Local Governance and ICTs in Africa

There is perhaps no continent that requires the application of new technologies, inventions and innovations to help solve its numerous and varied social and economic problems more than Africa. The ICT revolution has opened up vast opportunities to meet the intractable challenges and difficulties that have confronted Africa since the 1960s. One of the thorniest problems in Africa has been a persistent crisis of governance. This has created a context for human rights violations. Sadly, those with the responsibility for protecting people ended up exacerbating the economic and governance difficulties instead of promoting human development and the comprehensive well-being of citizens.

Finding ways to deal with this intractable dilemma has become the priority concern of several internal and external stakeholders. The ICT revolution has been seized upon to help improve the overall governance landscape on the African continent. The usefulness of ICT lies in its complementary relationship with other options that are available for improving human governance (h-governance). This suggests that a stand-alone role for the ICT revolution in fixing intractable problems cannot work.

In Africa, the twin problems of despotism and corruption have not been eradicated. Therefore all necessary means, including the ICT revolution, must be deployed to deal with these forces that have undermined Africa’s vast potential and prevented the continent from emerging as a powerful, prosperous, healthy and strong region. It is an embarrassment that after more half a century of political independence, no African state has become a fully developed economy. Most of the reasons for this lack of success can be attributed to the lack of a predictable system of governance able to mobilise citizens’ energies, and to the absence of innovations to steer society and the economic foundations of the continent to full prosperity.

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Governance in Africa operates from the local community to the continental level. Unfortunately, the crisis of governance persists at all levels, partly because the conscious and deliberate work of overhauling the system has not been done. There is a need, therefore, to deploy all means available to tackle the crisis as the starting point for creating a sustainable system. The main objective is to develop an irreversible system that works to stimulate sustainable human and economic development by eradicating poverty and promoting comprehensive well-being as a key priority.

There are three broad strategies for getting to grips with the issue of governance. One is to continue with what can be described as business as usual, paddling along the ‘h-governance route’ that has been in place since the wave of African political independence in the early 1960s, which on balance has ended up producing more corruption and despotism than good government and democratic fair dealing.

The second strategy is represented by the important innovation introduced by the onset of the ICT revolution. This has brought considerable potential to initiatives aimed at fighting dictatorship and increasing the participation of citizens in the institutions of governance. To be more specific, ICTs have opened a new e- governance space or route that has huge potential for improving opportunities for the participation of citizens in local and central government structures. This is exemplified in settings that enhance equity, transparency, accountability, responsiveness, responsibility, effectiveness and efficiency in the manifold transactions that link service suppliers and service recipients. In Africa, the full potential of ICTs is yet to be fully realised.

The third strategy is a judicious combination of h-governance and e-governance. ICTs cannot replace h-governance; their job is to improve it. H-governance cannot replace ICTs. The strengths and weaknesses of each must be assessed in order that their virtues can be combined. Such a creative combination is most likely to maximise staff effectiveness and accountability, as well as promote institutional transparency and citizen participation. It is here to stay. Close scrutiny of the weaknesses and strengths of each component of the dual governance structure is needed. The overall objective should be to speed up the process of improving governance across the continent at every level by utilising this socio-technical combination to best effect.

The LOG-IN Africa research programme takes the local and the municipal core of the African experience as pivotal to the improvement of services and as the levels through which decision-making, performance, effectiveness, efficiency, transparency, accountability and the participation of citizens in governance can be enhanced. This choice of the local and the municipality as the settings for the studies in this volume is appropriate for several reasons. First, it provides an opportunity to examine and appreciate the tangible impacts of ICTs on service delivery. This objective was achieved by analysing primary data to determine what changes had actually occurred in the operations of municipal administrative systems as a result of the introduction of new technology. The pan-African thrust of the research also yields fruitful insights on how ICT readiness and uptake are evolving in different local municipalities. The very local as research setting, coupled with a pan-African orientation, gives the studies a pioneering dimension. Had the research setting concentrated on the continental level, the micro-details provided by the local municipal sites would easily have been overlooked. Consequently, the decision to use quality governance indicators at the local level was very appropriate as a tool for collecting information on the best practices that apply to Africa’s varied governance landscape.

The LOG-IN Africa programme thus deserves support. In this volume the network used the research expertise of those with technical knowledge in ICTs and those with knowledge in local governance through the support of the African Training and Research Centre in Administration for Development (CAFRAD), a pan-African organisation committed to improving public administration. IDRC was also very supportive; over the years, it has been at the forefront in supporting research initiatives on the continent. These stakeholders spent three years working with ten countries, designing studies and research around an active municipal-level issue, in order to learn how the introduction and use of ICTs changed the way both staff and citizens operate in transactions generally carried out at the municipality level. The investigations covered areas such as business process modelling methodology and financial management systems.

In those three years, a number of regional workshops and one stakeholder major conference were convened, and primary data collection was carried out, mostly using UNDP good-governance criteria. This original research produced findings and knowledge that policymakers could not ignore. In at least three cases, the output involved designing prototypes to improve services that had been identified during the course of the research experience and assessed through a peer-reviewed conference. These efforts have finally resulted in this edited collection.

There is an argument that pan-African unity can be better facilitated if there is local self-recognition and active service provision. In fact, the way to overcome the tragedy of failed states in Africa is to promote local-level governance, while simultaneously promoting the ‘Africanness’ of all the existing states. This is one way that has been suggested to help reconstruct Africa’s governance architecture by clearing up post-colonial myopia. The relics of the arbitrary maps of post-colonialism have been a source of governance crisis in Africa. A way out of this crisis is to create cross-border municipal self-governance that permits ease of mobility and effective public service delivery. More widely, a number of analysts have suggested that the best way to get around this dilemma is to improve participation and provide effective services at the local level. The idea is to make municipal governance the core engine for service delivery. Analysts suggest that the more effective municipal governance becomes, the easier it will be to forge stronger pan-African unity. In support of this position is the argument that a municipal government is easier to define and has fewer opportunities for expanding the corruption networks that have been a key feature in many states that emerged after decolonisation, where the elite competed to capture the booty.

Given this background, ICTs and e-governance at the local level, promoted by research initiatives like those of LOG-IN Africa, become a critical means for spreading pan-African unity by promoting functioning decentralisation at the municipal government level.

The LOG-IN Africa research output on e-local governance is a timely and important contribution to pan-African research as it creates space for the interaction of the dual world of ICTs and governance to address the problems that persist in Africa. What the researchers addressed together is the application of ICTs, not only to improve governance by addressing the good governance criteria outlined by the UNDP (i.e. participation, rule of law, transparency, responsiveness, consensus orientation, equity, effectiveness and efficiency), but also to arrive at a novel conception of what it means to govern, and to be governed and managed. The objective is to make those who manage accountable to the managed, and those who are managed to participate in decision-making in contexts where responsiveness, responsibility, efficiency and effectiveness determine work ethic.

This objective implies that those who govern must view the governed as consensual partners in a network where hierarchical relationships are there to facilitate rather than to hinder the best form of governing. The E-governance Assessment Framework developed by Professor Timothy Mwololo Waema brings to the fore the distinctive contribution of the LOG-IN Africa research programme in providing concrete empirical evidence of the effects of ICT on governance, whilst clarifying and reviewing the relevant conceptual linkages between ICTs and governance. An important conceptual innovation is the distinction between government and governance, on the one hand, and good governance, on the other. Waema redefines good governance in terms of its ‘quality’. Quality of governance is in turn shown to refer to the achievement of tangible improvements in the lives of citizens through the introduction and utilisation of ICT applications in society, in business and infrastructure initiatives. The main requirement is the need to improve the quality of service transactions between those who supply and those who receive services.

The specific country cases deal with a range of different issues, but they represent a common research effort to highlight improvements in governance following the application of ICTs. Significantly the volume has a roadmap for future research.

The Egyptian case study on business process mapping for e-local governance looks at the local municipal government’s service provision to citizens. Specifically, it examines how local government staff and citizens interact by using ICT to request and receive information in an atmosphere that generates satisfaction by eliminating administrative hurdles. In the process of studying the local government development project, the researchers recognised the significance of using common business process modelling (BPM) for those receiving and providing information, knowledge, services and communication.

In comparison, the Ethiopian case study carries out an assessment of local kebeles, the lowest level in the country’s administrative system. The research explores life-event service provision at the kebele level by targeting the following: the level of ICT usage; the status of e-readiness; the availability of an ICT policy and strategy; the nature of citizen participation; the quality of service provision to citizens.

In Kenya, attention shifts to a study of the application of ICTs in financial management in the two municipal councils of Mavoko and Nyeri by examining how the qualities of participation, effec- tiveness, efficiency, responsiveness, transparency and accountability play out in the municipalities’ Integrated Financial Management Information System. The findings are striking in that the staff and the councils were responsive to billing errors that had been captured by using ICTs. Citizens also thought that on the whole the councils had become more accountable due to the ICTs. The study reveals nevertheless that certain weaknesses persist in the two councils, despite the introduction of ICTs.

The Mauritius case study relates to the Kenyan one in that it also focuses on revenue management in municipal and district councils. The study concludes that the revenue management system of three municipal councils, whilst currently working well, needs additional improvements, which could be achieved by using a more user-friendly approach to promote the roll-out of services.

The Mozambique case study directs attention to the Land Management Information System. This was potentially a critical study, involving as it did the introduction of ICTs in rural municipalities, establishing a setting for the possible co-evolution of rural and urban communities within a community for which what matters is the quality of service transaction, and not the dynamics of transforming a rural community into an urban one.

The other studies from Uganda, South Africa and Ghana deal more or less with the value and importance of ICTs for local governance. The Ugandan case targets communication; in the South Africa study the area of interest is local economic and social development; the Ghana study broadly addresses the issue of political inclusion. Taken together, they indicate the range of application of ICTs.

A number of benefits can be derived from the LOG-IN Africa research programme. First, it can contribute to the use of quality as a measure for generating a toolkit for pan-African governance indicators. Second, it has the potential to apply lessons from the country-specific case studies in order to establish nation- ally a system for indicating local e-governance quality. It is also possible to expand further the programme’s empirical research foundation, by including monitoring and evaluation as significant components of the research process. Through this orientation, it would be possible to use the empirical case studies to assess the costs and benefits of e-governance from both short- and long-term perspectives.

In conclusion, in addition to developing the stock of knowledge on the African e-governance experience, this volume provides information on and analyses of e-governance at the municipal and the local level in Africa, thereby opening up the possibility of further research on how new technologies can be used to change the governance architecture in Africa.

This volume presents important original research that must not be ignored by public policymakers – at municipal, regional, national and continental levels – in the respective countries in Africa. It is strongly recommended that this work be used and debated.

Congratulations are due to the research teams in the participating nations and to the team leader for the arduous task of coordinating the complex research process that resulted in the publication of this volume. It will undoubtedly influence the governance landscape of the continent.

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* ‘Local Governance and ICTs in Africa’, edited by Edith Ofwona Adera and Timothy Mwololo Waema is published by Pambazuka Press (ISBN 0-85749-032-X).
* This essay is the foreword to ‘Local Governance and ICTs in Africa’
* Mammo Muchie is professor and director of the Research Centre on Development Studies and International Relations, Aalborg University in Denmark.
* Please send comments to editor[at]pambazuka[dot]org or comment online at Pambazuka News.