%20-%20https://sketch.com%20--%3e%3ctitle%3e3ECBBF50-FD08-412A-943D-2CFC5E025A16%3c/title%3e%3cdesc%3eCreated%20with%20sketchtool.%3c/desc%3e%3cg%20id='Stylesheet'%20stroke='none'%20stroke-width='1'%20fill='none'%20fill-rule='evenodd'%3e%3cg%20transform='translate(-926.000000,%20-668.000000)'%20id='BUTTONS'%3e%3cg%20transform='translate(100.000000,%20597.000000)'%3e%3cg%20id='BTN-/-RIGHTS'%20transform='translate(816.000000,%2065.000000)'%3e%3cg%20id='ICON-/-Rights'%20transform='translate(10.000000,%206.000000)'%3e%3cpath%20d='M13.5752841,0%20L1.34943182,0%20C0.59375,0%200,0.586666667%200,1.33333333%20L0,22.6666667%20C0,23.4133333%200.620738636,24%201.34943182,24%20L17.6505682,24%20C18.40625,24%2019,23.3866667%2019,22.6666667%20L19,5.36%20L13.5752841,0%20Z%20M13.5752841,1.89333333%20L17.0838068,5.36%20L13.5752841,5.36%20L13.5752841,1.89333333%20Z%20M1.34943182,22.6666667%20L1.34943182,1.33333333%20L12.1988636,1.33333333%20L12.1988636,5.36%20C12.1988636,6.10666667%2012.7926136,6.69333333%2013.5482955,6.69333333%20L17.6235795,6.69333333%20L17.6505682,22.6666667%20L1.34943182,22.6666667%20Z'%20id='Shape'%20fill='%23595959'%20fill-rule='nonzero'%3e%3c/path%3e%3ccircle%20id='Oval'%20stroke='%23595959'%20stroke-width='1.5'%20fill='%23595959'%20cx='9.5'%20cy='13.5355339'%20r='5.5'%3e%3c/circle%3e%3cpolyline%20id='Path-2'%20stroke='%23FFFFFF'%20stroke-width='1.5'%20transform='translate(9.500000,%2013.035534)%20rotate(45.000000)%20translate(-9.500000,%20-13.035534)%20'%20points='8%2016.0355339%2011%2016.0355339%2011%2010.0355339'%3e%3c/polyline%3e%3c/g%3e%3c/g%3e%3c/g%3e%3c/g%3e%3c/g%3e%3c/svg%3e)
Reflection on dirt involves reflection on the relation of order to disorder, being to non-being, form to formlessness, life to death.
We must ask how dirt, which is normally destructive, sometimes becomes creative. (Mary Douglas Reference Douglas1966: 7, 196).
INTRODUCTION
When the new president of Senegal, Macky Sall, took power in April after the highly contested elections of 2012, one of his very first acts in office was to reform the institutions responsible for managing Dakar's household waste. The move was not at all a surprise one, given the long historic saga of institutional reorganisations in the waste sectorFootnote 1 and the related series of dramatic controversies during the previous 12 years under Abdoulaye Wade. In the post-colonial period, Dakar's waste sector has been restructured at least 12 times. The tenor of that volatility reached an unprecedented pitch during Wade's tenure, which saw eight major institutional shake-ups. Particularly from 2006–2012, the city oscillated between being remarkably tidy and offensively insalubrious as government, waste-workers, and ordinary Dakarois fought it out over the rules, responsibilities, and rewards for managing the city's waste. Following these household waste crises, Sall's dissolution of Wade's waste management system was a highly symbolic act aimed at purging the previous administration's failings and charting the country's new course.
Why has Dakar's waste been such a sticky subject in recent years? Though the littered cityscape is often explained away through reference to financial or material insufficiencies, this article digs beneath Dakar's rubbish piles to illuminate much more than a simple history of technical failure. Instead, the city's waste crises are analysed in light of waste management's role as a fundamental urban public service with a significant budget (more than 10 billion CFA in 2012), a key employment sector (1500–2000 techniciens de surface),Footnote 2 and a visceral symbol of the city's management in the wake of structural adjustment and the context of intense political competition. It chronicles the institutional instability in Dakar's waste sector since the 1980s, paying particular attention to the Wade years. During this time, as politicians jockeyed for control, waste-workers periodically went on strike and ordinary citizens staged dramatic neighbourhood-wide rubbish ‘revolts’ through public dumping, and rubbish was catapulted to the centre of political debates. Uncovered within this tumultuous history are power struggles within the state and caustic negotiations between state and society around the ordering processes of urban governance.
The article considers the shifting institutional landscape of waste management – and, especially, the manipulation of waste labour – through the lens of cultural politics. It explores how institutional battles manifest political contests over the city's modern image as well as the deep symbolic and material stakes of ordering public space and labouring bodies in the capital city. After a theoretical framing of the cultural politics of household waste, an empirical section outlines the politics of waste chronologically leading up to and during the Wade era. We will see how the contours of volatility turn on an intense power struggle between the central and local state to control the management of the capital city. A chief element of contestation was the status and remuneration of the city's waste-workers – the largest remaining bastion of the urban civil service. Attempts at manipulating waste labour have engendered enormous resistance from the waste-workers' union, which has emerged during the Wade era as one of the most visible and savvy labour movements in contemporary Senegal. Braced by its newfound complicity with the citizens of Dakar, the union resisted Wade's efforts to make the sector flexible, gained some key concessions, and won the favour of President Sall upon his election into office.Footnote 3 Following this chronology, an analysis section weaves together these threads to reflect on the wider implications of the moral economies of waste management – or the performance of order and disorder – for the urban question in Dakar and the landscape of citizenship in Senegal's contemporary period.
THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF RUBBISH
Household waste is a subject that frequently graces the public media and frustrates many Dakarois each and every day. Like elsewhere, however, the city's waste challenge is almost always either rendered a technical problem or a product of corruption, plain and simple.Footnote 4 As such, it becomes part of the depressingly familiar narrative of the ‘failed’ African metropolis – one that is replete with visions of chaos, anarchy, and literal dirt and decay. In short, the waste problem often stands in as the quintessential symbol of the African ‘crisis’ writ large. And yet, there is much more to waste – as dirt – than meets the eye. In framing the discussion of the institutional volatility of waste management in Dakar, an analysis of the cultural economies of waste and waste-work becomes important.
Recently the subject of a burgeoning literatureFootnote 5 it has long been recognised that waste has a complex role in formations of value. Going back to Mary Douglas' seminal work on pollution and taboo, we know that symbolic associations around impurity maintain social structures (1966). Dirt should be seen, she argues, as simply ‘matter out of place’ or ‘disorder’; there is a social function behind rites and rituals defining what – and who, for that matter – is considered pure versus what is labelled a contagion. Labelling people and places as dirty/clean is thus all bound up with the socio-spatial ordering of society. And following, in her words: ‘Dirt offends against order. Eliminating it is not a negative moment, but a positive effort to organise the environment’ (1966: 2). In this light, in addition to shaping how we see cleanliness of the body and environment, ideas of pollution and impurity ascribe complicated meanings to the act of cleaning – as an effort to order the unruly environment. In Senegal, cleaning takes on added meaning owing to the particular importance ascribed to purity and cleanliness as an indispensible fundamental of Islamic faith.
Just as space in the colonies was produced and regulated through ideas of dirt and disease, the impetus to order the waste-strewn city remains a central component of contemporary modernising missions.Footnote 6 In this way, waste management is an essential foundation of producing a modern, orderly city. At the base of state legitimacy, therefore, is the government's role in the performance of cleaning through managing urban waste. Given the exaggerated significance of Dakar as the symbol of the nation, the stakes of ordering this capital city are paramount.
Yet, urban waste and its management is intrinsically a contradictory indicator of progress and modernity. As Sarah Moore points out in her work on waste politics in Oaxaca, Mexico, waste is, at its base, the excess of modernity (2009). As the outcome of consumption and production, the challenge of managing waste escalates with the pursuit of modernity. In her words: ‘Because garbage is inherently misplaced, waste represents a risk to the modern urban societies we are trying to produce’ (2009: 428). It is, therefore, the movement of waste – its effective, proper, disposal – which allows development to continue. The blockage of that disposal process and the accumulation of urban waste in public spaces is the ultimate symbol of non-progress (the opposite of value) and demonstration of state delinquency. This is important in considering the powerful symbolic value of socio-spatial ordering through waste management and the political valence of rubbish in – or out of – place.
Controlling and enforcing the labour of waste management is part and parcel of ordering the city – its communities and individuals – especially in the neoliberal era of flexible labour and self-management. It is well understood that urban public services often crystallise the contradictions surrounding neoliberal reform and, as such, have been a key arena of struggle in the era of austerity.Footnote 7 As in other settings, the last decades in Dakar have borne witness to an erosion of urban public services as well as the government's role as the ‘employer state’. In Dakar, where formal jobs are scarce and the government controls less and less of a civil service, the size of the waste labour force serves an important clientelist function. A key motivation behind the political struggles to manage the waste sector is the impetus to control this last bastion of public jobs. Cleaning work – as a highly visible and arduous labour – can, moreover, act to prove or display the legitimacy of a responsible state. Thus, as we shall see, the management of waste labour also has a propagandist element in Dakar, with the distribution of order inextricably intertwined within larger questions of equity, justice, and accountability across the urban landscape.
Furthermore, given the role that the labour process plays in constituting social status, the organisation of waste labour is deeply implicated in managing and disciplining labouring bodies. In most parts of the world, waste collection is stigmatised as lowly, dirty work, owing to the negative associations of waste (see Ali et al. Reference Ali, Olley and Cotton1998; Miraftab Reference Miraftab2004). In Islamic settings, waste workers can be particularly stigmatised because of the religious associations between waste work and impurity (Beall Reference Beall2006; Fahmi & Sutton Reference Fahmi and Sutton2006). The imperative to make labour flexible during the neoliberal era, moreover, often works through the figure of the disposable worker, whose labour is constructed as expendable and with little value (Standing Reference Standing1999; Bales Reference Bales2000; Wright Reference Wright2006). Indeed, flexibilising waste labour value has been a primary means of restructuring the local state to conform with neoliberal principles in Africa.Footnote 8 As we shall see in the following history, since the late 1980s, manipulating waste labour in Dakar – in the sense of flexibilising contracts, replacing workers, fighting collective bargaining – has served as a core state strategy to cope with shrinking budgets, shore up electoral support in the face of intensified political competition, and discipline workers.Footnote 9 In this way, waste-workers have often found themselves trashed in a double sense, owing to the negative associations of the work itself along with the negation of the value of their labour.
And yet, if the state's role in managing rubbish is a process of taming the city and disciplining its residents – or capturing them to a life aesthetic of orderly progress – then it is also about the possibilities for disrupting those power relations through a politics of disorder. In Moore's words, ‘As garbage and other risks go rogue, they present the capacity to undermine existing political and management institutions and their related sociospatial orders' (2012: 10). We shall see that in the face of instability in their working conditions over the last decade and attempts at manipulation and control by different echelons of government, waste-workers in Dakar have emerged as a powerful source of critique of government policy and a formidable challenge to state authority. In a prescient illustration of dirt becoming creative, strikes by workers and public dumping by residents of Dakar deploy the power of dirt to creatively subvert ordering paradigms in a potent assertion of rights to the city (c.f. Mitchell Reference Mitchell2003). Where rubbish becomes creative, identity associations are potentially disrupted, and fissures are formed in the larger hegemonic processes of controlling populations. Rubbish in the public space in contemporary Dakar is thus the outward expression of contests at the heart of urban citizenship.
THE SAGA OF WASTE MANAGEMENT: A HISTORY
The following sections outline the institutional reorganisations in the waste sector chronologically, paying special attention to contestation surrounding labour. A summary is presented in Table 1.
Overview of Dakar's waste management institutions from 1985–2012.
From Set/Setal to Alternance
Before the central period in question, Dakar was no stranger to shifting regimes of waste management and punctuated moments of waste crisis. In the 1970s, the sector was privatised and managed by a Senegalese waste management firm, SOADIP (La Société Africaine de Diffusion et de Promotion). The new Socialist Party (PS) mayor of Dakar, Mamadou Diop, then reorganised the sector through replacing SOADIP with a public corporation, SIAS (La Société Industrielle d'Aménagement Urbain du Sénégal) in 1985. SIAS was given the exclusive management of Dakar's waste under the oversight of the new entity federating the region of Dakar, the CUD (La Communauté Urbaine de Dakar).Footnote 10
SIAS satisfied its responsibilities for only a short time. By 1988, the city was plunged into a dramatic waste crisis that manifested the disorder of the general political–economic conjuncture. In the wake of the controversial presidential elections of 1988, the youth rioted in the streets and a state of emergency was declared. Soon after, a different sort of social movement in Dakar transpired that would temporarily resolve the waste crisis and inspire the next chapter in the city's waste management: the Set/Setal movement (meaning ‘Be Clean/Make Clean’ in Wolof).Footnote 11 Set/Setal involved the localised activities of Dakar youth to clean and beautify their own neighbourhoods in reaction to the increasing filth of the city and widespread disillusionment with its policy-makers. Incubated in local youth groups, these young men and women began to organise their own system of neighbourhood waste management across the city.
By the early 1990s, the Set/Setal youth's cleaning activities had become indispensible in filling the gaps left by the flailing waste collection company and Mayor Diop masterminded their incorporation into a city-wide participatory waste system to replace SIAS.Footnote 12 A little known second chapter to the history of Set/Setal, this incorporation of youth into the waste sector represented a shrewd political calculation by Mayor Diop which served to cope with shrinking budgets, shore up political support in the face of intensified electoral competition, and evade the impending labour dispute threatened by the SIAS workers, the vast majority of whom were fired in the transition.Footnote 13 Facing mounting public tension at the strains of structural adjustment and the growing wave of opposition evident in the 1988 elections, the ‘participatory’ trash sector thus brought these youth activists in as new political clients and the fresh face of the nation and its orderly development. By 1995, these young men and women had become the city's official waste labour force, which Mayor Diop took pride in playing an intimate hand in coordinating.Footnote 14 Paid at day-labour rates (usually 1000 CFA/day), the workers lacked all protections and benefits. A powerful municipal agency, the CUD was the base of Mayor Diop's power and a significant cog in the wheel of the PS apparatus.Footnote 15
Alternance to 2006
In 2000, the election of Abdoulaye Wade to the presidency and the advent of Alternance was a landmark moment in the institutional history of Dakar's waste management. When Wade was elected, he faced a powerful city government that was considered the fief of the socialist Mayor, with an army of almost 2000 young waste collectors at its heart.Footnote 16 In Abdoulaye Wade's rush to dismantle the PS apparatus, the participatory waste sector was an obvious target for ‘reform’. Just months after the 2000 elections, the CUD was dissolved and Mayor Diop's base of power was eviscerated. After serving 18 years as Mayor, Mamadou Diop eventually lost in the local elections on 12 May 2002 to liberal candidate Pape Diop, a close ally of Abdoulaye Wade. A new government agency was created in 2000 to take over the management of the waste sector. At first named the HAPD (Haute Autorité pour la Propreté de Dakar), transformed shortly after to PRODAK (Propreté de Dakar), the agency then became APRODAK (Agence pour la Propreté de Dakar) in 2001. APRODAK was located under the direct oversight of the Prime Minister's office. Though APRODAK initially contracted with multiple local companies (concessionaires) for the cleaning and collection services, a call for bids was put out on the international market in 2000 for a major waste management company. The Swiss company Alcyon was selected for the exclusive market of Dakar's waste collection in 2001 and the 25-year contract was eventually ceded on 11 November 2003 to Alcyon's main sub-contractor, AMA-Senegal, a private subsidiary of an Italian waste management company (AMA-Rome) (Sénégal 24.4.2002). AMA-Senegal was charged with collecting household garbage in Dakar until 2006.
The waste-workers formed a politically ‘independent’ (autonome) union, SNTN (Le Syndicat National des Travailleurs du Nettoiement) on 15 December 2000, in anticipation of the need to defend their jobs and working conditions in the turbulent restructuring that was to come. This was to be the founding moment of labour movement that has since transformed into one of the most dynamic in contemporary Senegal. Though four other small unions formed later, these came to be federated into a Front Unitaire led by SNTN's Secretary General, Madany Sy, until late 2011.Footnote 17 Soon after AMA was officially awarded the contract, the waste-workers (who had entered the system with Set/Setal) were officially hired by AMA with formal contracts, set salaries (65,000 CFA per month), and regular benefits, temporarily closing out the insecure and informal institutional arrangements under which they had laboured for more than 10 years. The SNTN was formally integrated into the company's operations and, owing to their relative stability, the waste-workers voiced very few grievances during this time.
2006 to 2009
After some severe scandals, AMA's deficiencies were apparent by 2004 and the system appeared in crisis again by 2005.Footnote 18 Rubbish piled up across the city and outraged residents vociferously critiqued the system's deficiencies. The Minister of Local Governments and Decentralization (which had inherited the oversight of APRODAK, which had since become APROSEN (Agence pour la Propreté du Sénégal))Footnote 19 broke the contract with AMA on 5 October 2005, citing widespread corruption, mismanagement and devastating public health consequences. The first cases of cholera in many years had been registered in Dakar that rainy season (Diouf Reference Diouf2005). The state quickly reinstated its contract with AMA, building in some new checks and balances.Footnote 20 The contract was definitively cancelled directly by President Wade in July 2006. With the end of AMA's contract, Dakar was plunged into a rubbish crisis characterised by nebulous institutional arrangements, mass mobilisation by the union, and extensive public dumping.
After the departure of AMA, a ‘transitional’ power-sharing agreement was set up between the Ministry of the Environment and the newly created inter-municipal organisation federating the Dakar region, the entente CADAK-CAR (Communauté d'Agglomération de Dakar-Communauté d'Agglomérations de Rufisque). Though seemingly patterned after the CUD, CADAK-CAR was aimed at being ‘less political’ and more ‘technocratic’Footnote 21 than its precedent organisation and was generally considered to hold much less power and capacity.Footnote 22 The Mayor of Dakar served as the President of the CADAK-CAR and its official mission revolved around the management of household waste, the road network and public street lighting. Though waste was contained in its mission, consistent with the 1996 landmark decentralisation laws,Footnote 23 the special arrangement with the Ministry of the Environment rested on an addendum to the laws on decentralisation passed in 2002.Footnote 24 Citing Dakar's exceptionalism, this law specified that funding for waste management in the capital be provided by the central state and that decisions regarding Dakar's waste be determined by central state decree.
The framework for governing the waste sector set up in 2006 divided responsibility in the sector as follows: the Minister of the Environment would be responsible for overseeing the technical aspects of collection (maîtrise d'ouvrage), and CADAK-CAR would oversee the financial and administrative management of the sector. In other words, the Minister of the Environment would contract with the 18 local private operators (concessionaires) who supply the collection trucks, manage the collection and the dump, while the Mayor of Dakar, via CADAK-CAR, would manage the funds coming in from the State and oversee the pay cheques. This power-sharing arrangement held up until 2009 without too much controversy, owing to the fact that the Mayor of Dakar, Pape Diop (head of CADAK-CAR), the Minister of the Environment, Djibo Leïty Ka,Footnote 25 all hailed from Abdoulaye Wade's party. During this time, the main problems stemmed from controversy surrounding the one international concessionaire, Veolia Propreté, and the increasingly fierce labour disputes between the state and the waste-workers. A subsidiary of the French company Vivendi, Veolia was hired in late 2006 to coordinate all aspects of the collection on a ‘test’ period for the two downtown communes of Dakar: Plateau and Medina. Importantly, for these two communes out of the Dakar Region's 44, the company received a disproportionate share of the budget. In 2006, for instance, almost half of the total waste budget (460 million CFA per year) was paid to Veolia. The Veolia workers were hired and managed through a temping agency, did not receive benefits or formal contracts, and were paid the same as those in the rest of the sector.
With AMA's exit, the waste-workers found themselves in legal limbo. Justified by the ‘transition’, they were categorised as temporary employees, lacked formal contracts and benefits (including healthcare, sick leave and holidays), and were provisioned only minimal equipment, if any at all. They were simply kept on a roster and paid their meagre salary at the end of the month, or sometimes many weeks after. It is difficult to exaggerate the difficulties posed by these working conditions. The low pay, steadily increasing work burden, stigmatisation, rising cost of living, allegedly exploitative working hours, and extensive family obligations constituted a formidable challenge. The plethora of institutional actors involved, moreover, including multiple intervening government agencies and a host of private contractors who provision trucks and drivers, obscured lines of responsibility and efficacious action. Many fell ill during this period or lost their homes due to payment irregularities, and many spoke of dislocation in their family lives due to the stresses on the job. Adding to this the onerous physical demands of the work and related health problems, their positions were profoundly precarious.Footnote 26
It is during this dismal and gruelling period after 2006 that the waste-workers emerged as a force to be reckoned with on the political stage under the charismatic leadership of their founder and Secretary General, Madany Sy.Footnote 27 When the trouble with AMA began, the waste-workers began waging periodic massive strikes, demonstrations, sit-ins, even hunger strikes, in an effort to tap the power of dirt in the public space and tug at the heartstrings of the Dakarois. Through tirelessly educating and agitating over the radio waves, and even reaching out to international activists,Footnote 28 Sy and his union emerged in the public view and won a number of key concessions.
The first battle fought by the waste-workers was the question of whether those who had worked with AMA would be incorporated into the ‘transitional’ system at all. Through massive strikes and demonstrations, the vast majority of the workers won their right to be priority hires in the new system. For those 320 workers, most of whom were garage and administrative employees fired with the departure of AMA in 2006, the focus then turned to indemnification. Through numerous city-wide strikes and sit-ins jointly orchestrated by the Front Unitaire, these workers were formally laid-off and paid off (a total in 712 million CFA) in the summer of 2007, after more than 11 months without work or compensation (Sud Quotidien 4.10.2007).
Progress was also made during this time in the longer, harder battle over the question of the legal status and working conditions of the workers incorporated into the new system. Specifically, the SNTN was received numerous times by the mayor of Dakar, the Minister of the Environment, and finally, the director of Veolia. All of these institutions had previously refused to recognise the union. The ensuing negotiations accelerated AMA's liquidation process, regularised the workers' payment schedule, and challenged a number of Veolia's practices in the downtown districts. Notably, the SNTN won a battle widely covered by the press in Dakar over the right for workers in Veolia's zones to be affiliated with the union. Accused of firing over 100 workers for their affiliation with SNTN, Veolia was directed by the state to re-hire them in a major coup to the union in September 2008 (Nettali 22.9.2008). These small victories were to improve the workers' bargaining power during the institutional reorganisations that were to come.
Importantly, despite the inherent stigma associated with their line of work, the waste-workers' union also made major strides in redefining their profession and gaining widespread community support during this time. One key indicator of community support was the neighbourhood household waste revolts that often accompanied their waste strikes. In April 2007, for instance, during one of the waste-workers union's longest strikes, residents of whole neighbourhoods across the city began dumping – externalising – their accumulating household waste into public spaces in concerted acts of protest. My interviews with residents of one of the centrally implicated neighbourhoods, HLM Fass, revealed that participating residents and organisers of the revolts were quite proud of what they had orchestrated and furthermore, that they had widespread support among their neighbours. The organisers and participants were also very clear about the message they had intended to send. In aiming their action precisely at ‘the politicians’, their goals were twofold: to tell the officials to resolve the problem with the waste-workers and to convey their larger discontent at being neglected by the state. The following statement by the two main waste revolt organisers is illustrative:
What we did was a total revolt. Because we are revolted by the attitude of the state! It's the state that should fix this problem. We noticed that this was a recurring problem that had returned again. These workers are not well paid. They are the heads of households who live a pitiable existence, facing three months without pay. We think that is terrible … It's revolting. Revolting. Revolting. This is as fundamental public service. … It's the state's responsibility. It's the state that pays the workers, who pushed them to go on strike. Here in Africa, a father can't go three months without receiving his salary. It's totally impossible! We think that the state is responsible. When we did the ‘dumping’ of the rubbish on the main road, we knew that was exactly where the authorities passed. The next morning, they went and got people to collect that rubbish. That goes to show that the only language those people [politicians] understand is, in the end, violence … . Before we dumped the rubbish on those roads, they had stayed more than two weeks without doing anything. … We are not savages, we are citizens. We are educated.Footnote 29
This statement illuminates how well the waste-workers' public education campaign had worked: the residents they served were aware of their predicament and squarely sided with the workers in their dispute with the government. This is no small feat, given the negative associations of the profession. Beyond simply supporting the waste-workers, however, the statement above also highlights the second goal of the revolts: a broader demand for services and accountability from the Senegalese state. Those participating in the revolt saw the lack of adequate waste collection as a symbol of their overall disadvantage in the scheme of urban governance and as a symbol of the state's abandonment of its citizens. They felt that this injustice called for extreme action, it warranted their creative displacement of their rubbish into the public space.
The waste revolts and the HLM Fassois' views on the rubbish crisis are particularly revealing for the state of politics at this particular moment in Dakar. April 2007 was just one month after the presidential elections of 2007, in which Wade won to little jubilation from the Dakarois. At this time, support for Wade was dwindling, as Alternance had brought little opportunity to most Dakarois and as the cost of living skyrocketed. Viewing Alternance through the lens of waste after the elections of 2007, most Fassois were disenchanted with the state of affairs. Most people offered up a litany of critiques of Alternance, suggesting instead that it be called ‘Alternoos’, in reference to the party in power's tendency to party (noos, in Wolof) instead of work. Two of the organisers of the waste revolts quoted above made very clear their disillusionment with Alternance. Both had been active organisers for Wade's party in 2000, but they admitted that the last seven years had been overwhelmingly disappointing. They argued that the waste crisis was an example of ‘bad governance’ on the part of Wade but that this negligence was like playing with fire. The fact that even ‘pacifist mothers’ would dump their household waste in the street, they said, was a symbol of how dire and risky the situation had become. An especially salient aspect of the waste revolts is the direct inversion of blame represented by public dumping. Another respondent put it this way: ‘They think we're dirty because we live here. But, we are not dirty! This is the mayor's trash, so we gave it back to him.’Footnote 30
The waste revolts that day did work: the mayor of Dakar intervened to clean up the mess. Only after the waste-workers continued their strike with a second plan of action, however, did the mayor finally meet with the waste-workers' union to resolve the dispute. A few days later, the workers were finally paid and went back to work until the next series of strikes a couple of months later, held for other grievances. The media coverage of the neighbourhood revolts was extensive, dramatically pronouncing that the Dakarois had had enough of government inaction on the waste-workers' strike (Fall Reference Fall2007; Nettali 25.4.2007; Sud Quotidien 25.4.2007). The following passage from an article entitled ‘Insalubrity: Dakar (re)invaded!’ characterises much of the reporting during the crisis:
Insalubrity has again taken over the neighbourhoods. The Senegalese capital is invaded by heaps of rubbish dumped by angry populations. … Colobane, Fass, Gueule Tapee, Medina, Him Fass are under the yoke of the rubbish. Ulcerated by the inaction of the authorities, the residents have reacted. The week-long strike [of the workers] who claim two months of back pay for a total of 24 million, seems to be at the source of this situation. … We are attacked by the nauseating odours of Dirtiness, queen of the capital. The residents, discontented to see the waste continue to pile up in front of their homes, before our eyes, dump their waste onto the road. (Sud Quotidien 25.4.2007)Footnote 31
2009 to 2012
In March 2009, in a turning of the political tide and following on the heels of a particularly acerbic spate of waste strikes, PS candidate Khalifa Sall was elected to be Mayor of Dakar, signalling an end to the liberal party's control over the Mayor's office (Dieng 18.2.Reference Dieng2009; Le Quotidien 20.2.2009). From that moment until 2012, the institutional and labour arrangements in the waste sector took centre stage in the political battle between Abdoulaye Wade's central government and the City of Dakar.
Immediately after taking office, Mayor Sall acted decisively on the part of the waste-workers through formally hiring them on as employees of CADAK-CAR, regularising their payments, and providing them with social security (IPRES) and health services in July 2009.Footnote 32 Then, under firm pressure from the union, Mayor Sall let the final short-term contract with Veolia expire in December 2009, declaring publicly that he intended to regularise the sector for good by ending closed-door agreements and putting out a public call for bids for the company to replace it (Diame & Diop Reference Diame and Diop2010; Nettali 5.1.2010). Sall aimed one more blow at Veolia in November 2010, in response to the waste-workers’ planned strike during Tabaski, by ordering that union delegates who had been fired by Veolia be re-instated and that a section of the union be created within that enterprise (Seck Reference Seck2010). At the same time, Mayor Sall convened a commission to study the waste sector, propose a strategic plan for its organisation, and look into pay rises for the workers.Footnote 33 Then, in January 2011, the Mayor led the charge for an agreement signed between CADAK-CAR and the bank BICIS, to provide accounts for all public workers under his thumb, most notably starting with the waste sector (Diallo Reference Diallo2011). The union vociferously declared its support for the Mayor and CADAK-CAR.
In reaction to Mayor Sall's efforts to consolidate authority over the waste sector, just a few months later, the President reshuffled Dakar's waste management again. To be blunt: by April 2011, the Mayor and President all but declared war over the sector. In a heated set of newspaper interviews that month, the Mayor is quoted saying: ‘It's a political battle that we will fight until the end … The surface technicians [waste collectors] are right to refuse to be the sacrificial lamb’ (Le Soleil 8.4.2011).Footnote 34 For his part, the President said: ‘We must tell the truth. Today's Mayors are unable to manage garbage’ (Cissokho Reference Cissokho2011).Footnote 35 During that month, Wade retaliated by resuscitating APROSEN and making plans to soon take over the sector, a plot to remove it all together from the Mayor's control. Though excluded from managing Dakar's waste sector since the early 2000s, Wade made plans to transfer the budget and authority for waste management away from CADAK-CAR back to APROSEN (Bacaly Reference Bacaly2010; WalFadjri 19.5.2010). APROSEN then organised a street clean-up operation with 1500 youth, which completely circumvented the waste-workers’ efforts and labours (Gueye Reference Gueye2011). In response, waste-workers went on strike to protest their being left out of this effort and their mysterious lack of pay cheques over the last few months. For their part, community residents continued to express their dismay at the situation through periodic public dumping.
At the end of Wade's mandate, the story heated up even more: in August 2011, the President announced that he would be taking waste even further out of the hands of the city through the creation of an altogether unprecedented entity: a national waste management agency called SOPROSEN, La Société pour la Propreté du Sénégal, which was then voted on by the National Assembly on 16 August (Diallo, A. Reference Diallo2011; Seneweb 16.8.2011). Mayor Sall vociferously protested the vote and the agency, stating that he (as president of CADAK-CAR) was never consulted and contesting that it directly contradicted the decentralisation laws of 1996 (Seck Reference Seck2011; Sidy Reference Sidy2011). He points out, furthermore, the irony of a (neo)liberal president who in fact seeks to centralise and nationalise more than deregulate (Sall 2011 int.). From August until the elections of 2012, the waste sector was again relegated to a transitional institutional and legal limbo. Although SOPROSEN was not fully created, Wade transferred the 10 billion CFA waste budget into the hands of the Ministry of Culture, Gender and the Social Environment (Le Ministre de la Culture, du Genre et du Cadre de Vie), essentially eviscerating CADAK-CAR – an institution that he himself had created. The workers and Mayor alike continued to protest the creation of the new agency, but essentially hunkered down until the elections to see what would become of waste management in the next political climate. Wade's government, for its part, fell back on the now hackneyed performance of public cleaning in an aim to shore up political support. Sidelining the formal waste-workers, the Ministry of Culture organised a series of highly visible ‘Days of Cleanliness’ leading up to the elections in Dakar, where over a thousand young people were paid as day-labourers to conduct periodic sweeps of the city (Traore Reference Traore2012).
On 25 March 2012, a new era of waste management was ushered in with the election of Macky Sall as president. As mentioned at the beginning of this article, one of Sall's first acts in office was to announce his intention to dissolve SOPROSEN and relocate Dakar's waste management back into the hands of local government. By summer 2012, Veolia had finally left Senegal and a number of moves were made towards regularising the sector once and for all. At a Journée de Réflexion hosted by SNTN that took place on 20 June 2012, representatives from the Mayor's office, the Ministry of Local Governments (Ministre des Collectivités Locales), and other implicated institutions all indicated that they were committed to working together with the union to ensure that the perpetual ‘transition’ period in the sector would come to an end with a final, effective and just management system for the sector and its workers. On 17 December 2012, the National Assembly unanimously voted to dissolve SOPROSEN and officially return the management of waste to the Minister of Local Governments (Sud Quotidien 18.12.2012). Only time will tell whether the saga will continue or the system will be definitively regularised and the city released from the noxious yoke of its periodic waste crises in this new era.
ANALYSIS AND CONCLUSIONS: READING DISORDERLY DAKAR
The history outlined above illuminates how the powerful connotations and consequences of dirt in the public space have propelled the question of waste management to the centre of key debates in Senegalese politics. Wrapped up with the problem of waste and its management are important questions about the state – its ability to delineate, delegate, and fulfil its duties, and its image and legitimacy – but also questions about the citizens: their relationships to the state, to the space of the urban environment, and to each other. Standing in marked contradistinction to capital city aspirations of modernity and Islamic values of cleanliness, a waste crisis is the messy manifestation of political contests around work, the urban environment, and political–institutional power. The organisation of waste labouring bodies and their rebellious acts of dirtying, moreover, has proven to be a particularly potent means of asserting rights to the city. A closer look at the saga of waste politics during this period offers important insight for a deeper understanding of urban governance, state–society relations, and the contours of political life in the Wade era.
The institutional landscape of the waste saga since Alternance exemplifies many of the allegations that ran rampant over Wade's tenure concerning the mismanagement of public funds and political manipulation of government agencies in the face of flagging legitimacy (Dahou & Foucher Reference Dahou and Foucher2004; Diop Reference Diop2006; Mbow Reference Mbow2008; Bingol & Vengroff Reference Bingol, Vengroff and Adebayo2012). Instability in the sector exemplified what observers have noted was a tendency for government ministries to mutate according to the state's will as it periodically reorganised the form and function of its patronage systems. The value of controlling the budget and jobs represented by the waste sector joined with the importance of controlling Dakar's development and image as the economic, political and symbolic heart of the country to place the sector at the centre of political manoeuvrings.
The schizophrenic approach to liberalising the sector is a case in point. Although privatisation of the public sector was key on Wade's agenda in principle, as we can see in the waste sector, Wade privatised in fits and starts. With the arrival of AMA came a more forceful move towards privatisation, but with the repeal of that contract and the institution of the long transitional phase to follow, the system languished in a hybrid arrangement that defied clear logic outside of the urge to exert control over the sector and its vast budget. The overwhelming advantages given to Veolia for servicing only a fraction of the city's population provided ample testament to the larger critiques alleging muddled and personalistic logics of public management in the Wade government.Footnote 36 The creation of a national waste management company, SOPROSEN, in the twilight hours of his presidency, furthermore, marked a final desperate effort to manipulate the sector for power and prestige. We can see here that far from a classic (neo)liberal agenda, Wade's neoliberal experiment was a non-linear, messy process read through the particularities of waste management, the specific historically inscribed relationship between civil society and the state in Senegal, and Wade's particular autocratic response to combat his flagging legitimacy. Though the specifics are decidedly Senegalese, this is consistent with wider trends across the continent of governing through hybrid strategies of statist politicisation and manipulation of ‘privatisation’ policies (e.g. McDonald & Ruiters Reference McDonald and Ruiters2004; Adama Reference Adama2007).
As we could see beginning with Mayor Diop's calculus to channel Set/Setal in the 1990s, controlling the waste sector became deeply inscribed in the battle for power between politicians and parties, but especially between the local and central state. The dissolution of the CUD as one of Wade's first actions as President represented not only a strategy to disembowel the fief of one of his main rivals from the Socialist Party, but also to re-centralise political power away from a powerful local government entity. His founding, later on, of CADAK-CAR, which was in practice, initially, just a skeleton of the CUD's power, can be seen as a thinly veiled attempt to mask his centralisation efforts within a facade of decentralisation. With Mayor Sall's attempt to consolidate power in the Mayor's office and beef up CADAK-CAR after 2009, we saw Wade reacting through attempting to cripple that office once again, through firmly reversing the tide of decentralisation by creating SOPROSEN. This history illustrates that controlling the trash sector has become ensnared in a local–national state battle for power where individual politicians pin their moral reputations on various strategies to control the sector. The stakes of controlling the ordering processes of the city are not just financial and clientelistic, but symbolic and moral. If dirt and disorder are metaphors for corruption and depravity, then presiding over a clean and orderly city indicates the proper functioning of government and the morality of its leaders.
Though the institutional manoeuvrings illustrate the incredible stakes of controlling the waste sector in Dakar, this political calculus cannot be reduced to the desire to manage the waste budget or sheer competition between politicians and parties. Perhaps what can best be gleaned from these dynamics is a better understanding of the difficult construction of hegemony that faces the Senegalese state and shifting contours of state–society relations in this tumultuous period. At its essence, the politics of rubbish illustrate the continued relevance of the urban labour question in shaping Senegalese politics, as well as its articulation with the youth question. The waste-workers represent one of the last remaining bastions of public sector employment over which the state can exert direct control. Furthermore, because of the extraordinary power they hold through the general waste strike and their close contact with the Dakarois, courting favour with the waste-workers has become paramount. Just as Mayor Diop knew all too well that the sector was of ultimate importance in managing urban populations and the rising tide of youth dissent in that era, President Wade and Mayor Sall seem profoundly aware of the delicate nature of managing the waste sector labour force today. Wade's attempts, furthermore, to elide the waste-workers completely during his recent electoral campaign by bringing in ‘new’ youth in a performance of cleaning, signalled yet another chapter of manipulation around the city's dirty work.
A closer look at the waste-workers’ battle over the last decade also lends insight into the new contours of unionism in the post-PS era and, more broadly, testifies to Alfred Ndiaye's observation that new labour relations are being forged – with difficulty (2002). Senegalese unions have flown full-force towards building a non-interventionist unionism in recent years. Prominent amongst them, the SNTN has been staunchly resistant to the meddling of political parties. Recalling – and, for many, traumatised by – their experience in Mayor Diop's participatory waste sector, the workers’ decision to affiliate with the CSA (Confédération des Syndicats Autonomes du Sénégal) was taken explicitly to avoid the influence of political parties. This affiliation has not, however, immunised the SNTN against government nor party intervention aimed at the unions, which continued in different form under Wade.Footnote 37 The waste strikes were, in fact, just a potent example of what appeared to be a rising tide of protests and mobilisations taking place since Alternance and Ndiaye's observation of the blocked negotiation process between labour and the state. Unions have no recourse but to ‘hot’ strategies (strikes) to resist and make their voice heard. An especially noxious – though powerful – lever with nasty impacts on the waste-workers and Dakarois alike, the waste strikes thus symbolise the messy state of labour relations within the current political conjuncture.
Under the leadership of Madany Sy, the waste-workers have, nonetheless, made progress toward challenging their low status and inhospitable working conditions through staking novel citizenship claims in the dirty spaces of the city. One of the features that defines the waste-workers’ movement but also buttresses its strength and dynamism is the cosmopolitan unity derived from Set/Setal that informs the waste-workers’ political identities and union battle. Owing to Set/Setal's democratic beginnings, the workforce is extraordinarily diverse and representative of a cross-section of Dakar urban society. Stemming from their long-shared history together in Set/Setal and the trials and tribulations of the trash sector, moreover, they have developed an impressive social support network undergirded by an intense camaraderie and solidarity. As I describe elsewhere, the waste-workers are also united by another bond: their common faith and conviction that the labour of cleaning the city is an act of piety (Fredericks Reference Fredericks2009a). Although striking represents the most powerful lever they have to make their voices heard, the union has only gained traction in their struggle through accompanying their strike strategy with a public relations campaign legitimising their actions through common values. If cleanliness is godliness, Sy argues, then those who work day in and day out to purge Dakar of its impurities should be rewarded in the here and now for this noble deed. Key to this platform is an appeal to a shared Muslim identity and commitment to principles of fraternity, fair treatment, and the importance of cleaning and cleanliness in Islam. Thus, through a savvy campaign of legitimation, the workers elide party politics and instead root claims for labour rights on a moral plane that engages, reconfigures, challenges the symbolic weight of rubbish.
Stemming from this savvy platform, the union has transformed a reviled profession into one that many Dakarois admit is ‘dignified’ and even ‘noble’Footnote 38 and thereby enlist the active support of the communities they serve. As he conveys his workers’ plight to the Dakarois and earns their complicity in the daily practices of their profession and battle for legitimacy and fair treatment, Sy's name has become a household term. He was even chosen to be a candidate for deputy during Senegal's recent legislative elections in July 2012.Footnote 39 Beyond articulations of respect and an element of fame, however, the greatest indicator of this community support is represented by the radicalism of the periodic waste revolts. In a context where behaviour is tightly conscripted and cleanliness so revered, these dramatic acts of intentional dirtying – which so directly contrast with Set/Setal two decades earlier – are enormously meaningful. In light of Douglas’ insistence on the creative power of dirt, they served as an audacious challenge to the logic of flexibilised labour and the larger political system it represented. These residents felt that it was precisely through refusing to be sullied by the state's negligence, that they were fulfilling their citizen duties by making claims on the state. Though it is clear that the new president is fully aware of the sector's importance and responsive to the workers’ power and visibility, the precise formula through which this new ‘president of hope’Footnote 40 will respond to those claims in his management of order in Dakar remains to be seen.
