The panel addresses the renewed engagement of ‘traditional’ leaders’ in resource mobilisation (tax, user fees and aid) and rural development. It explores potential conflicts when traditional leaders are given new roles that often leave them in an ambiguous position as both local community representatives and as state and/or donor agents.
Across Sub-Saharan Africa, decentralization initiatives and community-based development programs increasingly amount to formal and informal instances of ‘traditional’ resurgence. While failed or conflict-ridden states have experienced a revival of traditional leadership largely by ‘default’, other states have embarked on legal reinforcement of traditional authority: Ghana, Uganda, South Africa and Mozambique. Traditional leaders are no longer, it seems, conceptualized as obstructions to modernization, but as powerful partners in rural development implementation and are given extensive state-administrative tasks such as revenue collection. In contexts of a weak rural-based ‘civil society’ and low state capacity, traditional leaders are by state and donor agencies alike increasingly expected to provide the often missing ‘link’ to rural communities. Delegation of developmental and/or revenue-collecting tasks to traditional leaders often combines contradictory agendas: while cast in the language of community participation and cultural diversity, it is frequently driven by the objective to extend the territorial reach and governmental capacity of the state that may lend to comparison with colonial forms of indirect rule. Traditional leaders are expected to act both as state agents, as catalyst of developmental change and as representatives of the wishes of local communities.
The paper discusses the resurgence of chiefs as powerful actors in development efforts, as a result of the weaknesses of locally elected councillors, since the implementation of democratic decentralisation in Malawi in 1998. The chiefs’ role is fraught with ambiguity, which complicates the hope of consolidating democracy through decentralisation initiatives.
The paper scrutinizes the multiple roles Somali clan elders have assumed as resource managers and peacemakers since 2000 when they were integrated into the state structure of Ethiopia’s Somali frontier. The ‘hybridisation’ of these elders in- and outside the state administration relates to the manifold normative orders that characterize the region.
Against the re-enforced legal acceptance of traditional leaders in Zimbabwe, the paper assesses chiefs’ role in natural resource management. It addresses the debate between traditionalists, who argue for the importance of these institutions, and modernists, who question the chiefs’ role in the new democratic politics of the environmental sector.
The paper addresses traditional leaders’ role in community development in South Africa. It explores three dimensions: the societal impact of traditional leaders’ commitment to development; the strategies they employ vis-à-vis NGOs, the state and other local institutions; and the negative attitudes of NGOs and government employees towards traditional leaders.
The paper investigates how the political involvement of traditional authorities has changed in Northern Somalia. Their influence has increased dramatically in the absence of an effective state, but accountability has shifted from local communities in the past, towards increasing involvement in quasi-national politics.
The paper addresses cases of chiefs’ involvement in political violence and explores the emergent contradictions between chieftaincy and party politics when violence is legitimated in the name of ‘tradition’ and/or ‘development’.
Since 1995, traditional authorities have been re-instituted in Uganda’s constitution, but are barred from collecting the taxes that ensured their economic survival in the past. The paper explores the new political paradigm, which argues that traditional institutions can play a meaningful role in collecting taxes in the new decentralised state.
Against the background of a 2002 policy initiative by the Namibian Home Affairs Minister aimed at “cleaning up” and policing the Namibia-Zambia borderland, the paper contrasts the officially sanctioned and actual roles of traditional leaders and vigilantes from both countries in regulating the legal and illegal movement of goods and people across the international border. The local chiefs are found to be powerful agents on behalf of their own interests, taking advantage of their positions as de-facto frontline state representatives and skilfully playing the economic, political, and security interests of other local and state-level players out against each other. The study suggests the necessity of a more nuanced understanding of realities in the borderland, where local dynamics bear little resemblance to the official imagination of two separate and unambiguously defined sets of territory, authority and citizenship.
Against the 2002 formalization of traditional leaders as ‘community authorities’, the paper explores chiefs’ renewed role in tax collection and NGO/donor-driven community development. It argues that lack of legal clarity and varied localized interpretations have placed chiefs in an ambiguous role as, simultaneously, state assistants and representatives of rural communities.
This paper explains the continued political importance of rural areas in East Africa through its focus on a central institutional link between state and society: the poll tax. The expansion and decline of this tax since the early 1990s until today is traced and explained in the light of recent thinking about taxation and democratisation.