Trust, Participation and Pandemic Politics in Africa

A. Carl LeVan ^1* Yahaya Baba ² Abdu Mukhtar Musa ³

• ¹ American University, Washington, DC, United States
• ² Usmanu Danfodiyo University, Sokoto, Sokoto, Nigeria
• ³ Omdurman Islamic University, Omdurman, Sudan

aligned with a shift among international financial institutions such as the World Bank, who in a new embrace of "good governance" saw non-state power as conveniently compatible with ambitions to promote the private sector, continuing a legacy of structural adjustment (Roelofs 2023). However, this perspective may have simplified the class-based nature of many demands originating from economic exclusion (Branch and Mampilly 2015). It also obscured the multifaceted nature of civil society in Africa, where organizations sometimes embraced an apolitical standing as a way to promote cooperation for local development (Kew 2016;Ndegwa 1996). Other times these organizations straddled the fence of the imagined boundaries between state and society, due to either links to historic cultural organizations shaping political party development or co-optation by governments (LeVan 2011). These debates were born anew with the rise and swift demise of the Arab Spring, where social movement scholars have highlighted organizational independence as a critical prerequisite for organizational capacity and institution building necessary for lasting democratization (Kadivar 2022). Guiatin thus engages classic debates about civil society, updating them for the current era of democratic backsliding, where civil society alternatively faces populist co-optation and authoritarian demobilization.Khadijah Sanusi Gumbi from Bayero University and Yahaya T. Baba from Usman danFodiyo University also consider civil society dynamics. Their collaboration examines how low trust impacted policy choice in Nigeria during the pandemic. Importantly, they trace the origins of the "End SARS" protests -some of the biggest since Nigeria's transition to democracy in 1999 -to a backlash against lockdowns and other containment measures to protect public health. (SARS is the Special Anti-Robbery Squad, known for its brutality.) After people became outraged by theft of relief assistance and other government mismanagement, the police overreacted, translating into an even bigger mass movement with broader demands for human rights and accountable governance. The paper's qualitative approach uses interviews and newspaper reports to test institutional performance theory, which posits that observable performance of government determines citizens' confidence in public institutions.Finally, a paper co-authored by Ruth Murumba from Daniel Moi University and Angela Pashayan from American University differs from those above by studying the impact of the pandemic on trust at a micro-level, zeroing in on daily life in a Nairobi slum. When Kenya adopted containment measures to stem Coronavirus in 2020, it deployed the Provincial Administration, a relic of colonial control. Wage laborers from the Industrial Area and informal workers from settlements such as Mukuru Kayaba soon protested the adverse economic impact of public health measures. The state met these demands with force. Ultimately, both the regulations and the institutions chosen to implement policy undermined the urban poor's trust in government, linking lived experiences of subaltern uncertainty with the volatility of Kenya's local and national politics.All of the papers share a commitment to understanding the political and social impact of the pandemic. For example, COVID-19 intersected with a wave of protest embracing demands for better governance, "cleaner" elections, and more vertical accountability. The coups highlight the volatility of low trust contexts, while social movements in Nigeria and Kenya demonstrate how pandemic-related grievances intersected with other popular demands. The fruit of this robust north-south collaboration is a truly global perspective that brings new perspectives to the transformation of trust across a swiftly changing continent.