Everyday Corruption and the State: Citizens and Public Officials in Africa (review)

Blundo et al. have written an interesting and often amusing book on mundane corruption in West Africa, claiming to be the ‘first detailed and systematic anthropological study to be carried out in a group of countries on the specific topic of everyday corruption in Africa’ (p. 4). The book is the result of two years of extensive documentary and ethnographic work undertaken by six researchers in Benin, Senegal and Niger from 1999 to 2001. It focuses particularly on petty and institutional forms of corruption in the sectors of transport and customs, the legal system and public procurement. Through an examination of seemingly illicit activities, the book tries to uncover the ‘real’ rules and procedures that regulate informal and formal economic and legal behaviour in the three countries. Rather than corruption being seen as something inherently negative, the book makes the case that corruption must be understood as a practice embedded in everyday forms of sociability that transcend normative concepts of illegality and illegitimacy.

The book is divided into two sections. The first gives a background and justification for the study of corruption in Africa. It argues that efforts to combat corruption often misunderstand its pervasiveness in everyday life and ignore the communal complicity of different actors who resort to corruption as a way of coping amidst administrative confusion and the dysfunction of public services. It argues that in some cases corruption is a matter of professional necessity: the uncorrupt individual will be seen as foolish or selfish if he refuses to engage in corrupt acts. The book goes on to suggest that instead of employing a ‘zero tolerance’ policy towards corruption, new efforts might ‘advance in small steps, outlining steadily (negotiated or imposed) dividing lines between the acceptable and unacceptable’ (p. 134). While the authors concede this approach might ‘risk gradually surrendering its substances, requirements or soul’ (p. 134), they do not provide a description of what shape these small steps might take. While academics are not always policy makers, I feel a more detailed exploration of the policy implications of their research could have enriched the contribution that the book makes in that area.

Perhaps the most interesting part of this first section is the authors’ exploration of the popular semiology of corruption. Such an approach helps uncover everyday perceptions of and attitudes to corruption in social life. They suggest that corruption is often understood as just another public service, a public resource that everyone is entitled to draw upon from time to time. They emphasize correctly that while corruption is not condemned outright, it is nevertheless judged according to a scale of acceptance operating in the minds of ordinary people: ‘While a good appetite is normal, gluttony is deplorable’ (p. 133). They thereby construct a ‘moral economy of corruption’, which governs and regulates the ethical construction of corruption in society. Considerations of circumstance and scale thus govern the representation of corruption in Africa.

The second section of the book deals with specific sectors: the legal system, customs and transport, and public procurements. Each of these chapters begins with a wonderfully evocative vignette of corruption, highlighting the ‘real’ informal procedures that govern behaviour in each sector. Analysis of these procedures complements work on the African informal economy which presents social networks in informal economies as a form of alternative regulation which transcends official written rules and norms but nevertheless forms the basis of everyday economic interaction. A businessman or trader must know the rules of the game before he can enter the market. Arifari’s chapter on customs and transport emphasizes this view. The problem with such informal regulation is that it restricts the market to ‘insiders’ and excludes wider participation in the economy. Such a reality is well reflected in the final chapter of this section, which deals with the way contractors...