To the British, local government was a “school for level of interest in this seminar is partly a function of the fact that, although democracy,” while for the French the commune was the arena for the exercise the theme of decentralization has been part of the development discourse for of rational civic rights on the part of both urban and rural citizens. [...] capital and accompanying central government agencies to the town of After independence, the various pressures of the one-party state, military Dodoma, away from the coast and close to the physical center of the country. [...] came to be the focus of almost all political and administrative initiative, and The end of this phase of the decentralization story coincides with the begin- the ideology of development stressed central planning and national integra- ning of the structural adjustment period of the mid-1980s. [...] The first, chapter 9, by Mamadou Diop, the current mayor of Yoff (a suburb of Dakar) and the former mayor REFERENCES of metropolitan Dakar, explains the position of the mayor in the process of decentralization in Senegal. [...] This is the groundswell for the flashpoints of perennial conflict in the by a culture of the politics of patrimonialism in which all powers and resources West Africa subregion (Liberia, Sierra Leone, Côte d’ Ivoire) as elsewhere in flow from the ruler (‘the father of the nation’) to clients who shore up the the continent (Sudan, Rwanda, Congo, Angola, etc.).
- Pages
- 123
- Published in
- Canada
