ABSTRACT

This chapter looks at "local government" in urban areas in Africa, paying particular attention to the differences in approach and experience between Francophone and Anglophone cities. It focuses on the administration of urban services and infrastructure, and the issue of the appropriate balance between the public and private provision of urban amenities. By the 1980s most large African cities had one of two modal structures of urban government. The financial situation of many African urban governments was, by the mid 1980s, tenuous at best. The pattern in Anglophone Africa was historically more adventuresome and, by the 1980s, more diverse. The Tanzanian case was an extreme example of a general African tendency during the 1970s and early 1980s to proclaim the value of decentralization as a general principle, but to hedge and even to undercut its implementation in practice. The decentralization structure facilitated civil service domination in the decisions.