political maneuvering and competition change the nature of rent distribution or

“pacting” arrangements. The Senegal and South Africa case studies in this chapter show how changes within elite coalitions can open up some areas for more progressive social contracts, while closing off others. • Subnational social contracts. Even if a country-level social contract might be stagnant, there can be significant subnational variation and opportunities for change. A good example is Lagos, Nigeria, where, beginning in 1999, two successive governors were able to put together a reform coalition to renegotiate the social contract by producing significant improvements in transportation and sanitation, which also resulted in increased tax compliance and therefore revenue generation. As members of opposition parties facing hostility from the center, their political survival depended on delivering on popular demands. • Sectoral or policy-level opportunities. Certain policy areas will have their own social contract dynamics and may be amenable to renegotiation. These sector-specific social contracts can, in turn, influence other aspects of the broader social contract.

The study commissioned country experts to undertake analyses of the evolution of the social contract in six countries: Cameroon, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Somalia, and South Africa. These case studies illustrate different aspects of the social contract, and also highlight the path-dependency of prevailing contracts, but also moments of change and reform. Outlined below are summaries of the country studies and how they relate to the social contract framework.

Cameroon: Lack of Responsiveness in the Social Contract

Understanding the multifaceted challenges in Cameroon (Fisiy 2019) requires considering many of the structural features that are common to the social contract in Africa. These features include Cameroon’s colonial history, the linguistic bifurcation of the country, and the incomplete unification following independence in 1972 that allowed separation aspirations to linger. Other features that have shaped the current social contract in Cameroon and the pressures upon

it include an economy heavily dependent on extractives and the rise of a small, urban middle class that has been tied to the public sector. Figures 3.2–3.4 indicate that Cameroon’s social contract features characteristics associated with low civil capacity, low inclusiveness, and low resiliency (below median openness and alignment). The country case study paper (Fisiy 2019) addresses many of these aspects, a few of which are summarized here.

The contested and fragile bargain between the state and Cameroon’s citizens has revealed a low-inclusiveness social contract that has been stretched, allowing for religious, linguistic, and generational differences to be instrumentalized in the anglo versus francophone Cameroonian crisis. Given Cameroon’s historical evolution, the primary emphasis since independence and reunification has been on state-building efforts without equal attention to citizens’ rights and duties in a multi-ethnic society. A burgeoning civil society sector, especially faith-based groups and cultural organizations, has, in many instances, become associated with service delivery rather than establishing an accountability mechanism to improve the state’s quality of services and inclusiveness. In turn, seeing the state functioning for private gain has increasingly become the norm (Bayart, Ellis, and Hibou 2009; Hibou 2004; Mbembe 2001; Watts 2018b). The mindset of la politique du ventre4 (Bayart 1979) has led to the politics of cooptation based on the logic that la bouche qui mange ne parle pas.5 The privatization of public services has progressively been striking at the very core of the concept of social contract. Furthermore, the state relies “mostly on a few large formal firms for tax revenue, as well as import/export taxes mostly from timber and the oil sector” (World Bank 2016, 76). The state has little need to be responsive to citizens’ needs, and the virtuous circle of state-building is not triggered.

Endemic corruption and weak accountability. With growing despondency over the state’s inability to deliver on the bargains that constitute the social contract, citizens no longer believe in a dream of shared wealth and prosperity; rather, the acquisition of wealth depends on luck—geography is still destiny—and political connections. Without taxation, citizens get treated as “subjects,” beneficiaries of government largess with no voice to hold those who govern them accountable.

State structure and responsiveness to citizens’ demands. After 11 years of reunification, Cameroon became a unitary state through the 1972 referendum, which put an end to the federalist system, based mainly on the economic argument that the cost of running the two-state federalist system of government was expensive. When the Anglophone crisis erupted in 2016, the federalist agitators, who used the protests initially organized by lawyers and teachers to fight for their sectoral rights, boisterously advocated that the country should revert to the pre-1972 two-state federal structure. These separatists used the metaphor of a failed marriage, arguing that the logical next step should be divorce.