In the course of the past three decades, most African countries have been brought under the pressure of international financial institutions to restructure public companies and to open up to foreign investors. In countries endowed with mineral resources, the mining sector has been the first to be targeted for implementing this type of reform (Campbell 2009). Many studies have reported the dramatic social consequences of such policies. Few, however, have described how employees retrenched from public companies fend for themselves. This is the purpose of this article for the former workers of Générale des Carrières et des Mines (Gécamines), in the ex-Katanga province, DR Congo.1
In the early 2000s, Gécamines was a shadow of the former mining and industrial empire of Union minière du Haut-Katanga, nationalised in 1967. Owing to a lack of budget, most of its activities were brought to a halt and buildings left in a state of neglect. It was only producing around 20,000 tonnes of copper per year, compared to more than 400,000 tonnes in the mid 1980s, and had liabilities of US$1.3 billion. Gécamines employees, who had not received benefits in kind for years, were owed more than 20 months in wage arrears. To address the situation, the World Bank advocated a reform which consisted of stripping some of Gécamines’ assets and allowing them to be transferred to joint ventures with private partners.
The World Bank reform programme also envisaged staff reductions to give Gécamines a chance to start again on a new basis. It is against this background that a voluntary departure programme (VDP), aiming to reduce staff from 24,000 to 14,000, was conceived with the support of the World Bank. Within the framework of this programme, redundancy was made available on a voluntary basis to all employees with more than 25 years of service on 31 December 2002. In return for accepting the termination of their contract, the majority of workers who took redundancy received a lump sum of between US$2000 and US$4000, depending on their grade and their seniority. This lump sum was presented not only as severance pay, but also as capital to be invested in new economic activities.
Based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out between 2006 and 2011 in Panda, a former Gécamines town on the outskirts of Likasi, this article explores how workers who participated in the VDP (or partants, as they call themselves) made a living in the phase of their ‘reintegration’.2 In doing so, it aims at developing a sociological approach to the study of popular economic practices in Africa that moves beyond the phenomenology of uncertainty recently advocated by several Africanist scholars (Whyte 1997, 2002; Johnson-Hanks 2005; Haram and Bawa Yamba 2009; Mususa 2010, 2012, 2014; Cooper and Pratten 2015; see also De Boeck 2015a, 2015b). These scholars seek to describe how people actively deal with uncertainty on a day-to-day basis, and to characterise the form of consciousness involved in their activities: it has been conceptualised – among other things – as a ‘subjunctive habitus’ (Johnson-Hanks), an ‘improvisory agency’ (Mususa) or an ‘ethos of contingency’ (Whyte and Siu 2015). Founded on long-term research on various aspects of social life, these phenomenological explorations provide fresh insights into how people cope with contingencies and make sense of their being in times of ‘crisis’ (Roitman and Mbembe 1995). To be sure, uncertainty is a common theme in ordinary conversations, self-narratives and various forms of popular culture in Africa.
Regarding the study of popular economic practices, the analytical framework advocated by these authors allows us to shift the focus from the formal/informal divide and economic regulation – an long-standing issue that has gained renewed attention in recent years (Guyer 2004; Roitman 2005; Rubbers 2007; Meagher 2010; Hull and James 2012; Ferguson 2015) – to the subjective experience of the poor. In their ambition to develop a general theory of action under conditions of uncertainty, however, they often overestimate the importance of uncertainty and the difficulty in making plans for the future in the everyday lives of the people under study. In some instances, the old idea of a ‘culture of poverty’ (the life of the poor is reduced to survival and disorder) does not seem very far away. Yet, as Whyte and Siu (2015, 19) remind us, ‘dealing with uncertainty … usually has to do with mobilising resources in order to exert some degree of control.’ To understand how people deal with contingencies, therefore, one needs a theory of calculation and plan making (Callon 1998; Bourdieu 2005).
In addition, with the notable exception of Cooper (2015), the experience of uncertainty tends to be loosely related to the macro context of ‘crisis’ that African countries have experienced since the 1990s without further specification of the economic, social and cultural conditions generating it for the people under study. This allows some authors to unduly extrapolate from their case studies, and to grant with the same ‘habitus’, ‘agency’ or ‘ethos’ the inhabitants of a whole city, area or even country. This critique calls for focusing in more detail on the economic practices of a given category of people in a particular place.
From a more theoretical point of view, the privilege given by most scholars to phenomenology leads to focusing on action in the making, the fluidity of everyday life, and the words that people use to describe their ordinary experience. As Noret (2015, 3) argues in a discussion paper on the volume edited by Cooper and Pratten (2015), ‘following such an approach always runs the risk of leaving un-analysed the conditions of production of the social experiences under scrutiny, therefore reducing social theory to a form of “account of the accounts” (Garfinkel) of the social actors.’ It tends to overlook not only cultural dispositions, but also power relationships and broader structural dynamics (see Bourdieu 1977). For these reasons, a phenomenological focus on ordinary experience remains insufficient to understand how uncertainty is produced and negotiated on a day-to-day basis.
To address these issues, this article proposes to take the analysis of economic practices in a sociological direction, and engage with their diversity and complexity in more detail. It will study how the partants of Panda – that is, men and women from the same generation, with a similar work experience, living in the same neighbourhood – made a livelihood after their departure from Gécamines. To do so, it will take as a starting point the opportunities and constraints related to the projects and activities they undertook, and illustrate each type of project, or activity, by a brief case study in order to show how it fits into the lives of ex-Gécamines workers and their families. This mode of presentation and analysis is intended neither to make sense of subjective experiences, nor to present some typical trajectories, but to identify the conditions in which livelihoods are earned and to illustrate how these conditions combine and form singular patterns of social life.3 Before starting, it is however necessary to say a few words on the debate that surrounded the VDP and the careers of my informants at Gécamines.
The meaning of reintegration
From the point of view of World Bank representatives, the VDP was a test case for similar redundancy programmes to be implemented in other public companies. Since Gécamines, the same operational approach has been used to cut staff numbers in five other Congolese state enterprises carrying budget deficits. And it is not impossible that it will be applied elsewhere in Africa in the future.
As in the microcredit programmes funded by the World Bank in the 1990s, the money granted to Gécamines employees was conceived as a social compensation within the framework of wider economic reforms (Elyachar 2005). The difference, of course, is that this money was not granted as a credit to would-be entrepreneurs but as a severance payment to employees over 45 years old who had lived for more than two decades in the social world of the company.4 For this reason, the experts who designed the VDP had low expectations regarding the reintegration programme. Only a few, they admitted, would succeed in creating micro-enterprises. The VDP as a whole would be deemed satisfactory provided that they succeeded in fending for themselves, and that their living conditions did not decline.
Such expectations, I would argue, are grounded in a (neo)liberal conception of reintegration that puts emphasis on individual responsibility. Ex-Gécamines workers are not viewed as victims of the restructuring of the company, but of the paternalistic policy of Gécamines – it is from the culture of dependence generated by this paternalistic policy that they must break free in order to develop their businesses. The role of the state (and of the World Bank) is above all to create new economic opportunities through the implementation of legal and economic reforms. Social assistance is to be provided only to people earning below a certain income level to allow them to get back on the market and fend for themselves. In such a perspective, emphasis on absolute poverty and empowerment overrides concerns about relative poverty and redistribution. The only form of social policy that neoliberalism allows is economic growth (see Foucault 2004).
Assessments of the programme carried out by external consultants in 2005 and 2009 have been made on the basis of a similar conception of ‘reintegration’ (CRETES 2006; World Bank 2009). Founded on surveys and focus groups, both audit reports concluded that the average standard of living of ex-Gécamines workers has increased since the baseline study conducted by the University of Lubumbashi in 2003, before the implementation of the VDP. The authors of the 2009 report acknowledge that this conclusion is partly biased: in 2003, Gécamines employees were suffering from extreme poverty because of wage arrears. But they nevertheless argue that the programme could not have reached better results because of workers’ age and culture of dependence.
As soon as the VDP came to an end in March 2004, an action group named the Collectif des ex-agents de la Gécamines was created to denounce the terms of the VDP and demand more adequate compensation for the workers involved (see Rubbers 2010). Together with two trade unions, the Collectif organised demonstrations in Katanga and lobbied the authorities in Kinshasa. With the support of a non-governmental organisation (NGO), it also put the case of partants before the World Bank Inspection panel in 2009. Their requests were followed by long negotiations and further investigations. But in 2011, when the World Bank published its final answer, it became clear that ex-Gécamines workers would not receive full payment of all wage arrears and other benefits in kind.
Contrary to the conclusions of the reports in 2005 and 2009, the Collectif claimed that the living conditions of ex-Gécamines workers had deteriorated since the implementation of the VDP. Removal of children from school, divorce, malnutrition and even death were identified as the most tangible consequences of this process of impoverishment. For the action group, this dire outcome was predetermined from the outset. Workers used the VDP money to clear their debts, buy new furniture and household goods, and pay school fees for their children. As a result, the lump sum they received was not sufficient to develop their economic activities into profitable businesses.
Obviously, Collectif expectations for reintegration were higher than those of World Bank envoys. For Collectif leaders, success meant finding new economic opportunities that would allow former workers to meet their family duties and personal needs. This was measured against the living standards afforded workers in the past under Gécamines’ paternalistic policy. In this view, most partants had not been ‘reintegrated’; their living conditions were worse than they used to be when they worked for Gécamines. The VDP scheme did not enable them to escape from the extreme poverty they had experienced since the 1990s. As I argue elsewhere (Rubbers 2010, 335), the Collectif’s expectations regarding reintegration existed within a discourse that denounces the company’s and the state’s failure to assume their social responsibilities. The company and the state were seen as accountable to the ex-Gécamines employees, who were entitled to adequate compensation for their lifelong work in the company. This view gave priority to social justice and moral obligations, not economic growth.
It is clear from the above discussion that the reintegration of ex-Gécamines workers has given rise to conflicting interpretations by the World Bank and the Collectif over what constituted success and failure. These interpretations reflect different expectations concerning reintegration and conflict over who was responsible for it. Notwithstanding these differences, both interpretations obscure the diversity and complexity of individual cases. In order to make partants ‘beneficiaries’ or ‘victims’ of the VDP, the two discourses tend to offer a homogeneous narrative of their experience, framed either as a ‘chance’ to improve their lot or a tragic fate. In contrast, the analysis compares individual case studies.
Working for Gécamines
Most of my informants in Panda were men born between 1935 and 1965, into the family of a Union minière worker who had been recruited in the Kasai province or Northern Katanga. The few informants who were not children of Union minière workers were recruited after passing the selection tests regularly held by the company. At that time, Gécamines was renowned for job security, opportunities for promotion, and several perks enjoyed by personnel and their families. In the course of their careers, they could improve their rating, obtain more responsibilities and get pay rises. They could also follow training courses, pass exams and obtain promotion. Depending on their rating and grade, as well as on the size of their family, they had access to a range of housing options and other benefits in kind. In the recollections of my informants, Gécamines was at the time a well-organised bureaucracy which controlled every aspect of workers’ everyday lives, but also allowed them to plan for the future.
From the late 1970s onwards, as Gécamines was confronted with growing difficulties, staff living conditions began to decline. Wages were hit by rising inflation, and benefits in kind progressively cut. In the first half of the 1990s, the decline reached dramatic proportions. Pushed into extreme poverty, my informants in Panda were forced to sell their furniture, withdraw children from school and reduce the number of meals. To address the situation, they began to leave their work early and help their wives and children in cultivating land or engaging in petty trade. By then, household revenues depended to a large extent on these parallel activities (on the consequences of these changes on gender and generational relationships, see Dibwe dia Mwembu 2001; Rubbers 2015). Many of my informants told me they experienced severe difficulties dealing with this new situation. Benefits in kind once granted by Gécamines were remembered with nostalgia, but paternalism was criticised for failing to prepare workers to fend for themselves.
The living conditions of Gécamines workers did not improve when Laurent-Désiré Kabila came to power in 1997. After the outbreak of the war against Rwanda and Uganda in 1998, wage arrears increased until they reached a total of 36 months at the time of the VDP in 2003. What had been experienced as a temporary crisis in the early 1990s had turned into a structural condition, and the activities undertaken to deal with the absence of a regular wage into a set of routines. In such circumstances, promotion was not an option anymore. In the words of my informants, the meritocratic apparatus of Gécamines had given place to complete ‘disorder’ (fujo). The strategies of social reproduction and mobility centred on Gécamines were abandoned and replaced by new projects. Even so, most of my informants continued to hope that Gécamines would eventually recover, that wage arrears would be paid and that proper compensation would be granted to them at retirement age.
In 2003, these hopes of recovery and compensation seemed more unrealistic than ever. For that reason, all the workers who qualified volunteered for the VDP despite the fact that the lump sum offered to them was lower than expected. Even those close to retirement age were encouraged to join by their family and trade unionists; since the company was bankrupt, they ran the risk of receiving no pension at all. Taking part in the VDP would at least allow them to meet their family’s most urgent needs and develop their own economic activities. In the view of my informants, the decision to join the programme was far from ‘voluntary’; it was largely determined by poverty. Throughout their working lives, their plans for the future were dependent on their standing and prospects in Gécamines. Now they were offered no better option than to take a lump sum and to imagine another future, outside the company. This situation caused major anxiety among partants, to the point that a certain number of them, already suffering from high blood pressure and cardiovascular disorders, died in the months following the VDP.
Collective projects
A fear expressed by people involved in the programme’s design was that ex-Gécamines workers would fail to fend for themselves because of their advanced age and the culture of dependence generated by the company’s paternalistic policy. In their view, workers were not used to managing large sums of money and ran the risk of squandering their severance payment on perishable goods. To avoid this situation, and encourage workers to invest in sustainable activities, the Unité de Coordination de la Réinsertion au Katanga (URK) – the government agency responsible for implementing the VDP – organised an information campaign in Gécamines housing estates, and carried out individual interviews with workers. In association with NGOs, it also supported a limited number of collective projects. This led to the creation of several workers’ enterprises.
Aside from URK, ex-Gécamines workers received support from Father Rudy, a Belgian chaplain based in the small Gécamines town of Kambove, 20 kilometres from Likasi. Like URK officials, this Catholic missionary was worried that workers would struggle to manage their money. To avoid the danger of a major social disaster, he toured the churches in the Likasi area to sell them his project, the Fédération des Coopératives de Kambove (FDC): a group of five cooperatives with activities in agriculture, poultry farming, health care, trade and transport services respectively. Workers interested in the project were invited to invest fixed amounts of money in the activities of their choice. In return, they would receive dividends in cash or kind a year later. No involvement in the activities of FDC was expected from members. The purchase of equipment, recruitment of workers and management of activities would be undertaken by Father Rudy and his Congolese collaborators.
To most ex-Gécamines workers, Father Rudy’s project was a safe and profitable investment. As several informants told me, FDC won their trust because it was managed by a well-known white priest. Moreover, Father Rudy promised high returns on investment. When he came to Likasi, he guaranteed no fewer than 140 bags of maize per person after the first harvest. In view of these prospects, 1700 persons invested a total of approximately US$1.6 million in FDC. Within one year, however, FDC went bankrupt because of embezzlement of company assets by the executive team and various other problems (burnt fields, buses involved in accident, problems with the state administration etc.). In Panda, where most workers invested a large part of their money in agriculture, the consequences of this failure were dramatic. In return for the required contribution of US$1005, each member received only five bags of maize.
As mentioned above, the government’s reintegration programme pushed workers to create collective enterprises in a large number of sectors. A case in point is Josiane, a dynamic woman in her sixties. For her, to participate in collective projects was a way to invest her money, to be involved in associational life and to get recognition for her organisational skills. The daughter of a magistrate, Josiane began her career at Gécamines in 1970 as a teacher in a training centre for women (foyer social).5 She worked then in various community organisations, and developed strong ties with a small group of women. Building on these relationships, she conceived the Huilfeco project. She invited her female friends to form a collective enterprise with the aim of producing sunflower oil. The subscription fee was set at US$300 per person, in order to raise a minimum capital of US$7000. But the call for participants was sent too late, when most potential members had already spent their money. Out of the 31 women who had showed interest in the Huilfeco project, only 12 finally invested a sum between US$50 and US$200, adding up to a total of US$1100. This capital was used to acquire a plot of land, plough it with a tractor and pay villagers for harvesting. In the end, Huilfeco produced 936 litres of sunflower oil. The enterprise made no profit and its activities ended there. When Josiane agreed to meet me in 2006, she hoped that I could help her to find new sources of funding to revive Huilfeco.
With the rest of her VDP money, Josiane invested in another collective enterprise, Craisco, which produced chalk for schools. Supplies of raw chalk came from a quarry situated 280 kilometres from Likasi, and workers were recruited to manufacture chalk. The product was sold to Catholic schools. Craisco received a grant of US$9000 from URK, but the project did not survive the 2004 mining boom, which caused a rapid increase in wages and prices. It became impossible for Craisco to rent trucks, pay workers and compete with chalk imported from China. None of the 18 members, including Josiane, made a profit on their investment.
After the failure of Huilfeco and Craisco, Josiane found herself unable to make ends meet. When I interviewed her in 2006, she was supported by her former husband, who sent money for her and their two children. She also received occasional assistance from her younger brother and the daughter of a previous marriage. She hoped nonetheless that her projects would be revived through some form of external support. The last time I met her in 2009, she was involved in a new project, an organisation focused on the protection of social rights. The same organisation, she told me, had plans to pursue commercial agricultural activities.
As the case of Josiane shows, the partants could rely on their professional and organisational skills, as well as on the solidarity existing among them, to create and develop collective enterprises. They acted as entrepreneurs in Schumpeter’s sense of the term – they offered new products and new ways to do business, developing an innovative combination of production factors. But they were confronted by many hazards in a context where machines were old, infrastructures of poor quality, prices constantly fluctuating and formal rules renegotiated on the ground. They also had to deal with predictable management problems when cooperative shareholders are poor and have moral obligations towards each other: some were awarded membership without paying full fees; others were granted credit they could not repay. In other projects, funds were embezzled by managers or redistributed among members. The majority of collective projects in Panda ultimately failed because of such economic hazards and management problems. For this reason, most partants now prefer working alone.
Subsistence activities
None of my informants intended to go back and live in the village of their forebears. Although returning to a rural homeland was common for their parents, it was not a desirable option for the generation of ex-Gécamines workers. They bought their houses from Gécamines in the 1980s and had access to arable land near Likasi. They had no need to go back to rural areas to practise agriculture. They also wanted to stay close to their children, who would hopefully take care of them in their old age. Their last visit to their fathers’ or mothers’ villages generally dated back to several decades before, indicating that they had generally lost contact with their rural kin.
At the time of the VDP, most ex-Gécamines workers in Panda had plots of land on the outskirts of town, and could ask Kahonde chiefs for more land. This made agriculture a viable option to mitigate the negative effects of unemployment. On plots ranging from one to three hectares, they and their wives and children grew maize and, additionally, some manioc, sweet potatoes, beans and other types of vegetables. The largest part of the harvest was used for home consumption. The remainder was sold to pay school fees and buy new clothes.
Agriculture in Panda has a long history. In the 1930s, within the framework of its ‘stabilisation’ policy, Union minière began to encourage women to cultivate small plots of land (Dibwe dia Mwembu 2001). The aim of this policy was to fight against the ‘idleness’ of women, which was viewed as a major cause of moral disorder in the African urban population, and to supplement workers’ food rations. In the period following the Second World War, however, agriculture came to be regarded as a low-prestige activity by a growing number of workers. In the opinion of those who aspired to a ‘modern’ lifestyle (teachers, clerks etc.), they had come to the city to get a job, not to use a hoe like their forebears. Similarly, their wives were encouraged to follow courses in training centres for women in order to become proper housewives; cultivating the land was seen as something to be left to village women. Things changed again when workers experienced a deterioration in their living conditions from the late 1970s onwards. Those who had previously snubbed agriculture realised that it could supplement their wage. As mentioned above, they began accompanying their wives and children to the field, and agriculture progressively substituted wage labour as the household’s main source of income.
In a sense, the VDP scheme was the conclusion of this long process of (re)conversion from wage labour to agriculture. When Gécamines workers volunteered for the VDP, their principal aim was to free up more time for farming and expand their fields. They knew, however, that unless they had the means to buy chemical inputs and recruit villagers to help them, the harvest would generally not be sufficient to meet their various expenses. Gaining access to land also required them to be generous and respectful towards villagers. Should they arouse villagers’ resentment, they ran the risk of seeing their harvest stolen or burnt, or being attacked by magical means (masaku).
In addition to agriculture, workers sold various services at home. These included repairing electronic devices, giving private tuition, sewing clothes or providing nursing care. Take for example Serge, a 60-year-old man who previously worked as a winder in the Central Works of Panda. In 1983, he and his wife began to cultivate a plot of land 20 kilometres from Panda. It was this field, Serge told me, that allowed them to make ends meet in the 1990s. Serge received US$3000 through the VDP: US$1000 was invested at a loss in the FDC. Approximately US$1500 was used towards various ends: buying bicycles, paying school fees, meeting everyday expenses and paying the dowry of his son’s future wife. With the remainder, Serge had bought seeds in order to expand his field, and some chickens that he kept inside his house.
When I visited Serge in 2008, a large industrial machine lay in the middle of his living room, suspended over a small brazier. Serge explained to me that this was an electric motor he had just rewound for SNEL, the Congolese electricity company. For anything between US$400 to US$700, he regularly performed similar repairs for various companies, including Gécamines. Since Gécamines lost its most experienced technicians during the VDP, it has since resorted to outsourcing from the informal economy. Serge told me that he and his wife could make ends meet since, out of his 13 children, only two were still dependent on them. Moreover, their education was supported by St Francis Church in return for Serge’s long service as a sexton.
Ex-Gécamines workers like Serge, who succeeded in making a modest living out of their economic activities, generally found them a source of satisfaction. At least they no longer had to deal with factory schedules, the orders of superiors and delays in salary payments. Now they could organise their activities and revenues as they liked – a freedom that endowed them with a sense of control and security. In their view, even though being made redundant was hard, it eventually allowed them to discover their skills of self-reliance. They celebrated the values of hard work, independence and responsibility, distinguishing themselves from those who, in their mind, continued to ‘wait without doing anything’; workers who, in the characteristic spirit of paternalism, passively invested in FDC, or expected good news from the Collectif.
Getting a new job
After more than 25 years of service, most partants did not want to work under a new employer. The difficulties faced in collective projects and subsistence activities, however, led some to reconsider this possibility. In order to get a job, they needed to have skills relevant to potential employers (private schools, mining companies or trading houses) and to be personally recommended to the recruiting agent. Indeed, those who found a new job got it thanks to the intervention of personal acquaintances. Among those who found work, most were recruited by Indian and Chinese mining companies in the Likasi area.
These companies were often criticised for employing a large number of low-paid casual workers with no job security.6 They were also blamed for refusing workers leave to attend funerals. Indian and Chinese managers, it was said, did not show much concern for their workers’ obligations and responsibilities. Another common criticism was that the kind of work performed in these workplaces would not allow for any reward, bonus or promotion. In this regard, ex-Gécamines workers often complained about the fact that Asian companies did not take their age and experience into consideration. A former executive in his fifties, for example, could end up under the supervision of a young recruit.
When expressing these criticisms, my informants constantly compared Asian management to European management at Gécamines in the heyday of paternalism – that is, when the company granted its staff job stability, opportunities of promotion and benefits in kind for the whole family, and allowed workers to take leave for funerals. Protected by a collective agreement, these social rights had contributed to the emergence of a ‘moral economy’, which continued to serve as a reference point in the assessment of working conditions in new companies. From this perspective, what the Asian companies were blamed for was their lack of concern for the moral economy of paternalism inherited from Gécamines and the conception of human dignity associated with it. Indeed, according to some of my informants, working for an Asian company amounted to being treated like an animal.
Gabriel, who worked as a night watchman in a Chinese mining company, was one of the few ex-Gécamines workers who accepted harsh working conditions to improve their lot. He had worked for a long time as a fitter in the Panda Central Works, and was the son of a Union minière employee. It was only in the last years of his career that he was transferred to a desk job because of backache. To complement his income, his wife acquired two plots of land in the 1990s and she continued to cultivate them afterwards. The money that Gabriel received from the World Bank in 2003, however, was not invested in agriculture, but in trade. After having invested US$1200 in FDC (at a loss), he bought a freezer to allow his wife to sell fresh products at home. Because of the frequent power cuts in Panda, the gains she made were small. Gabriel told me that sometimes it could take her up to a week to sell a box of canned fish and earn a few dollars.
In 2005, Gabriel was visited by a neighbour who suggested that he should apply for a job as a watchman in a Chinese company. For this job, he would receive US$80 a month, and a bag of maize flour. Gabriel struggled to get used to the job. This was of course a tough job for a man in his sixties suffering from backache. In addition to this, he had to work at the same level as unskilled young men. He claimed that Chinese superiors had no respect for Congolese staff: ‘They are racist. They really treat us like animals. It is not like Westerners, who consider us like human beings. For the Chinese, we are not human beings.’ Nevertheless, Gabriel was content with the job since it allowed him to finance his wife’s economic activities. More recently, his eldest son got a good job in a mining company and, with the savings from his wages, built small shops for rent in Panda. Since he was single and lived at his sister’s house in Lubumbashi, he gave the rent money to Gabriel. Thanks to these various sources of income, Gabriel and his wife had the means to support the six children still dependent on them.
As in the case of Gabriel, ex-Gécamines workers tended to avoid putting all their eggs in one basket. No employment excluded the others: the same worker could get a job, participate in the economic activities of his wife and invest in a collective project. Women and children, who made a major contribution to the household budget, played a central role in taking decisions and starting new activities and projects. The revenues generated by these various activities complement each other and may allow the household to have a relatively comfortable lifestyle and to envisage the future with some confidence.
A process of disaffiliation
On the basis of the preceding case studies, it is possible to identify the main factors influencing the economic ‘reintegration’ of ex-Gécamines workers after the VDP. Apart from the contingencies related to different types of activity, these factors include health, skills, social network, the support of wives and children, and the number of dependent children. By contrast, bad health, lack of skills, divorce, social isolation or the need to cater for several children were likely to plunge workers into hardship. Those who suffered from health problems to the point of not being able to work were in a particularly vulnerable position. They had to rely on their wives’ activities in trade or agriculture, or support from their children. If they lacked these means of support, they risked being caught, like Yves, in the vicious circle of poverty and social isolation.
Among other health problems, Yves suffered from chronic urinary infection, chest pains and depression. Feeling physically weak and depressed, he was unable to engage in other economic activities in the 1990s. Because of this, his wife left him and their two children in 1998. In 2003, of the US$2500 he received from the World Bank, he invested US$1620 in FDC at a loss. The remaining money was used to repay debts, pay school fees and buy food. In 2007, Yves was living alone in extreme poverty. His children left him to live with relatives or friends, and he tried selling various goods at home. To help him, a priest offered him a part-time job as the computer-room keeper in a Catholic school. Since this computer room also operated as an Internet café, Yves was able to make a small amount of money every month. When I returned to Panda in 2011, however, Yves informed me that he had lost his job. During our conversation, he told me that he felt he was in an ‘abyss’ from which he could not climb out, to the point that he thought about ‘going to the other side’ to ‘meet the Lord’. But, he said, he did not have the courage to do it. Since then, he had stopped making plans for the future. He lived one day at a time, relying on God’s grace to take him out of poverty.
Yves and other ex-Gécamines workers in similar situations seemed to be going through what Castel (1995) calls a ‘disaffiliation’ process. In the last 20 years, they have been confronted with a decline in their living conditions, a loss of social status and progressive isolation from their families. Their only concern was to feed themselves. As Yves put it: ‘The first priority is to find something to eat, whatever its quantity or quality. You have to make do with what you can find. You’re not even a man anymore, because even animals in the bush can eat as much grass as they want.’ As this quote suggests, ex-Gécamines workers in dire straits have been pushed to live one day at a time, and to depend on opportunities to survive. This caused a feeling that their human dignity had been taken away.
Conclusion
By focusing on the livelihood activities of retrenched workers from a public company, this article has shed light on an understudied aspect of World Bank neoliberal reforms and their social consequences. The analysis shows that ex-Gécamines workers in Panda had to face major challenges in their attempts to make a living after the VDP. The money that they received from the World Bank was not sufficient to develop intensive agriculture, or place them in a competitive position in another sector. In the various projects and activities in which workers invested, they faced various problems owing to economic hazards and poverty. Moreover, many still had dependent children, which required meeting various expenses such as school fees and medical treatment. In these circumstances, workers could hardly escape from a poor and precarious existence. Nevertheless, to live in poverty does not necessarily mean experiencing radical uncertainty on a day-to-day basis.
The phenomenological approach advocated by several scholars, and discussed in the introduction, does not allow us to account for the variations found in the case studies presented above. Ex-Gécamines workers in Panda are not subjected to circumstances in the same way, and their everyday life cannot be simply equated to ‘a routinized state of crisis’ (Johnson-Hanks 2005, 367) or to ‘fractal patterns of social flows and blockages’ (De Boeck 2015a, 48). If the problems to which they have been confronted in the phase of their ‘reintegration’ could hardly be anticipated, they were quite predictable: they have been used to dealing with such problems for more than 20 years. Moreover, the partants living in Panda had a variety of material, social and cultural resources that allowed them to look towards the future with a certain degree of confidence: all own their house; have access to arable lands to cultivate; and have relatives ready to assist them in case of extreme need. Some also have skills and connections that they have been able to use for finding a job, or selling services at home. In the final analysis, only those who lack such resources – such as Yves – live day by day and look at the future as unpredictable and out of control.
To move beyond the exegesis of local concepts and discourses about disorder and uncertainty, this article has invited us to pay more attention to the economic and social conditions in which livelihoods are earned, and to how these conditions combine to produce different life trajectories. This sociological approach, I would argue, allows us to better understand how uncertainty is produced, and account for variations in the way it is experienced. My own research findings in Likasi show that the experiences of managers, who live in another area of the city, were different from those of the workers described in this article: they received a larger sum of money; they could rent out their mansions at a high price and move into the rooms reserved for domestic workers; and they often had children in relatively comfortable situations or circumstances who were able to help them out. In the category of workers, the number of ex-Gécamines workers living principally from farming – a major source of economic security for people in Katanga – was apparently higher in Panda, on the outskirts of the city, than in Kikula, at the centre of Likasi. There, I found more people with a new job, or earning a living from petty trade. If this observation is correct, then the place where people live is an important dimension to take into consideration for understanding how they make a living. Even in a small place like Panda, the trajectories of ex-Gécamines workers were not all the same. As the case studies above show, the activities they initiated confronted them with different problems and possibilities, and they did not have the same resources to carry them out. As a result, what was in the past a relatively homogeneous neighbourhood saw new socio-economic inequalities emerging in the aftermath of the VDP.
It follows that how ex-Gécamines workers fended for themselves in the period of their ‘reintegration’ can hardly be reduced to ‘judicious opportunism’, ‘improvisation’ or ‘capture’. To produce sunflower oil (Josiane), to repair industrial electric motors (Serge) or to build new shops (Gabriel) also implies making plans, coordinating action with other people, keeping a work schedule, and calculating revenues and expenditures to varying degrees. To do so, the partants could rely on various skills acquired during their career at Gécamines. Through the imposition of time discipline, the organisation of saving schemes and training sessions in household economics, the company had equipped its staff with intellectual and practical skills to manage resources and organise work. Capitalising on such skills, ex-Gécamines workers constantly tried to organise their economic activities in order to avoid living day by day, and build a better future.
To focus on the resources (assets, skills, relations etc.) that people have to invest in livelihood activities does not exclude us from making generalisations about subjective experience. It only cautions against the tendency to define popular economic practices by one single principle, or general theory of action, whether it is an ethos of contingency, accumulation of people or entrepreneurial spirit. The people I met in Panda were sometimes seizing opportunities, sometimes investing in social relationships, sometimes acting as entrepreneurs. What they had in common, I would argue, was less a stable and definite way to deal with uncertainty and make a living than a whole set of norms associated with their work for Gécamines. Their assessment of who is doing well or not in his/her activities was informed by various criteria constituting their sense of the good life: having armchairs in the living room, meeting their obligations towards their children, being respected for their work, having an occasional beer with friends and so on. To a certain extent, the good life was the one they experienced in the heyday of Gécamines. All this suggests that, despite the decline of Gécamines and the workers’ dismissal from the company, the paternalistic policy implemented by Gécamines in the past continues to raise their material and social expectations.