NIGER TRIP REPORTS (2) TAHOUA & THE CHALLENGES OF

UNCLAS SECTION 01 OF 03 NIAMEY 000137 SIPDIS SENSITIVE, SIPDIS DEPT. FOR AF/W, BACHMAN; PASS TO USAID FOR KTOWERS; INR/AA FOR BOGOSIAN; PARIS FOR AFRICA WATCHER; ACCRA AND DAKAR FOR USAID E.O. 12958: N/A TAGS: PGOV EAGR EAID ECON SOCI SMIG NG SUBJECT: NIGER TRIP REPORTS (2) TAHOUA & THE CHALLENGES OF DECENTRALIZATION REF NIAMEY 76, NIAMEY 62, 06 Niamey 1075 -------------- SUMMARY -------------- ¶1. (SBU) This is the second cable in a series commenting on issues examined by Poloff during December travel to northern and central Niger. This edition examines some of the challenges facing Niger's process of political decentralization. Since 2004, the Government of Niger (GON) has tried to devolve power over local decision-making to elected officials. Two years on, decentralization remains Niger's greatest democratization challenge. While the process remains popular, resource constraints, high local expectations, questionable commitment by the GON, and occasionally weak performance by local officials suggest an uncertain future. Poloff examined local government performance in Niger's 4th largest city, Tahoua, and found cause for guarded optimism. ¶2. (SBU) While in Tahoua, Poloff also examined issues of religion and the re-insertion of Tuareg ex-combatants from the Azaouagh zone. These issues are addressed, respectively, by reftels A & B. END SUMMARY -------------- TAHOUA OVERVIEW -------------- ¶3. (U) The city of Tahoua (pop. est. 114,000) is Niger's 4th largest. Along with Niamey, Maradi, and Zinder, it is one of 4 "urban communities," in Niger. Urban communities consist of one or more urban communes, which function rather as boroughs would in London or New York City-as administrative sub-units with some degree of autonomy. The chief central government administrator for the urban communities is the regional governor. NOTE: Niamey, alone among the urban communities, constitutes coterminous region, and therefore has its own governor. The urban communities of Tahoua, Maradi, and Zinder share governors with their respective regions. END NOTE. Tahoua is also the capital of the region of Tahoua and the Department of Tahoua. -------------- Decentralization Challenges and the Urban Community. -------------- ¶4. (U) Poloff met with the President of the Urban Community of Tahoua, Elhadji Dodo Abdou Ouhou, several municipal counselors, the city's two commune mayors, and a civil servant who assists them. Tahoua has two urban communes, each with a council and mayor. The President of the Urban Community is an overarching "Lord Mayor" responsible for the entire city. He is charged with coordination of urban commune actions and with representing the entire polity to GON entities. ¶5. (SBU) Decentralization continues to pose problems of capacity and organization in Tahoua. Our interlocutors argued that the relevant texts still aren't well understood by illiterate councilors and citizens. The President, two commune Mayors, and five counselors attending the meeting agreed that the process, while still popular, saddled them with a devastating combination of enormous responsibilities and insufficient resources. ¶6. (SBU) Resource insufficiency was due both to substandard revenue sharing by the GON and Tahoua's own inability to mobilize local sources of revenue. Property taxes, collected by the GON on behalf of the communes, had for years been shared @ 60% for the GON and 40% for the communes. In 2006, the communes' share was abruptly cut to just 20% by the new revenue law. Overall, Tahoua's revenue stream breaks down like this: --40% of the Urban Community (both communes included) budget derives from GON revenue sharing. These funds, perceived as more constant from year to year than locally collected revenues, have been used to make payroll. --24% of the budget derives from the "taxe voirie" or road tax leveled on vehicles passing through. Interestingly, this forms a bigger part of Tahoua Commune I's budget (25%) than Commune II's (14%),probably owing to the fact that the former contains the autogare, or small bus station-a lucrative source of revenue. The Urban Community was only able to collect about 30% of the potential revenue from road tax this year, due to a variety of problems besetting collection. --36% of the budget derives from other local taxes on markets, small businesses, animals, municipal services, and the head tax. NIAMEY 00000137 002 OF 003 ¶7. (SBU) All in all, Tahoua's revenue picture seemed grim-the tax recovery rate is 14% overall. In other words, the city is only able to collect about 42 million CFA ($83,000) out of a potential 300 million CFA ($592,000) in revenue each year. Given the GON's stingier revenue sharing this year, Tahoua city is in a bind. ¶8. (U) The local elected officials are responding to the crisis of "incivisme fiscale"-the culture of tax avoidance-in a variety of ways. They are working with traditional chiefs to convince people to pay their taxes. To this end, they have established a working group of neighborhood chiefs and municipal tax technicians that will conduct a comprehensive revenue census. The census will then serve as a basis for assessing tax payments. The group will also popularize the notion that paying your taxes can yield important benefits-like cleaner streets, tree plantings, and public water points. ¶9. (U) Poor people, our interlocutors emphasized, still have trouble seeing the value of tax payment, as no results are immediately apparent. Others traced the roots of the problem deeper into the past, claiming that Nigeriens' reluctance to pay taxes was a phenomenon of long standing; cultural, and related to the colonial experience. In the optimistic view of some participants, two years after commune elections was too proximate a point from which to judge the process. Most things, they noted, move slowly in Niger, and decentralization's teething problems may not suggest a lack of political will at the center. ¶10. (SBU) When Poloff asked about the underlying causes of the GON's seeming neglect of the communes, answers varied from such optimistic views to more realistic responses. Some participants conceded that decentralization had both friends and enemies at the center, and that they would have to lobby hard to convince the GON to live up to its legal commitments to the process. ¶11. (SBU) Tahoua's councilors are doing just that-using the GON's High Commission for Territorial Collectivities (HCCT) and the Association of Nigerien Municipalities (AMN) to lobby the government on their behalf. Poloff reminded the group that donors could help them to a certain degree, but that foreign aid would matter little unless matched with stronger revenue collection and a stronger GON commitment-in CFA-to the decentralization process. ¶12. (SBU) COMMENT: The incoherence with which the GON's decentralization portfolio is divided up between various actors--HCCT, Ministry of Interior and Decentralization, Ministry of Land Management and Community Development, and High Commission for the Modernization of the State, etc.--is one cause of the difficulty. END COMMENT -------------- A Lotus in the Mud? Commune I Shows What a Little Leadership Can (and Can't) Accomplish -------------- ¶13. (U) Against this rather bleak backdrop, Tahoua Commune I (pop. est. 48,000) stands out as a relative success story. While hardly immune from the problems of revenue collection and "incivisme fiscale" more broadly evident in Tahoua, number I has at least come up with some good ideas with which to address them. Behind every successful commune, there seems to be a dynamic mayor. Commune I's Mayor Elhadji Albala Sofo, is a case in point. A young hadji and nephew of the Chef de Canton, Sofo is an enthusiastic manager who knows his commune inside and out. He has no shortage of good, realistic ideas for improving municipal services and the municipal revenue stream. Among the more prominent and interesting of these ideas is that of a new autogare or bush taxi bus station-a resource that would allow Commune I to build on its most viable revenue base. ¶14. (U) The commune already gets 20 million CFA ($39,000) in annual revenue from the current autogare, located in downtown Tahoua. Because of the ease of access and lack of controls inherent in the current site, transporters are often able to avoid paying taxes and fees. Mayor Sofo wants to build a new, 40 million CFA ($79,000) autogare on the outskirts of town near the intersection of the Tahoua - Agadez highway. The site has already been cleared, walled off, and partly paved. The commune would complete it-adding a police station, public restroom facilities, and an administrative building in the process. ¶15. (U) The new autogare would generate at least 30-35 million CFA ($59,000-$69,000) a year in revenue for the commune. Not only would it be subject to stricter management controls than possible at the present autogare, it would double as a shopping center, with 100 or so purpose-built concrete shops that would be rented out to local shopkeepers, many of whom are looking for new sites outside of the NIAMEY 00000137 003 OF 003 crowded downtown area. Located at a key intersection near the fire-station and a new technical college, the new autogare seems a great idea in the history of urban planning (in Niger). Many local shopkeepers are already on board, and passengers would undoubtedly love the convenience, space, and ready access to services afforded by the new autogare. ¶16. (U) The real problem is a lack of start up capital. Between 1991 and 1996, the GON tried a public sector, statist solution to the problem of municipal capital project financing. It created the Caisse des Prets des Collectivites Territorial (CPCT),which financed a great number of projects including Tahoua's city hall. Subject to massive political meddling, it had trouble leaning on its borrowers, especially during the public sector financial crises of the mid-1990s. Non-repayment of billions of CFA in outstanding loans led both to the collapse of the CPCT in '96, and to the continuing reluctance of private banks to provide communes with credit -------------- LESSONS LEARNED AT THE TOWN DUMP -------------- ¶17. (U) The town dump illustrated an important truth: in Niger, every solution seems to pose a problem. Commune I's first goal was to address "assainissement"-public sanitation-one of the key concerns of every commune government. The commune's officials had to encourage people to clean out their lots and put the garbage out. Sensitization efforts in this regard produced a great success. People learned to bring their garbage to local collection points throughout the commune and a problem was solved, yet another was thereby posed. ¶18. (U) Commune I only has 12 overtaxed donkey carts to collect and transport the waste from the collection points to the dump. Garbage trucks are available, but @ 66,000 CFA ($130) a day, too expensive to rent very often. A bulldozer for the dump would set the commune back 50,000 CFA, ($98) exclusive of fuel and staff costs etc. While we toured the dump, watching donkey carts pull up with small loads of garbage, the councilors noted that even the refuse that made it that far posed a public health problem. Lacking a fence, watchman, or any other means of deterrence, the dump is a site for nocturnal scavenging. -------------- - COMMENT: DECENTRALIZTION, WHOSE CHILD IS THIS? -------------- - ¶19. (SBU) COMMENT: Garbage collection and municipal sanitation are, at once, the most essential and most logistically difficult tasks urban communes must accomplish. Getting these things right enables communes to demonstrate their value to the taxpayers who might thereby be more inclined to pay their taxes. However, given the relatively high costs and logistical complexity of the task, communes need substantial amounts of money to effect it-yielding another catch 22 for Niger's local officials. ¶20. (SBU) The central problem remains a lack of investment and revenue sharing by the central government, and communes' inability to collect local taxes. Donors should devote more attention to projects designed to increase revenue generation and collection. They should also call on the GON to be more supportive of its new communes. While donor pressure was a key factor behind decentralization in the first place, the process will hardly prove sustainable if donors' commitments are not matched by GON political and budgetary support. Yet, this begs the question: how far should donors go in supporting decentralization if the GON fails to keep its part of the bargain? END COMMENT. ALLEN