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Topic Discussion I
Politics of Hard Choices
Political Transition and Economic Restructuring
Room 1
(4 of 20 pages)
Adrien Houngbedji: Merci, Madame de Boer. I was just saying that in order
to understand the difficulties -- so I am going to try to say in 10 minutes the essential of what I should say.
So in order to understand the difficulties that my country, Benin, is facing in the success of the democratic process,
we should start with the situation which was prevailing on the eve of this democratic process. During 17 years,
the government -- the country was governed according to one party system and with a basis as a state ideology Marxism,
Leninism. So from a point of view of freedoms, it was the one party system. It had of course its repercussions
on the socio-economic structures of the country. Our main production activities were state oriented, the state
enterprises have been created without taking into account the necessity to guarantee their profitability, and of
course, the private initiative had disappeared, the public function was something proteric, the state resources
were very, very low, thus the progressive incapacity of the state to recover all of the expenses as well to try
to foresee some investments. And as a matter of fact, there was also like the runaway of the investors. This is
briefly the situation that we had inherited previously in 1989.
With the democratic process, we opted for liberalism, economic liberalism, and at the same time, we subscribed
to a structural adjustment program. All this was in order to be able to conciliate between the necessity of freedom
and also the need to achieve economic growth. So as each one of us knows, the economic liberalism responds to competition,
to the lulls of the market. As for democracy, in order to have it credible among the population, it should have
a social content. In these situations we could have the following solutions.
First we had to privatize our economy. This privatization was supposed to accompany economic liberalism, it created
social tensions, first because we had to make the enterprises profitable, we had to decrease the staff to resort
to compression and also, to reduce the salaries, and of course, we had to accede the enterprises that belonged
to the state to private interests. And on this level, Benin has faced a lot of obstacles. First the obstacle of
the workers themselves, in other words, labor unions, that considered that the transfer of the ownership of the
state to the private ownership was supposed to be done at the expense of the power of purchase, namely the salaries,
in such a way that there were a lot of strikes, as well as blockings that slowed down for a long time the whole
process. And then with regard to these privatizations, we faced the mentality which was that of the Benin people
for over 20 years. This mentality consists of saying that any good that produces wealth should be owned by the
collectivity and consequently, the perspective of seeding ones goods and ones properties to the private interest
constituted what was called like sale, a transaction. So there was a lull in privatization that was promulgated
for such enterprises and then five or six years ago, we progressively moved towards such privatization. The first
privatization was very hard and now drawing the lessons from the difficulties we had, we set the first condition,
the commitment for all those who have the state companies in order to abstain somehow to reduce the staff. In some
cases, it was successful, it was okay, but in most instances we witnessed a rejection phenomenon. However, the
latest privatization operation that took place, namely in the last two to three years in the most important sectors
of our economy, I would like to speak about, for instance, oil industry, wheel industry, as well as the oil trade,
all these privatizations were accompanied by social measures which made the decisions affordable in such a way
that the labor unions and the workers accepted in general very forms undertaken.
The second problem that we are facing is that the public function that we have inherited was somehow proteric,
we had at that time around 40,000 staff members, I mean, working with the state and then we needed 20,000 to function.
It was impossible to -- by reducing the staff to fire people that were so numerous. As you know in Africa, a terminate
agent of the state is usually a source of salary for 10 people at least, however we proceeded stage by stage. The
first stage consisted first of all to stop the recruitment, so during the first two to three years the public function
and never recruited personnel and staff, and the second stage consisted in adopting the lull that in-stores progress
and promotion, promotion according to merits. The system was based basically on promotion according to the period
of staffing, it was like apartheid and it did not allow our public administration to perform as such, so we had
to adopt this lull and this permitted and will permit also in the coming years to have a public function which
is much more dynamic. However, we realize that in some sectors, namely the educational sector and the health sector
as well, the willingness to compress and to stop recruitment was facing the vital needs of the population, namely
with regard to population and health. So how could we make the access possible for the compatriot to health services,
how could we ensure the victory of our fight against illiteracy if our health centers were left without nurses
and without medical doctors, and if our schools were left without teachers? And thanks to our partners in development,
we found a formula in these sectors, the solution of recruitment that is according to positions that's how we recruited
contractual people and they were hired and this allowed us to avoid the public function could increase again.
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