Taken For A Ride: Grounding Neoliberalism, Precarious Labour, and Public Transport in an African Metropolis (Critical Frontiers of Theory, Research, and Policy in International Development Studies)

How does public transport work in an African city under neoliberalism? Who owns what in it? Who has the power to influence its shape and changes in it over time? What does it mean to be a precarious and informal worker in the private minibuses that provide public transport in Dar es Salaam? These are the main questions that inform this in-depth case study of Dar es Salaam's public transport system over more than forty years. The growth of cities and informal economies are two central manifestations of globalization in the developing world. Taken for a Ride addresses both, drawing on long-term fieldwork in Dar es Salaam (Tanzania) and charting its public transport system's journey from public to private provision. This new addition to the Critical Frontiers of Theory, Research and Practice in International Development Studies series investigates this shift alongside the increasing deregulation of the sector and the resulting chaotic modality of public transport. It reviews state attempts to regain control over public transport and documents how informal wage relations prevailed in the sector. The changing political attitude of workers towards employers and the state is investigated: from an initial incapacity to respond to exploitation, to the political organisation and unionisation which won workers concessions on labour rights. A longitudinal study of workers throws light on patterns of occupational mobility in the sector, and the political and economic interests that shaped the introduction of Bus Rapid Transit in Dar es Salaam, and local resistance to it are analysed. Taken for a Ride reveals the political economy of public transport, exposing the limitations of market fundamentalist and post-colonial scholarship on economic informality, the urban experience in developing countries, and the failure to locate the agency of the urban poor within their economic and political structures. It is both a contribution and a call for the contextualised study of 'actually existing neoliberalism'. Cover 1 Taken for a Ride: Grounding Neoliberalism, Precarious Labour, and Public Transport in an African Metropolis 4 Copyright 5 Acknowledgements 8 Contents 12 List of Figures 16 List of Tables 18 List of Acronyms 20 1: Taken for a Ride: Rethinking Neoliberalism, Precarious Labour, and Public Transport from an African Metropolis 22 1.1 Early Impressions: Urban Public Transport as Functional Chaos 22 1.2 Structure and Agency in the African City 24 1.3 Structure and Agency in the African Informal Economy 28 1.4 Class Matters 33 1.5 Neoliberalism, Post-Socialism, and Public Transport 35 1.6 Methodology of the Book and its Chapters 42 2: Public Transport in Dar es Salaam: From State Monopoly to Neoliberalism (1970-2015) 48 2.1 Introduction 48 2.2 State-Provided Public Transport: 1970-83 49 2.3 The Privatization and the Progressive Deregulation of Public Transport: 1983-2001 52 2.4 Deregulation, Privatization, and the Quality of Bus Public Transport 62 2.5 Feeble Attempts to Regain Public Control: 1999-2015 66 3: `Life is War ́: Capital and Informal Labour in Bus Public Transport 72 3.1 Introduction 72 3.2 Informal Economy as Self-Employment? 74 3.3 The 2006 Integrated Labour Force Survey: Definitions and Patterns of Employment 78 3.4 From Statistical Fiction to Employment Realities: The Case of the Daladala 82 3.5 Bus Owners in Dar es Salaam 84 3.6 Daladala Workers 87 3.6.1 Juma Masuka 89 3.6.2 Kudo Boy 90 3.6.3 Uwazi 90 3.6.4 Kajembe 90 3.6.5 Rajabu 91 3.6.6 Rama 91 3.6.7 Asenga 92 3.7 The Employment Relationship in Daladala 92 3.8 The 2006 ILFS Questionnaire and Informal Wage Employment: Lost in Translation? 97 3.9 Informal Wage Employment: Invisible and yet Central 99 4: The Politics of Labour 1: The Quiescent Period (up to 1997) 102 4.1 The Criminalization of the Workforce 102 4.2 The Sources of Workers ́ Power 105 4.3 The Spatial Unit of Work 107 4.4 Labour Heterogeneity: The Phenomenology of Transport Workers 107 4.4.1 Daladalamen `with a Livelihood ́ 108 4.4.2 People `on the Bench ́ 108 4.4.3 `Those Who Hit the Tin ́ 110 4.5 Workers ́ Associationism: Forms and Limits of Solidarity 111 4.5.1 Managing but not Challenging Precariousness 111 4.5.2 The `Struggle over Class ́ 115 4.6 Transport Workers ́ Horizontal Mobility and its Implications 117 4.7 United they Stood, Divided they Fell 119 5: The Politics of Labour 2: Struggling for Rights at Work (1997-2014) 121 5.1 Informalization and Rights at Work 121 5.2 From Political Quiescence to Political Organization: Early Days, 1995-2000 126 5.3 The Construction of a Shared Meaning of Exploitation 129 5.4 Labour Rights through Collective Bargaining 133 5.5 Barriers to the Enforcement of Employment Contracts 135 5.6 Labour Rights: Bringing the State Back In 136 5.7 A New Political Subject: Trade Unions, the Informal Economy, and Labour Rights 139 5.8 Contextualizing Workers ́ Power and Realms of Possibility 140 6: Tracing Occupational Mobility/Immobility among Informal Transport Workers 143 6.1 Hitting a Moving Target: Methodological Issues 143 6.2 Histories of Occupational Immobility 150 6.2.1 Juma Masuka 150 6.2.2 Uwazi 151 6.2.3 Kajembe and Ngaika 152 6.2.4 Sulemani 152 6.3 Histories of Occupational Mobility 153 6.3.1 Rajabu 154 6.3.2 Abasi 155 6.3.3 Dotto 156 6.3.4 Asenga 157 6.3.5 Mudi and Kulwa 159 6.4 Workers ́ Trajectories: Predictable? 160 7: The New Face of Neoliberalism: The Bus Rapid Transit Project in Tanzania (2002-16) 163 7.1 The Political Economy of BRTs 163 7.2 The BRT Evangelical Society 169 7.3 The Ideology of BRT in Dar: Whose `Better City for Better Times ́? 173 7.4 Making Sense of Delays in the Implementation of DART 174 7.5 The Deeper Roots of Lack of Government Support 178 7.6 Towards the Implementation and Domestication of BRT: 2014 Onwards 183 7.7 What Can President Magufuli Do? 186 7.8 BRT Tensions as `Actually Existing Neoliberalism ́ 191 8: Conclusion: Taken for a Ride 192 8.1 Cities of Ghosts: Bringing People Back In 192 8.2 Grounding Neoliberalism 197 Appendix A: Questionnaire and Summary of Results 202 Appendix B: Labour Mobility, December 2001–June 2002 204 Glossary 206 References 208 Interviews 225 Index 228 How does public transport work in an African city under neoliberalism? Who owns what in it? Who has the power to influence its shape and changes in it over time? What does it mean to be a precarious and informal worker in the private minibuses that provide public transport in Dar es Salaam? These are the main questions that inform this in-depth case study of Dar es Salaam's public transport system over more than forty years. The growth of cities and informal economies are two central manifestations of globalization in the developing world. Taken for a Ride addresses both, drawing on long-term fieldwork in Dar es Salaam (Tanzania) and charting its public transport system's journey from public to private provision. This new addition to the Critical Frontiers of Theory, Research and Practice in International Development Studies series investigates this shift alongside the increasing deregulation of the sector and the resulting chaotic modality of public transport. It reviews state attempts to regain control over public transport and documents how informal wage relations prevailed in the sector. The changing political attitude of workers towards employers and the state is from an initial incapacity to respond to exploitation, to the political organisation and unionisation which won workers concessions on labour rights. A longitudinal study of workers throws light on patterns of occupational mobility in the sector. The book ends with an analysis of the political and economic interests that shaped the introduction of Bus Rapid Transit in Dar es Salaam, and local resistance to it. Taken for a Ride is an interdisciplinary political economy of public transport, exposing the limitations of market fundamentalist and postcolonial appraoches to the study of economic informality, the urban experience in developing countries, and their failure to locate the agency of the urban poor within their economic and political structures. It is both a contribution to and a call for the contextualised study of neoliberalism. The chapter starts by describing public transport in Dar es Salaam as ‘functional chaos’. It then critically reviews two thematic literatures, on African cities and on their informal economies, to reveal that references to chaos, dystopia, and their opposites, order and functionalism, are common. The key argument is that a highly contextual understanding of urban informality and of how African cities work is required to avoid overly deterministic structural accounts and romantic celebration of African agency without due attention to structural constraints. The chapter presents the book’s approach: namely a political-economy analysis, centred on class analysis and wary of automatically reading off the political interests of actors from their class position. It argues that neoliberalism and post-socialism are key to understanding Tanzania and public transport in Dar es Salaam, and calls for grounding ‘actually existing neoliberalism’ in a particular context while retaining the analytical power of the concept of neoliberalism. Taken For A Ride: Rethinking Neoliberalism, Precarious Labour, And Public Transport From An African Metropolis -- Public Transport In Dar Es Salaam: From State Monopoly To Neoliberalism (1970-2015) -- 'life Is War': Capital And Informal Labour In Bus Public Transport -- The Politics Of Labour 1: The Quiescent Period (up To 1997) -- The Politics Of Labour 2: Struggling For Rights At Work (1997-2014) -- Tracing Occupational Mobility/immobility Among Informal Transport Workers -- The New Face Of Neoliberalism: The Bus Rapid Transit Project In Tanzania (2002-16) -- Conclusion: Taken For A Ride. Matteo Rizzo. Includes Bibliographical References (pages 187-205) And Index. The growth of cities, and informal economies within them, are two central manifestations of globalization in the developing world. This book contributes to our understanding of both, through a study of public transport in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania's largest city, from 1970 to 2015.