ABSTRACT
This chapter argues for a different approach by politicians and planners. It defines provides evidence that democratisation and urbanisation have worked in contradictory directions. The chapter proposes suggestions of how this could be different if political, administrative and policy advisers, and planners at regional, national and local levels, would seek to connect African urbanisation and democratisation differently, using the prism of decentralisation. Democratisation and its twin counterpart, decentralisation, have worked in opposing directions and have thus failed to build the critical fiscal and political incentives to make African cities political and economic drivers of change and dynamism throughout the continent. The small- and medium-scale operations have become major employers of labour and have also managed to combine informal connections between governance, politics, religion, family life and business to create and sustain networks for problem-solving in the face of inadequate institutional and financial structures in many African cities.
