Legalization
Defining Productive Work
Both the colonial and postcolonial states made numerous attempts to remove so-called unproductive elements from the city and to repatriate them to the countryside. Often these elements included the self-employed, whose basic conflict with the state thus became one of determining not just how they would obtain a livelihood but also who would control their very means of survival. The resettlement schemes of the postcolonial state had their origins in British vagrancy laws, which date back as far as 1349. They were vigorously enforced by authorities in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England as a means of securing cheap labor for industry and to round up alleged criminals. These laws were transferred to the colony of Tanganyika in the form of the Penal Code, which targeted prostitutes, beggars, gamblers, suspected thieves, "rogues," and "vagabonds." In addition to this code, the colonial government introduced the Townships (Removal of Undesirable Persons) Ordinance in 1944, which is still in force. Under this ordinance, a district commissioner can order an "undesirable" person who has no regular employment or "reputable means of livelihood" to leave the town (Shaidi 1987).
Another colonial ordinance still in force is the 1923 Destitute Persons Ordinance, which pertains to people found without employment or unable to show that they have a "visible and sufficient means of subsistence." The magistrate can order such "destitute persons" to find work, detain them, or return them to their original place of residence. One of the main aims of these vagrancy statutes was to provide cheap labor for settler communities and to keep people in the rural areas, where they could continue the cash-crop production that was so crucial to the colonial state. In the 1930s the police commissioner and the provincial commissioner (Eastern Province) initiated the first forcible removal of unemployed people from Dar es Salaam to the countryside (Shaidi 1987).
The independent government attempted a number of operations to resettle urban dwellers in the nearby villages, the most important of which
was in 1976. It was not long before the majority of the resettled people had returned to the city, some only a few hours after being moved out (Shaidi 1987, 12). In another such initiative the government enacted a Penal Code Amendment in 1983 that banned people involved in so-called unproductive activities from the cities because they were considered "idle and disorderly persons."[3]
The Penal Code amendment expanded the categories of "idle and disorderly persons" to include:
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Soon after the Penal Code Amendment was enacted, the Human Resources Deployment Act was passed in May 1983, requiring all urban Tanzanians to be registered and issued labor-identification cards.[4]
The minister of labour, assisted by the labour commissioner and advised by the National Human Resources Deployment Advisory Committee, was in charge of enforcing the act, but the actual implementation was left up to the local authorities (Shaidi 1984, 85).
Under this act, also known as Nguvu Kazi, those who could not produce proper identification were to be resettled in the countryside. In the Dar es Salaam region all unlicensed, self-employed people, including fish sellers, shoe repairmen, and tailors, were considered idle and disorderly and treated like loiterers. President Nyerere ordered the prime minister to be "bold" in implementing the Nguvu Kazi act, saying: "If we don't disturb loiterers, they will disturb us." Nyerere compared the "loiterers" with economic saboteurs and racketeers, "whom the nation has declared war on" and depicted this campaign as a strong vehicle for promoting economic production.[5]Daily News, 26 September 1983.
The leadership justified the operation by the need "to increase productivity and make the country self-sufficient in food."[6]African Business, December 1983.
Immediately after the Deployment Act went into effect on 15 October 1983 the police, national-service soldiers, and people's militia started rounding up thousands of suspected loiterers on a random basis. Even an employed person found walking the streets during working hours could be charged with being "engaged in a frolic of his own at a time he is supposed to be engaged in activities connected or relating to the business of his employment." During the early 1980s Tanzanians experienced severe shortages, and workers frequently left their jobs during work hours to stand in lines to obtain food.
Detainees were taken to one of three centers in Dar es Salaam and had to provide documentation that they were employed and, in the case of women, that they were married. Those who were declared unemployed were sent back to their home villages or to state-run sisal plantations. Three months after the campaign started, 15,611 people had been detained (Shaidi 1984, 86).
The campaign was especially problematic regarding women. The authorities required married women to produce official marriage certificates within seven days of being detained to indicate that they had husbands who were providing for them (Kerner 1988, 53; Shaidi 1984, 86). This policy contained numerous questionable assumptions, including the notion
that all women who did not fall into the category of officially married—that is, women who were single, divorced, or widowed or women in common-law marriages—could be suspected of being loiterers and unproductive elements. Moreover, it assumed that the wives were dependent on their husbands, disregarding the fact that married women might have been supporting their families through their own projects.
For a brief period, food vendors and shoe shiners disappeared from the city streets, employed people did not venture away from their jobs during the day, and children going to and coming from school rode buses in groups (Kerner 1988, 49). But it quickly became clear that the campaign was a failure. No sooner were truckloads of people dropped off in rural areas than most of them returned to the city to resume their small-scale enterprises. The illegal trade in identification papers boomed, so that virtually anyone could come up with some form of documentation.
The Nguvu Kazi enterprise had its parallels in other parts of Africa in the late 1970s and early 1980s as various countries sank deeper into economic crisis. In July 1984 Nigeria's military rulers launched a War against Indiscipline, involving the arrests of vendors and the destruction of their stalls along main roads of urban areas. A day or so after the state action the vendors returned to resume business as usual (Eames 1988, 87; Trager 1987, 247–48). In Zambia police attempted to control price hiking during the period of shortages in 1982 by arresting and destroying the wares of women street vendors (Hansen 1989, 148). In Ghana the military government of the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council sought to do away with hoarding and price hiking by market traders during a period of shortages. Soon after their takeover in June 1979, they literally dynamited the central market in Accra to the ground and sold off the trader's stocks at the Kumasi central market. Market sellers continued to sell their goods through friends and from their homes, however. The heightened risk factor meant that the prices of the goods skyrocketed (Clark 1988, 61; Dolphyne 1987, 27).
In Tanzania the Nguvu Kazi campaign was destined to fail when the government resorted to coercion in an offensive against city dwellers, with little regard for the realities faced by the urban poor. It is ironic that while the Nguvu Kazi enterprise aimed at forcing urban dwellers into "productive" agricultural production, by the late 1980s those with farms outside the city or on the outskirts of the city were in an enviable position of having this additional means of livelihood. In principle, most people had no objection to farming and would have welcomed a viable scheme that gave them land and a means to cultivate. As one cigarette vendor who was born
and raised in the city told me, "The government just collected us young men and dumped us in the forest to farm. They gave us plots but no capital, no houses, no food…. We had no choice but to come back to the city and continue selling cigarettes. If I had a place to live and the means I would have stayed to farm."[7]
No. 1.6, interview by author, 21 August 1987, Mnazi Moja, Dar es Salaam.
Today it is widely recognized that rural life may hold more promise than urban life does, for in cities, in order to eat, one needs cash, which is difficult to come by. As one textile worker who purchased a 1.6-hectare farm in 1976 said: "If I do statistics in my head, life in the villages is better than city life. One has a plot and can sell one's crops. You have no problem if you rely on the crops that you grow. Life in the cities is harder. Where I work many have left their jobs since 1982 and many more since 1985. They have decided to go back to the villages or be self-employed."[8]
No. 6.54, interview by author, 11 November 1987, Manzese, Dar es Salaam.
The absurdity of the Nguvu Kazi policy was underscored by reports like the one of twenty-two shoe shiners who were arrested on the grounds of being unproductive. Several of them were physically handicapped, and half of them were students at a nearby vocational school who were trying to support their studies through this sideline activity. A city official told them to find jobs and warned them against turning to shoe shining. He announced that people with leather shoes needing regular polishing should learn to do it themselves. The official added, "Otherwise you have to buy safari boots or canvas shoes."[9]
Daily News, 17 November 1983.
Public response to this campaign was by no means indifferent. The notion that these activities were not productive made little sense to most people. The Tanzanian Daily News carried a series of interviews with self-employed people and asked them about the illegal and unproductive nature of their activities.[10]
Ibid., 2 October 1983.
One fishmonger said, "I regard this activity as being gainful. Every day I make a profit of at least 100 and 200 shillings or more at best. I have a wife and five children who are dependent on me. It is a good thing that people should be involved in some gainful activity or other. But there are people who have their businesses who will be harassed for no good reason. I don't see how you will convince me that a certain job is better than what I am doing now. Even if you give me employment in your company, I won't accept it. I just couldn't survive on a monthly salary." A peanut vendor responded, "I tell you I have been able to keep a wife and four children by doing nothing but selling groundnuts. My children are now in school and I rent a house. I have saved 3,000 shillings in a bank. I have even helped people who are employed in offices who came to me to borrow money when in financial trouble." And a knife sharpener answered, "It would not be fair to dismiss this as a useless activity sincevery many people depend on us. Shopkeepers, hoteliers, butchers and even other individuals bring their knives and pangas [machetes] for sharpening. The government should instead give us licenses and a place where we can conduct our activities."
Not surprisingly, rounding up these so-called unproductive elements proved far beyond the capacity of the government. Moreover, it merely served to antagonize the majority of the city's population. It was implemented at a time when virtually no new jobs were available and informal projects had become the main means of subsistence for most urban dwellers. The campaign failed because people simply refused to comply, continuing their daily income-generating activities as they always had. They ignored the new policy because their survival depended on their continuing these activities.
The government was forced to back down from its campaign. By 1984 the mass detentions were curtailed significantly. That same year the City Council began to register people through the ten-house-cell system to verify employment (Kerner 1988, 44). One top City Council official explained to me why the local government changed its position: "The City Council decided to change the 1983 government policy after analyzing the situation. The government could not provide work for all and could not repatriate the people in the countryside. We failed to send them into the regions, and then we failed to send them even to villages near the city."[11]
No. 7.18, interview by author, 21 June 1988, Dar es Salaam.
In 1985, at about the time the new president, Ali Hassan Mwinyi, came to power, the policy softened further, and the government began to license small businesses, thus giving official recognition to them. By the late 1980s, however, there remained disagreement among authorities over whether small projects constitute gainful work. The regional director of administration, who was in charge of seeing that the City Council carried out development policies like Nguvu Kazi, told me: "Some are against such work. They say such jobs could be done by the disabled, the old, not by strong men."[12]
J. B. Kitambi, regional director of administration, Coast Region, interview by author, June 1988, Dar es Salaam.
Nevertheless, after 1983 the government began to recognize, even if only minimally, the importance of the small-scale enterprises to the national economy. It "reinterpreted" the Human Resources Deployment Act to see the informal sector in a more positive light. A 1985 study sponsored by the government in cooperation with the ILO Jobs and Skills Programme for Africa explored the possibility of using the Human Resources Deployment Act as the basis for a national human resources scheme to deal, as the author put it, with the "failure of the modern sector to absorb
an increasing proportion of the labour force." The new policy toward the informal sector would make it essential that special attention be given to its role in creating employment because of its ability to do so at low levels of capital investment (Aboagye 1985, 1).
The change from 1983 was also evident in the remarks of the director of the National Vocational Training Programme, Morgan Manyanga, who said in a 1986 speech to Parliament that the "informal sector" is a "hidden sector." Services, he said, are provided without valid training licenses, work contracts, or taxation. He urged that such groups come out of "hiding" so that they could greatly help the nation by undertaking productive ventures. Although there is an element of absurdity in the notion that 95 percent of Dar es Salaam's population should "come out of hiding," this official's stance indicates a greater legitimation of these activities than the tone exhibited in 1983.[13]
Daily News, 9 June 1986.
Referring to this change in policy, one young man we interviewed said, "Up to now the government has failed because it wants people to work, but it fails to provide work. They arrested people and sent them to the villages without capital. Even in the past we were not loiterers, we had small businesses, but the government did not want to recognize what we were doing. Now at least they have considered that."[14]No. 1.6, interview by author, 21 August 1987, Mnazi Moja, Dar es Salaam.
At the national level, the emphasis had clearly changed by the 1990s. The government was beginning, if only haltingly, to assist the informal sector and was encouraging donor support for such activities, By the early 1990s the Human Resources Deployment Act itself was under review. The Ministry of Labour and Youth Development, which was to implement the act, had taken a few concrete measures to address the needs of young people who did not have access to formal education (International Labour Organisation 1992, 7, 8). The Ministry of Industries and Trade had established a Small Scale Industries Promotion Unit to improve the business climate for small-scale industries, and the ministry's Small Industries Development Organization (SIDO) began to address the needs of informal-sector operators in 1988, though budgetary constraints limited the impact of SIDO activities.
By 1994 the government had come up with a national policy to assist informal-sector activities in both rural and urban areas. focusing on the provision of financial services, appropriate technology, markets, and the development of skills. Encouraged by such positive gestures, international donors stepped up their support for the sector. The ILO, for example, launched a major initiative to support the informal sector. This project especially targeted women, children, and youth engaged in low-productivity
activities outside "formal regulatory and social protection mechanisms and who have limited access to credit, skills or training." The initiative focused on policy and regulatory reforms and on improving access to credit.[15]
Alpha Nuhu, "Tanzania-Labour: ILO Comes to the Rescue," Inter Press Service, 31 May 1995.
Whereas the 1980s saw a basic acceptance of the right for small businesses to exist, in the late 1980s and 1990s the debate shifted to issues of how municipal authorities dealt with problems of licensing, health violations, and relocating businesses to prevent overcrowding. In particular, small-scale traders were concerned about the abuses that occurred in the enforcement of various laws regarding this sector. In the mid-1990s the City Council militia were continuing their harassment and roundups of street vendors to move them to different business locations. The vendors, whose numbers had swelled in the city center, continued to charge City Council employees with seizing their goods for personal benefit.[16]
"War on Hawkers to Continue," Daily News, 6 June 1995.
Licensing Small Businesses
The key piece of legislation affecting informal-sector operators has been the Urban Authorities Act (1982), which gave the district councils the authority to determine how operators should function. Moreover, it gave them authority to collect revenue and to determine additional fees, such as for garbage collection. In Dar es Salaam two kinds of licenses were issued to small businesses and to market sellers. After 1985, fifty-six different kinds of small-business activities required licenses under the 1985 Dar es Salaam City Council (Hawking and Street Trading) Amendment to the 1982 Local Government (Urban Authorities) Act (see Appendixes D and E).[17]
The other piece of legislation regulating small businesses is the Licensing and Registration Act of 1967, which stipulates that all enterprises employing ten or more workers are required to obtain an industrial license from the Commercial Law, Registration and Industrial Licensing Department, Ministry of Trade and Industries (International Labour Organisation 1992, 21). Few informal-sector operations are large enough to fall into this business category.
The 1985 law revoked a 1963 law that abolished the urban trading licenses in response to pressure from shopkeepers (Bienefeld 1975, 67).According to the City Council licensing authorities, only 252 people were found guilty of violating the licensing law in 1987, and all had been fined. Many more, however, had been detained for such violations. They were rounded up by militia hired by the Inspection Committee of the City Council's Manpower Department. The City Council had six inspectors who derided daily where the militia should go. They concentrated on the central part of the city, Kivukoni, Kisutu, and Mchafukoga (Mnazi Moja), rounding up license violators and taking them into custody. In other parts of the city, each ward had its own inspectors who organized similar kinds of raids. Although microentrepreneurs considered legalization of informal-sector activities an improvement over the policy that branded their businesses unproductive, regulation of these small businesses through licensing posed a new set of problems.
City Council officials stated that their concern was making sure that vendors sold their wares in approved locations, yet the officials had no documentation that would indicate precisely where the off-limits areas were. Similarly, they claimed that they were concerned with meeting city health regulations. Yet this was at a time when there was little concern for other, more pressing citywide health issues. For example, shop owners and other people freely dumped large quantities of garbage into downtown streets; drainage systems remained clogged throughout the city; and control of malaria-carrying mosquitoes was virtually nonexistent, although in the past, vigorous campaigns to remove standing water and to spray the city had been undertaken regularly. These factors, along with the harassment of unlicensed small entrepreneurs (rather than the wealthier ones), made urban dwellers suspect that the issue of licensing the entrepreneurs was more than a question of keeping the city clean. Rather, it was aimed at keeping various patronage networks lubricated by extracting bribes from vendors. To a lesser extent, it was a response to shopkeepers' complaints about vendors' selling in unauthorized locations in front of their stores. The actions of the militia did not indicate any real effort to suppress the vendors but, rather, an attempt to intimidate them day after day into handing over a portion of their goods or earnings. It was clearly in the militia's interests to see the vendors return each day.[18]
One person wrote the following letter to the editor of the Daily News (3 June 1990): "If the Council is hard up why do they spend whatever little they have (in terms of money) to endlessly chase around the so-called unlicensed street vendors? (By the way is it not a wrong war in the wrong battlefield, and what happens to the 'War Spoils')."
In 1987–1988, for example, 6,082 small-business licenses were granted out of 10,000 requests. (In Buguruni 325 people out of roughly 30,000 self-employed applied for licenses in 1987.) In 1987 these businesses brought in TSh 3.6 million, or 1 percent of the entire City Council annual revenue. When asked why licensing of the smallest entrepreneurs was so important, given the unpredictability of their income and the fact that most were just barely feeding their families, a top City Council official responded emphatically, "But how are we going to control them if we have no licensing system?" He cited the cleanliness of the city and public health that would be jeopardized if people sold wherever and however they pleased. Moreover, he added, the City Council would not be able to do its job properly if it could not control and manage entrepreneurs in this way. City Council officials also suggested to me that people did not obtain licenses because they were selling stolen goods and because they were dishonest.[19]
No. 7.17, interview by author, 24 June 1988, Dar es Salaam.
The self-employed people with whom I spoke had a considerably different perspective on all of these issues. In a country where wages were not adequate, where there were few government welfare provisions, and where
the people had to care for their own sick, elderly, disabled, and unemployed, licensing regulations were often seen as an affront to popular notions of economic justice or to the norm of fairness (see Levi 1991). Virtually all of the hundreds of residents and ten-house party-cell leaders we spoke to about this issue saw the licensing of small projects, especially women's projects, as unjust. Many said they had no objection to the licensing of businesspeople engaged in lucrative projects like the sale of charcoal (wholesale), shopkeeping, or operating a restaurant. But for a poor person just trying to get by, they believed, licenses were an injustice because their sources of inputs and markets were too unreliable to make it worthwhile to obtain a license.
Most self-employed in Dar es Salaam operated their businesses without licenses. Ninety-nine percent of all self-employed workers were not licensed in 1988, according to my calculations based on City Council records and the 1988 census. In our survey, 87 percent openly admitted to not having licenses.
Popular sympathy for the self-employed was evident in confrontations between the militia and vendors. Passersby would frequently relay messages to vendors, warning them of the impending arrival of the militia. In May 1991 the Daily News reported an incident in which the militia came to arrest vendors who sold meals to workers in downtown office buildings. Passersby joined hands to protect the vendors. Fighting broke out, and the police had to come to the rescue of the militia, who were overpowered by the crowd, which booed the militia and called them thieves.[20]
Daily News, 16 May 1991.
Popular sentiment was underscored in a letter to the Daily News , which stated, "The sympathy of the public is always with these … people when they are almost daily chased away by guys in the City Council uniforms."[21]Ibid., 16 July, 1985.
Many City Council officials denied that the militia extracted bribes from the self-employed. Living in the center of the city, I observed the daily cat-and-mouse games of the militia in their pursuit of vendors. I often interviewed the sellers after the raids to find out who had been caught and detained, how much bribe money had been extracted, and whether the militia had confiscated or stolen their wares. Because the militia sometimes came in street clothes, vendors warned each other of an impending raid. Such typical occurrences may explain why City Council officials were so sensitive about the activities of the Nguvu Kazi office in charge of enforcing the purchase of licenses. In fact, they were under orders not to talk to any outsiders (such as journalists or academics) regarding their work and were to refer such people to the city director himself. Only after we interviewed the director did the Nguvu Kazi officials agree to talk to us.
Although the cost of a license was an important factor in explaining why people did not obtain licenses, perhaps even more significant was their rejection of state regulation of a part of life that was considered their own. The most basic right for the urban poor was the right to control their means of subsistence. For this reason, any outside attempts to regulate their means of subsistence was seen as an invitation to further interference, which could prove disastrous at a time when survival was so precarious.
At the same time, the arbitrary assignment of various fees by City Council officials to small businesses only compounded the general frustration with licensing. No study had been made to assess the income obtained from various enterprises. This accounted for the obvious incongruences in the fees relative to the value added of different kinds of enterprises. A woman with eighteen cows making TSh 120,000 a month from milk sales was required to pay the same license fee as was a woman who fried buns and earned TSh 6,000 a month. Tailors, carpenters, and masons, generally at the upper end of the informal-sector income bracket, paid the same license fee as did someone who made and sold paper bags, a low-capital, low-income project. The income of women running hairdressing salons depended on whether they braided hair or used chemicals to treat the hair. These incomes also varied with the size of their clientele, the location of their business, and other factors, yet they were all required to pay the same rate.
Another factor mitigating against obtaining licenses was the fact that in order to pay the license fee one often had to go through the bureaucracy and pay bribes amounting to three or four times the cost of the license itself. As one self-employed carpenter, who in 1982 left employment with the government-owned electricity company, put it:
Licenses only bring problems. Bribery is so common it isn't even worth mentioning. I have a license, but I had to pay a 10,000-shilling bribe to get it from the City Council. I just paid it because I got tired of coming back day after day and being told that they had not filled out the forms. The militia harass a carpenter for not having a license, but we make more income than they do. A clerk at the City Council makes 2,000 shillings a month. Such authorities know that if they arrest you, you will pay a bribe. It is their means of obtaining revenue. Those in top posts are not hungry because they squeeze the people below.[22]
No. 6.72, interview by author, 18 November 1987, Manzese, Dar es Salaam.
In addition to the problem of bribery in obtaining a license, many in Buguruni and Manzese reported that they had applied for licenses but had waited for months with no response from the licensing officials. The cumbersome application process for a business license served as an effective
deterrent to most potential applicants. The applicants were to first fill out forms obtained from their local ward office, submit the forms to the ward office, and wait until the forms were returned to them. The applicants would then take the forms to a Councillors Committee of the City Council, which would then evaluate the applications. The applicants would have to secure signatures from the responsible City Council Nguvu Kazi officials after having met personally with them (which could require several visits to the downtown City Council offices). In order to obtain a business license, individuals would first have to show evidence of having paid their taxes, of having a building permit, and of having had their business premises inspected for proper hygiene by a health officer (under the 1950 Health Act and the Factories Ordinance). Failure to obtain a license carried a penalty of TSh 2,000 ($20 at 1988 exchange rates) and/or imprisonment for six months.[23]
Government Notice No. 765, 30 October 1987. The Dar es Salaam City Council (Hawking and Street Trading) Amendment, Section 80, No. 8, Bylaw 15.
However, it was not uncommon for the application process to take as long as six months. One frustrated applicant applied for a business license, and by the time his forms were processed the license period had expired. When he asked that his application be applied to the following year, he was told to start all over again.[24]Daily News, 23 July 1985.
Widespread refusal to obtain licenses eroded the government's credibility and revealed a split among different levels of the government regarding the self-employed. One conflict emerged between local leaders and the City Council; a second, between national and local governments.
Conflicts between Levels of Authority
Payment for small-business licenses was an issue that was vigorously taken up by local CCM leaders and patrons at the lower levels of the party. Historically, the role of local leaders, especially at the cell level, had been to serve as a buffer between the higher state authorities and the people to whom they were accountable (Samoff 1973, 74). Numerous studies have shown how local leaders accommodated their constituents' preferences rather than complying with directives and policies from above (Hyden 1980, 114; Molloy 1971; Samoff 1973). One reason for this greater affinity between ten-cell leaders and local people is that their socioeconomic interests do not differ significantly from those of their neighbors, whom they represent.
Virtually all of the hundreds of CCM cell leaders we spoke to saw the licensing of small projects as unjust for the same reasons citizens opposed the licenses. Although the self-employed opposed payment for licenses for small businesses through quiet noncompliance (that is, refusal to pay), local cell and branch leaders were more vocally against licensing small
businesses and, in particular, against the militia harassment of people without licenses. Some branches had sent complaints to ward and district levels of the party, to the City Council, and to Parliament.
One CCM branch leader said that he had taken all steps within his power to raise the issue of licensing with the City Council. Nothing had come of his efforts to try to abolish the licensing of small businesses. He explained that "Those who can't farm have to do small businesses, but they have to do these with difficulty and without freedom. The City Council militia can come and harass them for not having licenses and then take away their wares from them. If I know the authorities, it won't be easy to get them to do away with licenses. These small businesses should not be licensed. The local governments should find another source of revenue and leave the people alone. They don't get much revenue, but still the City authorities harass them."[25]
No. 6.61, interview by author, 13 November 1987, Manzese, Dar es Salaam.
Local CCM leaders were especially impassioned about this issue because many had small businesses themselves and had experienced harassment. One cell leader said that her children, who sold pastries for her, had been harassed three times by the militia. "We have to run because we can't bribe them always. You run, leave your goods, everything, to save yourself."[26]
No. 6.153, interview by author, 8 December 1987, Manzese, Dar es Salaam.
Another cell leader in Manzese who sold coconuts at the market said: We pay 200 shillings a month to the City Council for the market space and 500 shillings a year for the license, but the City Council does nothing for us. All we have is what God has given us and boards to build a stall. There is no medicine in the hospitals, and you end up going to the private hospitals anyway. If you do not have a license the militia come and harass you and take away your goods and money. We get angry when they come. What kind of government do we have? Where is our freedom?"[27]No. 7.13, interview by author, 26 October 1987, Manzese, Dar es Salaam.
Local party organizations were all too often the recipients of orders from above rather than forums for expressing interests that were filtered up to higher levels of leadership, as they were intended. Nevertheless, these organizations were the main forum urban dwellers attempted to use, not only in settling local issues but also in attempting to confront higher bodies within the party and the government.
Urban dwellers also sought local patrons to defend them against militia raids and other encroachments on the interests of local people by the anthorities."[28]
Patron-client relations in Tanzania are rooted in the traditional headman or chief-subject relationship. These local patrons gained prominence in a number of different ways: through the social standing of their families; by marrying into a prominent family; by making a pilgrimage to Mecca and becoming an Al-Hajj; or by becoming a shehe (a Muslim sheikh) or imam (prayer leader). Their financial status was usually derived from owning boats, hotels, buses, or taxis or by engaging in trade (M.-L. Swantz 1986, 8-9, 37).
In fact, some of our most critical comments of party policy came from these patrons, many of whom sought positions as local party-cell leaders or on the elders' council of the party branch. They saw themselves as champions of the poor and the disadvantaged against the intrusions of the party and the government. The patrons' flexibility andwillingness to lend money and provide other social and economic arrangements made them indispensable in the community.
One such patron we interviewed was a Zaramo cell leader and businessman who had established a thriving wood trade. He had a little office with a desk and two chairs at the end facing each other, just like the local CCM offices. On the wall he had hung a party calendar and two large pictures of the then party chairman, Nyerere, and President Mwinyi. Outside the office, from which he ran his wood business, he flew the green CCM flag. He proudly explained to us that when the City Council militia came to harass the women selling pastries along the side of the road, they ran to his office with their pots and pans to hide. Thus, while surrounding himself with the symbols of the CCM, this patron was at the same time perpetuating another set of power relations.[29]
Seleimani Chamgulia, interview by author, 9 January 1988, Buguruni, Dar es Salaam.
In another CCM branch, a hotel owner established himself as a patron. Although he was active in the CCM, he was also critical of it and put distance between himself and the CCM and the government. He remarked, "If they change the [top] leadership of the party, life will be better. My life goes on because I don't sleep. I am a businessman and don't depend on the government. I have a hotel, so I don't wait for the government to help me."[30]
No. 6.46, interview by author, 10 November 1987, Manzese, Dar es Salaam.
The CCM secretary of this branch said that when she needed help in party matters she went to the hotel owner because she respected him and "considered him her father." The terms of kinship are frequently extended to nonfamilial patron-client relations as a means of further solidifying these relations. Clients often refer to the patron as "father" and to themselves as "his children."The City Council was not only at odds with local leaders over the harassment of vendors without licenses. It also had differences with the national government on the issue. Since 1986 national leaders have won popular support in criticizing the City Council for its harassment of vendors, especially of women. In the late i98os President Mwinyi several times openly decried the harassment of street vendors "whether licensed or not." In spite of his appeals, City Council representatives continued their harassment of unlicensed entrepreneurs, reflecting, perhaps, some of the competing interests between local and central governments. In one of the appeals, Mwinyi vowed that "stern action" would be taken against any police or militia found harassing vendors. The president said that "the traders were actually engaged in legal activities, trying to struggle against harsh economic conditions facing everybody…. He said that all urban councils should help the people engaged in petty businesses because that was one way of easing their economic burden."[31]
Daily News, 3 May 1989, emphasis mine.
After Mwinyi's November i987 condemnation of the City Council militia harassment, I heard vendors express enthusiasm for his statements. The Daily News quoted one woman who sold buns as saying: "We have been saved by the President from the hands of the City Council militiamen who have been a constant menace."[32]
Ibid., 14 November 1987.
Vendors also had their reservations, skeptical that this appeal would be heeded by the City Council. Their suspicions were confirmed a few days later when the militia resumed its raids.Other national leaders also decried the harassment of street sellers. Cleopa Msuya, when he was minister of industries and trade, addressed a 1994 seminar of small-scale women entrepreneurs in Mwanga, which I attended. He responded to their concerns about militia raids on businesses and property to check on licenses and location: "It is something negative to destroy these huts without informing the people. First, after all, these businesses must be allowed, period, because they help people. Second, people must be clear about where they should carry out their business. There must be well planned areas where people can run their businesses. Third, there must be an effort all the time to make sure that people are not interfered with in their places of business and that we should avoid the idea of going and breaking their huts and taking their license payments."[33]
Comments made at a seminar on "Women Entrepreneurs in the Local Economy," hosted by the Small Entrepreneurs Association of Mwanga, 7-10 March 1994.
For some leaders, appeals to the rights of street vendors became a quick and shrewd way of gaining popularity. One controversial national figure, Augustine Mrema, became a vocal champion of the causes of the urban street sellers and women. As former deputy prime minister and home affairs minister, he was one of the fiercest critics of corruption from within the CCM. He defended street hawkers from attacks by the City Council and personally intervened with husbands who beat their wives. When he was thrown out of his ministerial post in February 1995, he joined the opposition National Convention for Constitution and Reform (Mageuzi) and became its presidential candidate. His popularity increased, and for the first time the opposition was able to pose a credible threat to CCM's dominance.
The fact that common city dwellers saw the national leaders as allies against the City Council on this issue was evident after an intense period of raids against vendors in 1986. In one particular incident a group of vendors who sold in and around the Kigamboni fish market formed a demonstration and marched to the State House to register their grievances with the president. They told reporters that the City Council was threatening their "struggle to survive." Police diverted the march to the Central Police Station, where the vendors were told to bring their complaints to the City Council or the party."[34]
Daily News, 4 November 1986.
The national government's concern in keeping CityCouncil militia from harassing poor vendors was a way of responding directly to the problem of not having the resources to adequately pay workers. The continuation of these projects became a means of garnering greater legitimacy.
The differences between the national leaders and the City Council authorities appear to stem from the different interests they hoped to appease. National leaders were responding to pressures from labor to ease the conditions under which workers and their household members carried out projects. The City Council itself was probably divided. On one hand, there was concern to increase council revenue and to maintain good ties with the official business community by keeping vendors off their property. At the same time, the continuing practice of bribery by the militia and by people in charge of granting licenses suggests that the council had individual interests to satisfy within the institution itself.
Dodging the Development Levy
Refusal to obtain business licenses is related to the issue of tax evasion, for licensing and registration require the payment of taxes. Tax evasion has been one of the classic forms of noncompliance worldwide, according to Scott. He argues that although taxes were one of the most frequent causes of riots and revolts in early modern Europe and elsewhere, the main form of tax resistance was through "flight, evasion, misreporting, false declarations, and so on" (1987, 423). Certainly these quiet forms of opposition characterize resistance to taxation in urban Tanzania, where city dwellers have always been artful tax dodgers.
J.A.K. Leslie, writing about Dar es Salaam in the late 1950s, observed that new migrants during their first few days in town made it a priority to visit relatives and meet new people who could, among other things, provide a place to hide from tax clerks. People often used several names in order to make it difficult for the authorities to trace them in the event that they would be sought for not paying their taxes. Moreover, in the colonial period Leslie was describing, people commonly withheld their names or someone else's name from a foreigner or government representative for the same reason. Colonial authorities eventually set up tax drives because voluntary payment had failed. They blocked off streets, asking corners for evidence of payment. Even here, tax dodgers had little difficulty finding back routes to their homes (1963, 58, 60, 250). Those who were caught faced prison or labor camps, where they worked to pay the tax.
As in the 1950s, urban dwellers dodged the collection of the Development Levy, the poll tax of the 1980s and 1990s. The Development Levy, in
fact, had its antecedents in the poll tax. The British colonial administration created this tax under the Native Authorities Ordinance of 1926, which established indirect rule through local African institutions and leadership. Under this ordinance, local authorities collected taxes for the use of central government. The poll tax, known as local rates, was a flat rate collected from all adult men over the age of eighteen. Women were exempted from the tax unless they were employed or had an independent source of income. The tax had the effect of forcing Africans into wage-earning jobs in order to pay the tax. Later ordinances gave local authorities the authority to collect taxes for their own use (Bukurura 1991, 77–78).
The local rates were abolished in 1969, partly in response to public opposition to harsh tactics used by authorities in collecting the tax but also because of the association of the tax with colonial practices (Kulaba 1989, 219). The abolition of the tax left local governments completely dependent on the central government, without a major independent source of revenue. This move to eliminate independent sources of revenue was followed by the disbanding of local governments in 1972. Although the dissolution of local governments was heralded as a move to decentralize government, it in fact placed greater decision-making power in the hands of the central government. Regional- and district-level authorities, funded by the national treasury, gained power but were now accountable to the central government rather than to the localities, which had little control over personnel or the way in which funds were allocated. Conditions in the urban areas deteriorated quickly, including the provision of basic services like water and electricity, sewage disposal, and garbage collection (Kulaba 1989).
In 1982 two measures were enacted to rectify this situation. The Local Government Act was passed to reestablish the urban councils that had been abolished in 1972, and the Local Government Finances Act No. 9 was enacted to empower local councils to collect revenue. The passage of these acts meant that the central government dealt with taxes that were easy to collect, such as income taxes, duties, and licenses for larger businesses, whereas the local authorities were responsible for collecting fees that were more difficult to collect from an administrative and political standpoint (Kulaba 1989, 221, 231).
The Development Levy was instituted soon thereafter, though by a narrow margin of two votes in Parliament and after much heated debate.[35]
Africa Research Bulletin, 15 July-14 August 1982, 6525.
This law required all individuals between the ages of eighteen and sixty-five to pay a flat rate if they were low-income earners or farmers, while wage earners paid a graduated rate that was deducted automatically from their paychecks. Self-employed workers in Dar es Salaam were required topay a personal Development Levy and a Development Levy on their enterprise the first year they were in business. After that they paid only the business Development Levy, which was a percentage of their yearly business license (30 percent in Dar es Salaam).
People whom I interviewed bitterly resented the Development Levy, regarding it much like the colonial poll tax. They designed means of evading it that were as surreptitious as those of the evaders of the colonial taxes.[36]
Collection of the levy varied from year to year. For example, targets were exceeded in 1984-1985 by many towns, and by the following year, only 53 percent of the targeted amount was collected. Since then, revenue from the development levy has continued to fall (Daily News, 7 August 1991).
In some instances, tax collectors resorted to tactics reminiscent of colonial practices, such as road blocks, massive swoops, and detainment of defaulters.[37]Ibid., 4 January 1985, 3 April 1986, 9 October 1986.
Even employees who had the Development Levy automatically deducted from their paychecks were subject to harassments.[38]Ibid., 25 April 1986.
In July 1987 local governments began to use ten-house cell leaders and village governments to collect the levy in order to minimize confrontations between the people and the authorities, which had at times become violent, especially in urban areas. But this practice often backfired because it was not only taxpayers who evaded payment but also the local authorities assigned the task of providing lists of taxpayers who refused to comply because of the responsibility they felt to their constituents.Some have argued that the major evasion of the Development Levy has been due to the inability to pay and to a lack of clarity regarding duties, obligations, and reasons to pay. They argue that the government has not done a good job of educating people about the purposes of the Development Levy and convincing them of the necessity of paying the tax (Bukurura 1991, 91). Certainly these factors have contributed to the massive noncompliance in paying the Development Levy. However, it is also instructive to consider what people themselves have to say about the levy, especially given the fact that although for some the fee is too high, for most self-employed urban dwellers the sum is relatively small. The objections I encountered were varied but hinged around the issue of the lack of state legitimacy.
First, residents believed that they received little from the government in return for payment of the levy. They saw few tangible benefits, while the very poorest individuals were forced to meet the most basic welfare provisions on their own.[39]
A typical comment by a Dar es Salaam resident: "When it comes to the Development Levy we have ... seen nothing as a result of the levy we pay. Take Dar es Salaam as a [case in] point: the city is very dirty and the situation is deteriorating day in and day out. Our hospitals in the city are low in standards, [they have] poor hygienic conditions, no soaps, no insecticides and no mosquito nets in the hospitals. What we want to see is how such taxes are being spent" (Daily News, 9 June 1985).
Moreover, residents strongly resented what they believed were excessive misappropriations of funds by government authorities.[40]One Dar es Salaam businessman commented: "The Government is all the time raising taxes. Okay; it needs more revenue, but it has not plugged its own misappropriation of millions of shillings" (ibid., 9 June 1985).
Second, they feared that one tax would lead to endless demands for money by the government and the CCM. Income tax, house tax, tuition fees, and contributions for school and various fund-raising campaigns of the CCM were mentioned most frequently in this regard. People feared that agreeing to pay for one state tax was an invitation toraise taxes and to find new reasons to demand money from citizens. They made no distinctions between local governments and the central government with regard to these various taxes. Yet another concern was the harassment that accompanied the collection of the levy. In the Coast Region, residents appealed in 1988 to regional authorities to halt mistreatment of people in checking for payment of the levy. The government responded by passing the Local Government (Collection of Rates Procedure) Rules to reduce and eliminate default and do away with harassment by having village and cell leaders collect the levy (Bukurura 1991, 88–89).
Finally, the issue of women's paying the levy was especially controversial. Supporters of the levy on women argued that they were equal to men according to the law and theoretically could own their own property. Opponents argued that women in the rural areas rarely owned their own property and therefore should be exempted. In fact, prior to 1969 most women were exempted from paying the levy, and only those who had their own earnings were required to pay (Bukurura 1991, 80–81). In urban areas, low-income women argued that the tax was unjust because the economic crisis had placed heavy burdens on women and because they had thus been shouldering on their own the burden of caring for the young, old, and sick and of feeding the employed members of the household with income from their own small enterprises. As one woman I interviewed in Manzese, a low-income part of Dar es Salaam, put it, "Life is hard, but they don't understand that these fees just harass us. They are very strict with the Development Levy in the rural areas. A woman with a one-month-old baby was arrested for a whole day because of the Development Levy. Other women like Mrs. Kawawa [former chairperson of the Union of Tanzanian Women] and Kate Kamba [former secretary general of the Union of Tanzanian Women] and the rest marched in support of Development Levy. They do not know the problems of ordinary women. I am just an ordinary citizen."[41]
No. 6.80, interview by author, 17 November 1987, Manzese, Dar es Salaam.
Clearly the Development Levy brought to the fore the conflicting perspectives of low-income and wealthier, better-educated women, who were concerned with gender equality and the implications of exempting women from the levy. The issue was hotly debated in Parliament for years, with some members of the National Assembly arguing that women need not pay the levy because they are "naturally weak." Women members of Parliament firmly opposed the exemption, but they were overridden by Prime Minister John Malecela when he announced in 1991 that the local councils could exempt women from the tax and look for other sources of income. Still, the conflict between upper- and lower-income women over the levy
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reflected how women experienced their alienation from the state in different ways (Tripp 1994b).
Local authorities fared even worse with the small-business tax (Kulaba 1989, 219, 231). Self-employed producers avoided registration not only to evade the Development Levy but also so that they could operate their businesses without being subject to sales taxes and price controls. Taxes on produced goods ranged from 25 to 200 percent, and no differentiation was made with respect to the size of the production unit. Thus a small-scale industry paid the same tax as did a large-scale one. Because the sales tax is the most important source of domestic revenue for the government, it is doubtful that these laws will be changed (see Tables 7 and 8). Nevertheless, small-scale industries were so vulnerable financially that even simple taxes could make or break them. For most cooperatives and smaller production units the only way to survive was to avoid registration and hence taxation altogether (Havnevik 1986, 780).
The Battle over Grounds
Part of the conflict over small businesses centered on the issue of business locations. Selling in an unapproved location was one reason the City Council militia harassed vendors. Sometimes they were acting at the behest of shopkeepers who did not want vendors positioned in front of their stores. More often, however, the militia were only interested in the vendors' location as an excuse to harass and extract bribes from them. No one in the Nguvu Kazi office or any other department of the City Council knew where the authorized or unauthorized locations were because they had never been determined. This meant that it was left up to the militia and the inspectors to decide arbitrarily whether people were selling in approved
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proved locations. These conflicts continued into the mid-1990s. In 1995 organizations like the Organisation of Small Businesspeople (FESBA) and the Dar es Salaam Kiosk Owners' Association criticized the City Council for failing to find places to which street vendors could relocate after the City Council cracked down on them in the central Kariakoo market in February 1995. The association chairman, Issa Mnyaru, said in a statement issued to councillors that they were fed up with false promises by the government: "We are in a multipartyism era. You are required to listen to the people who voted for you."[42]
Daily News, 8 May 1995.
Indiscriminate militia attempts to move vendors from certain locations by and large failed. For example, the plans to move the central Kigamboni fish market to a less accessible location at Msasani met with little success. The market remains the main fish-auctioning center in the city. The City Council was, however, more successful in moving wood carvers who had set up kiosks along Bagamoyo Road to a central location in Mwenge in 1984. At the time, the City Council demolished some of the carvers' kiosks without prior notification and threatened to demolish more if people did not comply.[43]
Ibid., 24 January 1984, 31 January 1984.
One important conflict over location had to do with City Council attempts to channel the wholesale trade through a central market at Kariakoo. The downtown Kariakoo market was rebuilt in 1975, after which all
wholesale fruits, vegetables, certain staples, and dried and smoked fish were to be channeled through this City Council-operated market. Its aim was to bring the Dar es Salaam parallel market under its control, because it was believed at the time that only 50 percent of the wholesale trade was going through official channels (Sporrek 1985, 74–82). However, the centralization of the wholesale trade in Kariakoo did little to stem the parallel-market trade in the years that followed. The majority of produce coming into the city continued to be sold through markets like Manzese, which is the largest unofficial wholesale grain market in Tanzania.
The issue of location also concerns those with projects involving the keeping of poultry, cattle, and pigs because animal husbandry had initially been forbidden within townships (Kulaba 1989, 213). Urban dwellers relied on people with such projects for their chickens, eggs, ham, and milk, however. A 40 percent increase in registered livestock was reported in the city between 1987 and 1989 (Stren, Halfani, and Malombe 1994, 191). So pervasive was the practice of animal husbandry in the city itself that the City Council conceded to the practice but told owners to keep their livestock strictly within compounds to engage in zero grazing in 1989. The policy was revised in 1990, when livestock owners were permitted to keep no more than four animals at home zero grazing.[44]
Ibid., 19 December 1990.
Further impetus was given to such practices by Mwinyi's call on workers to start farm, animal-husbandry, and other projects.[45]Ibid., 2 May 1987.
Nevertheless, small herds of cattle continued to roam the city streets despite numerous City Council warnings, ultimatums, petty fines on cattle owners, and roundups of "loitering" cattle, as they were referred to by the authorities. As many as 2.3 percent of all reported road accidents in Dar es Salaam were caused by these animals (Kironde 1992, cited in Stren, Halfani, and Malombe 1994, 191). Although from time to time the City Council would round up "loitering cattle and goats," as it did in a 1995 raid,[46]Ibid., 5 June 1995.
for the most part this was one of the leastenforced regulations. Because the majority of animal owners within the city belonged to the class of administrators and professionals, it is conceivable that the authorities in the City Council were more hesitant to enforce strictly a law that would impinge on themselves and their friends and families, who depended on these projects for their sustenance.[47]One satirist, Adam Lusekelo, in the government newspaper Daily News, had this in mind when he offered the following tongue-in-cheek observation about animal owners in the Oyster Bay suburb populated by professionals, civil servants, and administrators: "Supposing 'City' [Council] is simply ignored by the Oysterbay Ranching Inc. What then? I don't imagine a scenario whereby our personages of great consequence are taken to court. Besides, who will dare take them to court? You can take the Tandika [a poorer area of the city] livestock keepers to court for letting their animals 'fertilise' our roads with their dung. But not kraal owners of Oysterbay. You risk a serious paralysis of Party and Government organs" (ibid., 9 August 1987).