By way of introduction: quality of governance, trust, and taxation from a citizens' perspective
Taxation, as a domain of political economy, is very important to understanding the nature of a state. Indeed, about two and a half decades ago, Theda Skocpol (1985, p. 17) argued about states everywhere that:
a state's means of raising and deploying financial resources tell us more than could any single factor about its existing (and immediate potential) capacities to create or strengthen state organisations, to employ personnel, to co-opt political support, to subsidize economic enterprises, and to fund social programmes.
Sabates and Schneider (2003) contend that taxation is associated with the state in two respects. There is the link between taxation and state accountability on the one hand, and the relationship between taxation and state capacity on the other (Sabates and Schneider 2003, p. 4). Observing these relations, they wonder if citizens that are made to pay more taxes demand more services in return from the state. As they contend, these questions enable an uncovering of the relationship between taxation and accountability, given that they indicate the key issues of who actually gets taxed and to whom the state is accountable. With respect to state capacity, they argue that within the literature it is increasingly established that the nature of the tax (whether it is income tax, customs tax or property tax) generates a specific mode of state–society relations, hence our understanding of taxation can only be appropriate when fully grounded in the mode of politics within a state, whether it be authoritarian or democratic. Gloppen and Rakner (2002) also note the tense relationship between public revenue collection through taxation and demands from citizens for more democratically accountable government. But they distinguish between the internal accountability of a tax system – that which is focused on the taxation system itself (its reach and efficiency in terms of collection and transparency) – and external accountability which relates to the link between governments and the citizens in terms of democratic accountability.
Mick Moore's recent contribution to the debate lies in his insightful observation that the taxation–governance nexus is couched within ‘two competing meta-narratives’. The first, which sees taxation as a catalyst for ‘revenue bargaining’ wherein tax revenues (for the state) are traded for institutionalised mechanisms for influence over public policy by citizens, as well as offering rights and channels to seek redress in cases of perceived abuses on the part of citizens (Moore 2007, see also Moore 2004a, 2004b, Luoga 2003). Indeed, Bird et al. (2008) found that these mechanisms are very important in giving citizens some sort of ‘voice’ over the way they perceive taxation, supporting a state's quest for legitimacy among citizens over its taxation of them and increasing its tax effort (the amount collected in taxes as a proportion of the GDP). Moore's second meta-narrative underscores the tax–governance relationship as framed by a ‘highly coercive’ state–citizen relationship, wherein citizens make subjective evaluations of the rate of taxes and the benefits or sanctions of tax evasion (Moore 2007, see also Fjeldstad 2004).
It seems clear that good quality government enlarges the scope of citizens' trust in public institutions, as well as opens further the boundaries of their moral disposition to voluntarily comply with paying taxes, giving further legitimacy to a state's taxation of them and their economic activities (for examples, see Murphy 2004, Braithwaite 2003a, Rawlings 2003). But if the result of a state's internal politics and practices leads citizens to believe that its political elite desire accumulation of wealth by foul means at the expense of general benefits for all, citizens tend to perceive government's efforts at taxing them as unjust or illegitimate or as a form of governmental nuisance (cf. Fjeldstad 2004, p. 17, 2002, p. 3, Braithwaite 2003a, 2003b, Bernstein and Lü 2000, p. 745). Overall, however, due to the low levels of income, demographic, and other factors, African countries have very low levels of domestic resource mobilisation through taxation in comparison to countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development or Asian contexts (United Nations Conference for Trade and Development 2007, p. 6, Tanzi and Zee 2000), implying their predisposition to lesser degrees of accountability and transparency over taxation and the utilisation of revenues.
According to Valerie Braithwaite (2003b, pp. 17–19), among five possible ‘postures’ that citizens can potentially adopt towards the regulatory authority of the state over taxation, there are two attitudinal modes that indicate a positive orientation to pay taxes. The first is ‘commitment’, indicating a ‘desirability of the tax system’ as well as disposition to see the payment of taxes as ‘a moral obligation’, while the second, ‘capitulation’, underpins the unquestioned deference to the legitimacy and power of the regulatory authority of the state assigned with collecting taxes (Braithwaite 2003b, p. 18). However, under conditions of perceived bad governance of public revenue, citizens could adopt three other attitudinal modes that Braithwaite (2003b, pp. 17–19) characterises as ‘postures of defiance’. First, they could ‘resist’ the payment of taxes if they believe the tax system is highly illegitimate and uncooperative; second, they could ‘disengage’ completely from the system if they feel alienated; finally, they could choose to see the tax system as an amoral arena where no rules should be followed unless they further their individual interests, fuelling their propensity to evade taxation through various ‘game-playing’ strategies (Braithwaite 2003b, p. 19).
In recent times, taxation has been receiving serious attention from scholars of African politics and economics. For Brautigam (1996, p. 81), for example, taxation expresses the power of the state, as it is a crucial element of a state's prospect in building and sustaining its capacities. But in sub-Saharan Africa, the patterns of state–society relations that taxation might engender are difficult to gauge, given the hazy context in which taxation is exercised, in addition to the often opaque financial transactions associated with the extractive industries. As Van de Walle (2001, p. 53) observes, taxes are either ‘not collected, exemptions [from taxes] are granted, tariffs are averted, licenses are bribed away, parking fines are pocketed’. In such a context, it becomes understandable that some Africanist observers note that African countries expose a very weak taxpaying culture (Fjeldstad 2003, Gloppen and Rakner 2002).
In this paper, we draw from anecdotal evidence to make an analytical commentary of citizens' views on taxation in Cameroon, especially when considering that the country is widely known to be in the grip of corruption and embezzlement by public officials, and a dismal situation relates to public service delivery for the benefit of citizens. We argue that widespread awareness of the state as a safe haven for corrupt public officials fuels citizen distrust about government's willingness to use revenue in any meaningful way and to their benefit, hence their tendency to perceive it as unjust, if not outright illegitimate. We do so by drawing on a review of secondary literature on the state of governance in postcolonial Cameroon, and material mainly from the private press, as the government newspaper, the Cameroon Tribune, hardly adopts a critical and objective editorial line, with its journalists tending to see themselves as part of the central administration (Nyamnjoh, Wete and Fonchingong 1996, p. 49). But the press sources are no less credible in that they combine elements of surveys, face-to-face interviews, and opinion pieces by concerned citizens that sparked online comments by others, reducing their degree of mediation.
In 1990 after the popular struggles against the one-party regime of Paul Biya, the country returned to multiparty politics through the promulgation of Law No. 90/053 of December 1990 by Biya. This law granted freedom of expression and association, made the formation of political parties legal, and provided some minimum protection for the media against vexatious lawsuits (Mbu 1993). Although this democratic opening has largely been foisted by electoral controversies (Nyamnjoh 2000, Takougang and Krieger 1998) and extensive human rights abuses, especially on political opponents and members of the private media, the modicum of political space it created lifted expectations about the levels of accountability and transparency in public governance, especially as corruption in the country had been on the rise since the early 1980s when Biya took office as president. Indeed, corruption and embezzlement of state funds by public officials have become so endemic that they have come to be seen by most Cameroonians as the major knot that ties together their problems with poverty, unemployment and insecurity. It is public knowledge of these pervasive phenomena that led Transparency International, the global non-governmental anticorruption watchdog, to characterise Cameroon as the world's most corrupt country in three, almost successive, years – 1998, 1999, and 2002. In this article, we begin by outlining how neopatrimonial practices characterise public governance in Cameroon, and then expose the politicisation of the government's anticorruption efforts that has done more to undermine citizens' trust in government than improve it. We then explore the anecdotal accounts of citizens' views about taxation as highly tied to these negative perceptions of the impact of such neopatrimonial tendencies.
Patterns of neopatrimonial governance in Cameroon: an historical overview
In a GlobeScan (2005) survey of ‘public opinion in Africa’ contained in the Africa in the new century report, the 1009 Cameroonians aged 15 and above ranked corruption in government as the third ‘national problem after poverty and unemployment’ (GlobeScan 2005, p. 7). These opinion imply that citizens mostly distrust the government and its institutions. In fact, with regard to the specific concern with trust, this same survey found that only 44% had trust in the national government in Cameroon, as opposed to Ghana, for example, where the national government enjoyed the trust of 87% of citizens (GlobeScan 2005, p. 13). This deficit of trust in the government of Cameroon is a reflection of citizens' experiences (long- and short-term) of excessive bad governance in Cameroon. Many, therefore, reasonably associate the state's inability to provide them with basic services at reasonable cost with the impact of embezzlement in inducing budgetary constraints (Ndue 2005). But this perception of the state is rooted in a much longer history of postcolonial governance in Cameroon.
Indeed, soon after independence in 1960, Cameroon embarked on an ambitious economic programme aimed at enhancing infrastructural and general economic development. In a bid to consolidate their hold on power, political leaders and bureaucratic elites substantially captured the public administrative machinery and other state economic agencies, such as state-owned corporations, to facilitate their personal accumulation of economic resources (Jua 1991, Konings 1996). The first president of Cameroon, Ahmadou Ahidjo, promoted a cult of personality in which he was seen as ‘Father of the Nation’ (Schatzberg 1986). As a true pater familias, Ahidjo saw himself as the guide suprême (Schatzberg 2001) who would lead the new nation towards development. Consequently, presidentialism for Ahidjo meant the almost total concentration of power around the one person and one institution that he incarnated – la présidence (Prouzet 1974, pp. 151−186, Bayart 1985, pp. 141−159). This meant that ‘his style of government was entirely personal and non-bureaucratic’ (Gabriel 1999, p. 5).
Ahidjo's hegemonic political programme was designed to use public institutions and state corporations as the basis for constructing a neopatrimonial, clientelist model of governance that emphasised patronage. Managers of these state corporations and heads of various government departments, as political clients appointed by the head of state, oweds total allegiance to Ahidjo, and non-allegiance was sanctioned with removal from office and, not too infrequently, with personal persecution (Konings 1996, p. 248). This system of governance has largely been accentuated by the current president, Paul Biya, since taking over from Ahidjo in 1982. A notable example of this style of governance was the ruinous plundering of the National Rural Development Fund (FONADER), an agricultural credit institution created with farmers' cooperative surplus sales to provide credit facilities to farmers. The fund experienced a disastrous collapse in 1997 as a result of the continuous provision of ‘unsecured’ loans to non-agricultural political barons of the Ahidjo and Biya regimes (Awung and Atanga 2002).
The situation of patron–client networks was strengthened with the discovery of oil deposits along Cameroon's coastline in the early 1970s. Almost immediately, revenue generated by the exploitation of these oil reserves became a private fund remitted to undisclosed offshore accounts for the president to draw on for his personal political machinations (Awung and Atanga 2002). The prevalence of these distortions of the rules of sound financial management of public finances by high-ranking public bureaucrats speaks of neopatrimonial patterns of governance as the norm, rather than being the exception in Cameroon. According to Bratton and Van de Walle (1997, pp. 63−68), such embezzlement is one of the features of neopatrimonialism which is defined as the ‘misuse of state resources for political legitimation’ (Von Soest 2007, pp. 62−79). However, rather than viewing this culture of governance in Cameroon as irredeemably irrational and dysfunctional, it makes sense to consider the arguments made by Chabal and Daloz (1999) and Bratton and Van de Walle (1997) that these apparently endemic practices are quite rational in the prism of neopatrimonial governance since they help maintain the incumbent regime and its supportive political elite in power (see also Van de Walle 2007). In this context of bureaucratic absolutism and civil service impunity, those in powerful positions are transformed into influential patrons in whose hands people now place their trust rather than trusting in the state institutions themselves (Daloz 2005).
Accumulation by corruption: the suspension of bureaucratic morality since the 1990s in Cameroon
In both the original Weberian notion and the reformulated new public management (NPM) models, public bureaucracies in ‘modern-administrative’ states (Riggs 1997) are associated with professionalism and efficiency as core values. In the context of Cameroon, however, such values are overturned to centre on appropriating the property or wealth of the state, even by dubious and illegal means. People generally imagine ‘the state’ and its public institutions merely as an entity to be courted, lured, and consumed (Geschiere 1982, Gupta 1995). In local discourse, people are inclined to ‘chopping’ the state (see Hasty 2005). Bayart (1993) extrapolates this Cameroonian reality into his argument that African political life is grounded in the logic of the ‘politics of the belly’. Given these and other observations of corruption and misuse of public office in Cameroon, it is not excessive to advance, as Fonchingong (2004, pp. 50−51) does, that ‘the swindling of public funds by top government officials is prevalent, and interventionism, clientelism, and nepotism have become the principles of governance’. Paradoxically, it is in the decades following the return to multiparty politics or political liberalisation that political figures and public officials in Cameroon have indulged in the most extensive display of acts of patrimonial accumulation, suspending any iota of bureaucratic rationality and morality left. This crisis of morality in public governance had risen to such alarming proportions that it took no less than Paul Biya, the leader of the prebendal bazaar that is the treasury of Cameroon, to surprisingly lament on its impact on the country. In the past, though, when opposition politicians accused his government of massive corruption he offered the now popular rebuttal, ‘Où sont les preuves’? [‘Where is the proof?’] On 31 December 2006, during his customary end-of-year televised address to the nation, however, he adopted a different line as he complained that:
There is something more serious. I am referring to corruption which I have often denounced but which is still rife. There is a clear mismatch between our effort to alleviate poverty and the scandalous enrichment of a few individuals. Public funds are embezzled, it should be recalled, at the expense of the nation. I want to say very solemnly today: this must stop. The National Agency for Financial Investigation was set up for that purpose. I expect it to perform its duty without complacency. Such a drain on national wealth is intolerable especially as parts of our population, particularly the unemployed, are still suffering hardships. (Post 2006)
The crisis of morality in Cameroon's public bureaucracy has become as extensive as it is corrosive, inviting the ire of many leaders of mainstream churches such as the Roman Catholic Church in Cameroon (RCC) and the Presbyterian Church in Cameroon (PCC). Both churches have made critical remarks in sermons about the state of governance and issued pastoral letters on corruption to both the government and their followers (see Mbuagbo and Fru 2003, p. 143). Although attracting donor and media attention and embarrassing the Biya government, these efforts from church leaders did not achieve much, as high-level corruption continued unabated. As part of its own share of the efforts to bring the problem into the national political agenda, the private media has been quite vocal. A private newspaper, Le Front, published a long list of public officials both in active service and retired, who had enriched themselves excessively (to the tune of billions of CFA francs) while holding public office jobs. According to Le Front (2006, p. 3), the names and total foreign account holdings of these public officials were released by an American financial network that tracks economic crime. On this occasion the editorial also boasted, partly in mockery of the president with regard to the proof of the veracity of these names and holdings, ‘Nous les avons. Le Sommet de l'État en a les mêmes’ [We have them and they are also available to the highest authorities in the state]. Since the emergence of these critical voices over the government's unwillingness or inability to engage seriously with the problem of corruption in the country, the government has launched what amounts to a semblance of an anticorruption campaign, but which has not done much to inspire citizens' trust either in the campaign itself or the government, as we outline below.
The accumulative politics of grand corruption and the government's anticorruption efforts in Cameroon
Such endemic corruption by public officials bears widespread economic and social consequences for the lives of ordinary people and businesses beyond the realm of the public bureaucracy. Corruption has been found to have negative effects on economic growth, investment and government expenditure (Tomaszewska and Shah 2000, Mehrez and Kaufmann 1999, Campos et al. 1999, Mauro 1995). In doing so, it widens social inequalities and class differences by damaging the government's capacity to undertake the delivery of public services effectively and confront poverty and income inequality (Kaufmann and Shang 1999, Gupta et al. 1998, Tanzi and Davoodi 1998, Gray and Kaufmann 1998). It also creates difficulties for and adds to the costs of doing business (Kaufmann and Shang 1999), especially in developing countries where regulatory environments are weaker.
For instance, as a measure of the prevailing weight of corruption on the business sector in Cameroon resulting from distortions of rules by public officials, the comparative World Bank and International Finance Corporation Global Enterprise Survey 2006 (World Bank 2006) reports that 77% of firms expect to ‘make informal payments to public officials to get things done’, while as many as 50.81% expect to ‘give gifts in meetings with tax officials’. Another 85.23% of firms surveyed expect to ‘give gifts to secure a government contract’. The full impact of this almost institutionalised corruption is that 52.05% of the firms surveyed identified corruption as a major constraint to doing business in Cameroon and 63% of these companies estimated that about 10% of their turnover went to ‘facilitation of payments’ for public contracts executed or services provided to the government (World Bank 2006). Such critical evaluations by the businesses, in addition to the criticisms from the churches and private media, spurred the government to launch an anticorruption effort in 2004 which is ongoing, but which is itself marred by its inescapable tendency to politicise everything it seeks to do.
Anticorruption as a political tool: ‘Operation Sparrowhawk’ as the hallmark of paradoxes in the anticorruption efforts of the government of Cameroon
In 2004, through the office of the vice prime minister and minister for justice, Ahmadou Ali, and under pressure from international donors to fight corruption as a condition for reaching the completion of the Highly Indebted Poor Countries Initiative (HIPC), the government of Cameroon launched ‘Operation Sparrowhawk’. This operation focused on the arrest and trial of a number of highly powerful former and serving public officials suspected of embezzling colossal sums of money during their time in office. In 2006 the government also created a National Good Governance Programme and a National Agency for Financial Investigations, aimed at probing economic crimes. It equally created a National Anti-Corruption Committee (NACC) as a replacement of the previous National Anti-Corruption Observatory that it had dismantled in 1997. In a highly publicised show of its activities, Operation Sparrowhawk swung into action in early 2006, making its first arrests of prominent public officials: a minister, Siyam Siwé, who served in government until a few days prior to his arrest, and three general managers of public corporations and their suspected accomplices (Gilles-Roger Belinga of the state housing corporation [SIC], Emmanuel Edou of the Crédit Foncier du Cameroun [CFC] and Emmanuel Gérard Ondo Ndong of the Special Fund for Investment and Economic Support of the Municipal Councils, known by the French acronym FEICOM). This string of arrests drew a great deal of public attention, but no more than that. It did not spur any meaningful return of trust in the state on the part of citizens.
In 2008, after a cabinet reshuffle in 2007 in which a number of allegedly corrupt ministers were dropped, paving the way for their eventual detention, Operation Sparrowhawk saw a second wave of arrests, including Polycarpe Abah Abah (finance minister and former director general of taxation), Jean-Marie Atangana Mebara (minister of foreign affairs and former secretary-general of the presidency) and Urbain Olanguena Awono (minister of health), all charged with the embezzlement of state funds. Abah Abah was accused along with accomplices of embezzling 4.9 billion CFA francs (€7.4 million) collected by the tax directorate for the CFC. Atangana Mebara is suspected of having embezzled funds for the 2003 purchase of the Albatross presidential plane. Olanguena Awono, along with six others, was charged with embezzling over 750 million CFA francs (€1.1 million) from AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis programmes (see the report on Cameroon by the International Crisis Group 2010, p. 24). In May 2008, it was the turn of the director general of the Chantier Naval et Industriel du Cameroun, Zacchaeus Mungwe Forjindam, previously highly praised by the head of state in his 2006 end-of-year address, and political baron of the CPDM regime in his native north-west region of Cameroon and who initiated the debate over the annulment of the constitutional provision on presidential term limits in November 2007. He was accused of embezzling 232 million CFA francs (some €1.47 million) and arrested in the presence of TV and press media while he came out of an extraordinary board meeting during which he had just been sacked (International Crisis Group 2010, p. 24). The most recent wave of the operation in early 2010 saw the arrest and incarceration of the former minister of primary education, Haman Adama, the former minister of the budget, Henri Engoulou the former minister of secondary education, Catherine Abena, and nearly 30 others.
The trials of Atangana Mebara, Abah Abah and Olanguena Awono began in early 2010 and are ongoing at the Mfoundi High Court in Yaoundé, meaning they have spent two years in incarceration before their trials began. During the trials it became evident that the prosecution, led by Justice Pascal Magnaguémabé, lacked sufficient evidence and needed that time to build cases against the accused, heightening the suspicion that the evidence being admitted into the courts may be merely fabricated by the regime. This situation is echoed for most of the others arrested, totalling almost 100 by May 2010 (International Crisis Group 2010, p. 24), all of whom are members of the ruling CPDM and continue to write ‘motions of support’ to Biya, even from their prison cells (as Siyam Siwé did in 2006). This has led many to see the efforts of Operation Sparrowhawk as nothing more than a smokescreen, a politicisation of the anticorruption efforts, just as in 1997 against Edzoa Titus. People see in such efforts the political victimisation of these (probably corrupt although not sufficiently proven) suspects, because the regime harbours suspicions of them using their ill-gotten wealth to effect political plans to capture power through an alleged group within the ruling CPDM party known as ‘Generation 11’ or ‘G11’ (International Crisis Group 2010, p. 4).
Overall, then, these anticorruption and anti-embezzlement campaigns and institutions, while drawing media attention, have failed to either improve citizens' perceptions of public institutions and public officials, or to instil a sense of public confidence in the state's capacity to genuinely engage in the crusade of moralisation of public institutions, as they are perceived to be initiated for the wrong reasons (Transparency International 2007, p. 15). Unsurprisingly, a 2008 public survey by Cameroonian newspaper Le Messager of 1200 Cameroonians residing in the major urban centres had found that 60% of those surveyed were ‘not satisfied’ with the actions of the Cameroon government, and as many as 42% of Cameroonians believe that such anticorruption initiatives are only cosmetic attempts by the government to placate both them and the international donor community over its commitment to engaging in good governance practices (Le Messager 2008). Ultimately, as many as 88% of Cameroonians polled thought that the government could start to prove its commitment by being transparent and accountable over its asset-recovery efforts aimed at returning to the national treasury the stolen wealth stashed in foreign bank accounts (Le Messager 2008, see also Eden Newspaper 2008). On this basis, it is fair to say that the anticorruption efforts of the government of Cameroon so far can largely be seen as ‘enforcement swamping or campaign-style enforcement’, marked by ‘periodic’ crusades against corruption (Cheung 2007, p. 57) that may only yield periodic deterrence without a sustainable overhaul of high-level corruption, hence their failure to convince many citizens of their potentially fruitful outcome.
It is no surprise, then, that in the midst of all these anticorruption campaigns, several major towns including Douala, Yaoundé and Bafoussam saw social unrest and riots related to the rise of basic food necessities such as sugar and oil, and fuel between 13 and 25 February 2008. These riots, largely involving youth, were put down by the government's security forces, who brutally assailed the youth with live ammunition and tear gas, resulting in several casualties. But it is important to point out that these February 2008 riots were also partly motivated by anger over the successful manipulation by the ruling CPDM party of a constitutional provision that limited presidential mandates to two terms, allowing Biya to seek a third term in the forthcoming election (Integrated Regional Information Networks 2008).
For many, the constitution had been the product of popular struggle and the civil disobedience movements of the early 1990s that marked a return to democratic politics, and overturning parts of the constitution was a clear rolling back of these achievements. But unlike the civil disobedience campaigns that played out for months in the 1990s, the February 2008 riots did not succeed in galvanising much support beyond the youth, and were quickly dissipated as a result of the shootings and targeted arrests of the leaders by the government security forces. Many Cameroonians have become disillusioned with their capacity to achieve any meaningful change by resorting to mass protest for fear of such brutal reprisals by the regime, and they have also become distrustful of the opposition leaders that led civil disobedience campaigns in the 1990s, such as John Fru Ndi of the Social Democratic Front (SDF) and Adamou Ndam Njoya of the Cameroon Democratic Union (CDU). Many believe these leaders have turned out to be equally autocratic figures that discourage any meaningful debate and change in leadership within their own parties. Therefore, they are reluctant to risk life and property as they did in the early 1990s, only to end up with another corrupt and authoritarian figure like Biya. They would rather stay the course until the retirement or death of the current autocrat.
In the end, then, the trajectories of such high-level bureaucratic corruption and embezzlement and the government's anticorruption efforts have constituted a clear strategy for the personal appropriation of national wealth by many among the governing elite since the 1990s (cf. Szeftel 2000). But such a mode of accumulation, patronage and corruption is clearly consistent with the pattern of neopatrimonial governance that has historically been characteristic of postcolonial governance since Cameroon attained independence in 1960, underpinning the peculiar mode or trajectory of exercising state power in Cameroon (Geschiere and Konings 1993). Indeed, the subversion and abuse of the public office by both high-ranking public officials and low-level bureaucrats constitutes a politics of corruption, accumulation and domination by the more powerful elites in the country, qualifying the country for what Rose-Ackerman (1997, p. 33) characterises as membership of the club of ‘kleptocratic or ‘vampire’ states' (see also Szeftel 2000). As Michael Johnston argues in the same volume:
Thus, most corruption will tend to benefit the haves at the political, material expense of the have-nots. The latter may obtain petty benefits – shopkeepers might evade official inspections, and citizens might pay to obtain a license, with small bribes or ‘speed money’ – or partake of small patronage distributed in the course of someone else's quest for power. But these benefits come at a cost: corruption bypasses due process and weakens civil rights, blocking off legitimate channels of political access and accountability while opening up (and concealing) illicit new ones. Patronage or avoidance of official harassment often comes at the cost of lost political choices and inferior public services. Many people pay the cost of corruption again and again. (Johnston 1997, p. 63)
In other words, through the neopatrimonial logic of patronage politics and the grand corruption it fuels among the governing elite in sub-Saharan African states such as Cameroon, the wealth and power that are accumulated and concentrated in the hands of these few men and women further strengthens their grip over the state and its institutions, policies and programmes, denoting these political and bureaucratic elites as a class with special political and economic interests to safeguard (Amundsen 1999). In Cameroon, these elites do so through a mixture of influence-peddling (nepotism and tribalism) and white-collar crime that entails various forms of corruption such as embezzlement, misappropriation and extortion or illegal levies for contracts, generally known in the local context as the ‘Gombo’ phenomenon (Blundo and de Sardan 2006). In Cameroon, then, the logic of kleptocracy (rule by thieving elites working for their own interests) prevails over that of a democracy (rule by the elite in the interests of the majority), a situation that is clearly not supportive to building a ‘sustainable democracy’ (Johnston 1997, p. 67). The anticorruption efforts have so far failed to be seen as such because of their politicisation. Moreover, it is widely established that the public perceives the effectiveness of such anticorruption measures when these efforts establish corruption as a ‘high-risk, low-reward’ activity (Huther and Shah 2000, pp. 3–5). But in Cameroon the fact that these efforts have not been accompanied by substantial recovery of the illegally accumulated wealth does not make the cost of being indicted or convicted for corruption very high, as many of the perpetrators may have lost their reputations and freedom, but retained the illegally accumulated wealth. In other words, measured by scale (billions of CFA francs) and the long history of such embezzlement and grand corruption (since independence in the 1960s), these constitute, in effect, strategies of accumulation that are consonant with Mbembe's (2000) view of ‘private indirect government’.
The implication has been that, in a general sense, citizens have come to think that government works against rather than for them, and that public revenues collected from taxes are not generally directed to serving public needs because these are embezzled or misappropriated for the private ends of the governing elite. Given this contextual background on the generalised political impact of corruption and kleptocratic governance in Cameroon, we now turn to explore Cameroonians' perceptions of the notion of government taxation under such conditions of governance.
Towards a more socially responsive use of tax revenue in Cameroon
In the early years of political liberalisation in the 1990s, the tumultuous nature of political activities, epitomised by the ‘Operation Ghost Town’ civil disobedience campaign launched by a coalition of opposition parties, set in motion what can be seen as economic strategies aimed at shaming the state. In addition to the customary social movements' strategies of work boycotts and industrial strikes during this period, there was also a strong element of fiscal disobedience which had as its objective to (and it did) effectively undermine the fiscal or revenue base of the regime in order to force it to grant some political reforms. The fiscal disobedience was characterised by questioning the logic of the state's claims to tax citizens, a situation which Roitman describes by the phrase ‘intelligibility of its exercise’ (Roitman 2005, p. 5), as the government of Cameroon constructed its narrative around the notion of civility, describing these boycotts and industrial strikes as ‘incivisme fiscale’ because they fostered tax evasion and smuggling. Opposing this narrative, citizens articulated their perceptions and actions in a reverse narrative of rights-based citizenship, trivialising the government's concern with ‘civility’ given the absence of economic benefits (in the form of the provision of social amenities) for taxes they pay (see Roitman 2005, p. 5). Indicatively, a journalist with a private newspaper – what the government often characterises as ‘subversive’ media – noted that:
when government officials embezzle state funds and splash our faces with their ill-gotten wealth it is all of us who pay the price. When salary increases are frozen for decades running, it is not only the civil servants who feel the grind. When government puts an embargo on employment for upwards of two decades, it is the whole society that pays the price. (Ntui 2005, p. 11)
Taxation and the social conditions of everyday life in Cameroon
With an average life expectancy of 51 years in 2010 and a literacy rate of 71% of the total population of almost 20 million people, Cameroonians are somewhat better off than the citizens in many other African countries, especially for those in the central African subregion (World Bank 2011a). But Cameroon is also ranked only 131 out of 169 countries in the Human Development Index (HDI) for 2010, sliding two places from its rank in 2005 (United Nations Development Programme 2010), with as much as 48% of its population living below the national poverty line in 2000 and plagued by an estimated 21% unemployment in 2001 (Central Intelligence Agency 2011). As regards taxation, Africa Economic Outlook (2011, p. 8) points to the ‘narrowness’ of Cameroon's tax effort and accordingly, reports that in 2009 the contribution of tax revenue to GDP stood at 17.1% and 17.4% (Africa Economic Outlook 2011, p. 8) of a GDP of US$22.9 billion (National Institute of Statistics of Cameroon 2010, p. 7) for 2009 and US$22.39 billion in 2010 (World Bank 2011a), respectively, inclusive of tax revenues on oil-related earnings. Discounting the contribution from oil-related earnings, we find that these figures reduce substantially to 10. 3% and 10.6% respectively (Africa Economic Outlook 2011, p. 9). Such low contributions of tax revenues to the country's GDP may be a partial explanation for the government's disregard for taxpaying citizens.
In this context, for those paying taxes of any sort, the World Bank (2011b, p. 7) points out that ‘the tax rates being already high’, the government of Cameroon's tax reforms with the ‘introduction of a single declaration for taxpayers paying value added tax (VAT), income tax, and patents (above a certain level) is a welcome step’, in addition to the abolition of the export tax on basic cash crops in 1998. Prior to these reforms introduced in the late 1990s, the government relied mainly on a complex tax system of direct and indirect taxation in which direct taxation consisted mainly of income tax and indirect taxation consisted of import taxes, export taxes, sales taxes on domestic goods and services, and specific taxes, such as that on the consumption of oil products, and most of these forms of indirect taxes were plagued by administrative discretions (Fambon 2006, pp. 2–3). In fact, prior to the reforms the cumbersome tax system placed undue burden on most people, especially on those with low incomes and small-business owners. For example, a certain Mrs Helen Letsendem (Cameroon Tribune 1990), a retail trader, explained that she felt
disappointed with the way business licences are levied … and I am expected to pay a ‘mixed’ Business licence known as ‘Commerce General’. Yet after all these, I am forced to pay taxes on different items in the store, from a tax on drinks to a tax on the sale of cooking gas. They have now added the tax on the Cameroon Radio and Television (CRTV) [state media], whether you have a radio or TV set or not.
| Type of Tax | Rates | Nature of taxation | How payment is made | Who pays |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Personal income tax | The tax varies between 10% (FCFA0–2,000,000) and 35% (above FCFA 5,000,000). | Wage-based/salaried income (progressive). | Employees have their taxes deducted directly from their wages. | Individual |
| Capital gains | 11% | Income from the derived from the sale of shares or disposal of fixed corporate assets. | Paid annually from income from such transactions. | Individuals and companies. |
| Corporation tax | Currently levied at the rate of 35%. In addition, a local surcharge of 10% of company tax is payable, which brings the effective rate to 38.5% of taxable profits. | A tax on profits made by companies and other corporate bodies based on their declared profits, determined after deducting allowable expenses and charges. | Paid annually by companies from declared profits. | Companies. |
| Value added tax (VAT) | Introduced 1 January 1999 and assessed at the rate of 19.25%. Late payment of VAT attracts interest at the rate of 1.5% per month up to a maximum of 50% of the principal VAT liability. | It is levied on all commercial transactions and activities except those that are specifically exempted. All exports of taxable products and similar transactions are assessed at 0%. Eligible for deductibility on corporate tax. | Paid by the business and transferred to the individual buyers of goods/services. | Individual customers. |
| Business licence tax (known in French as ‘patente’). | There are seven categories with turnovers ranging from FCFA5 million to FCFA15 million in Category 7 and turnover of over FCFA2 billion in Category 1. The tax payable is calculated by applying the stipulated rate applicable to each category. The actual rate is fixed by the local authorities in the area where the business is established and must fall within a range stipulated by the General Tax Code. | Business enterprises must pay an annual business licence tax, calculated according to a scale based on the annual turnover of each business. | Paid annually by the business owner directly to the council revenue authority where the business is located. | Companies. |
| Stamp duty | Rates range from 1% to 15%. | Various stamp duties apply to contractual obligations and transfers or leases of property as well as being levied on motor vehicle licences, advertising materials, passports, visas and bills of lading. Eligible for deductibility on corporate tax | Fixed stamp duties are purchased at the service point in which each service is being sought. | Individuals and corporations. |
| Source: compiled from the government of Cameroon's (2011) Code général des impôts. |
It may be true that these tax reforms have made the tax system less complicated and in more general terms contributing to the reduction of income inequalities in Cameroon (Atemnkeng, Akwi and Anzah 2006, pp. 17–19, Atemnkeng 2003). It is, however, not entirely clear whether such reforms have had a significant impact in reducing poverty for the majority of people, especially for those in the isolated rural communities, as the government (although improving now) does very poorly when it comes to the provision of infrastructure, with as much as 37.9% of its surface roads still in a ‘poor or mediocre’ condition (Africa Economic Outlook 2011, p. 13). Such poor road infrastructure prevents not only access to basic services such as health centres, but also leaves several communities outside the government's poverty reduction efforts, more so for the rural ones than their urban counterparts. Additionally, the World Bank report cited above also observes the dismal failure of the government to ensure the provision of, and access to, basic public services in these terms: ‘indicators for service delivery in Cameroon tend to trail behind the standards of countries at similar income levels. For indicators such as primary school completion or child mortality, Cameroon does even worse than the average for sub-Saharan Africa’ (2011b, p. 9). Moreover, while most homes in the urban areas and fewer in rural communities have access to electricity and piped water (Africa Economic Outlook 2011), in the years following the privatisation of the Société Nationale des Eaux du Cameroun (SNEC) and Société Nationale d'Electricité du Cameroun (SONEL), access has been significantly reduced. Communities experience frequent electric power cuts and taps run dry, sometimes lasting for days or even weeks at a time, even in residential areas in Yaoundé, the capital city.
An examination of the 2010 budgetary allocation of the government with regard to the relative allocations for industry promotion or social sector spending against spending allocations to either the presidency and its related services or the military, suggests interesting insights into its pattern of public spending. While the presidency is allocated 57.34 billion CFA francs, services attached to it receive 6.67 billion and the Economic and Social Council attached to the presidency, which has not convened for more than a decade and a half, receives another 23.62 billion CFA francs, a combined allocation of 87.63 billion CFA francs. This compares to 5.40 billion and 4.34 billion CFA francs for the ministries of trade and tourism respectively, which could help boost job creation given significant budgetary allocations. In the same way, the allocation of 175.35 billion of CFA francs for defence spending far outstrips the allocation of 43.71 billion and 123.70 billion CFA francs for higher education and public health respectively (Cameroon Tribune 2010) But beyond such lopsided and misguided budgetary allocations as a partial explanation for the deficit in social service delivery to Cameroonians, we must remember the role that pervasive corruption plays in distorting the impact of these already politically driven resource allocations.
It is evident that the problem lies not so much in whether the tax system is progressive or favourable towards reducing income inequalities. Rather it stems from the way government uses public revenues, or more precisely fails to do so effectively, in a way that is responsive to the social and infrastructural needs of most citizens (Atemnkeng et al. 2006, pp. 18–19, Ndue 2005), and this failure is in turn strongly tied to the grand corruption that prevails within the state of Cameroon. It is therefore this discrepancy between the payment of taxes and the perceived insufficient responsiveness of these tax revenues to social needs that colours citizens' perceptions of taxation in Cameroon, as elaborated on below.
Perceptions of taxation in Cameroon
Increasingly, citizens view the high tax burden identified by the World Bank report above as being matched by a near absence (if not outright absence) of social amenities and other public services. The perception of the injustice of being taxed by the government while it fails to reciprocate with services is so strong that they overtly condemn government's continuous taxation. And they are increasingly expressing such frustrations through the private press, especially those newspapers which offer interactive space for discussion on their Internet sites. An illustrative case can be seen in the online comments by Cameroonians, both abroad and within Cameroon, that followed the online publication of a press article by two concerned residents of a local community, entitled ‘Why government should not collect taxes in Kumbo’ (a small town in the north-west region of Cameroon). The article and some responses to it were so striking that we have reproduced it here in full. The article and the discussion surrounding it highlight crucial links with various conceptual insights reviewed in the introduction.
Clearly, the authors of the article, reflecting the prevalent views among citizens in communities in Cameroon, express deep frustration with the payment of taxes without a demonstrated concern for infrastructural and social development in their Kumbo community. What emerges is an articulation of their desire to ‘exchange’ their taxes for better roads and schools from the government (Sabates and Schneider 2003, p. 4). Most notable, however, is the clear articulation by the authors of the relationship between accountability and taxation by the state. Demands for social and infrastructural development of the Kumbo community in exchange for the taxes they pay correspond broadly to demands for ‘external accountability’ in terms of how the state uses tax revenues (Gloppen and Rakner 2002). However, what is also clear is that this absence of development and the deep tone of anguish embedded in similar lamentations by many taxpaying communities in Cameroon expose the visible absence of any room for ‘revenue bargaining’ between communities and the state (Moore 2007). This leaves taxpayers disillusioned and despairing of any chance for redistributive justice from the state. Also, with regard to Braithwaite's (2003b, see also 2003a) analytical scheme of citizen postures towards tax authorities and or taxation, in Cameroon what we see through this article is that these citizens' perceptions appear as ‘postures of defiance’ where the call to evade paying taxes (game-playing) is juxtaposed alongside the expression of anguish in forms of outright resistance to (tax) authorities in urban centres.
Beyond the main argument and grim picture of the plight of taxpayers painted by the authors of the main article, however, the selected comments themselves are worthy of further analysis in terms of the relations between taxpayers and the state. The first comment, for example, evokes citizens' anguish over the perversion of government by corruption and how this lies at the root of the state's inability to reciprocate towards taxpaying communities with the provision of adequate services. The second comment is an outright call for resistance to paying taxes to the government in the face of its unwillingness or inability to use revenues collected to improve the conditions of life for citizens. And many citizens understand that grand corruption is effectively part of the problem, since, as shown by the results of a survey conducted in the city of Douala, many citizens seek to evade taxes because they do not want to continue enriching those who have already illegally appropriated enough of the national wealth (Esso 1996). Such perceptions could then justify the second online commentator's calls for resistance through a ‘tax revolt’, employing the ‘rhetoric for calling on taxpayers to be watchful, to fight for their rights’ (Braithwaite 2003b, p. 18).
Framed in such rights-based discourse, perceptions on the part of citizens hinge on the unjust claim to taxation by the state, highlighting the fact that left to themselves citizens' voluntary compliance would be low, if not supported by a great degree of the threat of coercion against those who might contemplate tax evasion. Occasionally, such citizens' perceptions have been accompanied by effective confrontational action against state authorities. For instance, there was an upheaval in the small ‘Fiango’ market of a medium-sized urban centre in the city of Kumba, a town in the south-west region of the country, as a protest against ‘high taxes’ was staged by traders in 2007. During this protest, the Kumba Traders' Welfare Association (KTWA) promised to stage a peaceful protest march to the offices of the taxation department, the Kumba urban council, and the senior divisional office. Prompted to take action against what they found no longer tolerable, they complained and threatened that:
We must seize our rights if it is not given to us. We shall sacrifice and let government know what we want and if our request is not granted, we shall swing into action. Traders have been turned into paupers and the government wants us dead. (Post 2007)
Indeed, it appears that the inadequate provision of social and infrastructural services in Cameroon as well as the pervasive nature of grand corruption in the country combine to fuel anguish and frustration among the more precarious social groups such as youth and women in the urban centres. This is the case for students, for those working within the informal sector (market women and small traders), and even housewives, who are all confronted on a daily basis with the rising costs of living and/or corruption in Cameroon. In the absence of strong and organised working classes in the country, since the 2000s youth and student protests around university towns have been more common than strikes from organised labour groups. Thus, in addition to occasional generalised protests undertaken by youths such as that of February 2008 discussed above, between 2005 and 2010 there have been several serious student protests within state universities across the country, including at the University of Buea (2005 and 2006) and at the University of Yaoundé (2005 and 2007). In April 2005, as a student at this university, one of the authors participated in a prolonged protest against the high cost of living and the increasing levels of insecurity resulting from banditry attacks on student neighbourhoods. During the protest two students were shot dead by law-enforcement agents, without any consequences (see International Crisis Group 2010, p. 14). Shortly afterwards, in November 2006 another student protest ensued. This second protest erupted at the University of Buea when it transpired that the authorities at the ministry of higher education had corruptly modified the final admission list published by the vice-chancellor of the University of Buea following an entrance examination into the newly created medical school at the university. A further two student casualties ensued from their confrontations with the security forces (see Orock and Ngeve 2012).
Conclusion
This paper has explored the crucial problem of how citizens in Cameroon, a country plagued by bad governance, perceive the fact of the state taxing them. It has done so by exploring the relationship between the social and political conditions of state governance in Cameroon, tracing the complex processes shaping the institutional incapacities of the state in providing citizens' needs – mainly perceived as associated with the problem of corruption among public officials. It has also shown how these same processes shape citizens' assessments and relations to these institutions. It is evident that neopatrimonial governance, expressed by widespread bureaucratic corruption and dismal levels in public service delivery, on the one hand, and citizens' distrust of these public institutions, on the other, lead citizens to adopt negative perceptions and sometimes defiant postures towards the state's legitimacy to tax them.
Oluwu (2002, p. 2) has argued that (public) governance implies ‘the fundamental rules governing the relationships between the rulers and the ruled’. Yet, as this paper has shown in the case of Cameroon, more than anything else corruption and administrative unaccountability surround the derailment of these bureaucratic rules that have been crucial in shaping citizens' distrust of public institutions and the public officials in them. This distrust is perceptible in their attitudes toward taxation. As some degree of democratisation has yielded some measure of deliberative space, the church and the private media, as segments of civil society, have taken the opportunity to bring the problem to the fore of the national political agenda. This has forced the government to initiate anticorruption campaigns that have so far failed to overturn these negative views of public institutions, as a result of the perceived politicisation of these clean-up efforts themselves. The Cameroonian case clearly illustrates the challenges confronting African states if they seek to expand their capacity for domestic mobilisation of resources through taxation.
Notes on contributors
Rogers Tabe Egbe Orock is currently a PhD Fellow at the Department of Anthropology, Archaeology and Linguistics of Aarhus University in Denmark. He holds a combined BSc (Honours) degree in sociology and anthropology from the University of Buea in Cameroon, a Master of Administrative Science degree in public administration from the University of Vaasa and a MSocSc degree in social and cultural anthropology from the University of Helsinki, both in Finland. This paper was written while he was a student in the master's programme in public administration at Vaasa. He can be contacted by email at etnoreto@hum.au.dk.
Oben Timothy Mbuagbo holds a PhD in social anthropology from the University of Basel in Switzerland and a MSc in sociology from the University of Ibadan in Nigeria. He is currently a senior lecturer in sociology at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology of the University of Buea in Cameroon. He has published extensively in areas spanning the sociology of governance (civil society and democracy, decentralisation and local power dynamics in the Cameroon's city administrations) as well as the politics of ethnicity in Cameroon. He can be contacted by email at mbuagbo@yahoo.com.