Genealogy and Context of la Concertation

It was around midday of an otherwise uneventful day at Ngaoundéré's municipal office. Ngaoundéré is the political and administrative center of Adamaoua, one of Cameroon's three northern provinces. Comprising 64,792 square kilometers of mostly humid savanna plateau, Adamaoua hosts a largely rural multiethnic society of close to 700,000 people, whose livelihoods rely heavily on cattle, agriculture, and road transport. For everyone waiting for the arrival of the Vina District prefect, who, following local etiquette, showed up an hour late, there was little doubt as to what had gathered us all there. A letter written about a month earlier under the heading “Transport and taxation of cattle trade” was on everyone's lips. Signed by the all-powerful directeur général des impôts (DGI, general manager of taxes) on August 10, 2004, the letter is addressed to the managing director of Camrail, the railway company. The letter reads,

As noted earlier, the measures that the letter announces were not isolated decisions but small pieces in the broader puzzle of nationwide reforms that targeted the country's tax policies and administration. Indeed, the DGI had built for himself a reputation as a staunch reformer, and his appointment as national minister of finance a few months later seemed to confirm this reputation.Footnote ² Measures such as these were also a response to pressures from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank requiring that the authorities enlarge the taxpayer pool and intensify controls and audits to improve nonoil revenue figures. Indeed, both the verification of the place of business through a plan de localisation (location map) and the requirement of recently issued certificates of tax payment are formalities introduced by the new tax law to ensure an increase in the number of taxpayers and their regular filing of tax forms. When interviewed, local officials confirmed that targeting the cattle economy, which they considered largely undertaxed, was one of the tax administration's main priorities in Adamaoua Province.

This new, tougher stance toward the cattle economy was at the root of the exercise in la concertation that I consider here. Before going any further, however, let me briefly discuss the genealogy of the notion itself. In France, la concertation is an administrative formula that enjoys wide currency. It is seen as a way of exploring participatory forms of government in a democracy in which the risk of a widening gap between policies designed by technocrats and the felt needs of citizens is only too obvious.Footnote ³ The first legal texts that explicitly invoke this formula date to the creation of the zones d'aménagement concerté (participatory urban planning zones) in 1967 (Law 1967/1253 of December 30, 1967). La concertation has prospered considerably since, and today it is especially prominent in the sphere of municipal administration. Law 2002/276 of February 27, 2002, for example, invokes la concertation as one of the pillars of the so-called démocratie de proximité (local democracy).

In spite of this apparent success, la concertation has been the object of sustained controversy. The optimism of its early proponents (Reference Bloch-LainéBloch-Lainé 1964) soon gave way to a diagnostic of failure (Reference Grémion and CrozierGrémion 1974). In this regard, la concertation is not unlike its Anglophone equivalent, the “citizen participation” that was promoted in the mid-1960s as an all-purpose remedy for social ills in the United States and the United Kingdom (Reference ArnsteinArnstein 1969). A recent overview of the role of la concertation in French administrative law, for example, attempts to capture its broad semantic range in the following enumeration: “Information, pedagogy, participation, manipulation, appropriation, sharing schemes, representation, consultation, co-production …” (Anonymous 2006: 12). The divergent connotations implied by the notion reflect differing assessments by its practitioners, be they professional or lay, experienced or occasional. For all the emphasis on generating synergies, building consensus, and creating a common vision, la concertation often fails to live up to its promises.

More striking than the disappointment la concertation has generated and the criticism it has attracted, perhaps, is the versatility of this administrative tool. While legal texts specifically regulate its place in the administrative decision-making process and its modes of exercise within privileged domains, such as urban planning, the reach of la concertation far exceeds these narrow boundaries. It is a label tagged to a domain of fluid engagement between government officials and citizens. Under the umbrella of la concertation, they can exchange information, impressions, and ideas with the knowledge that these are not going to be subject to the strictures of administrative actsFootnote ⁴ that characterize many civil-law systems. When used to refer to these hardly patterned exchanges, it can be thought of as a presiding idea rather than an administrative genre. It is la concertation in this wider sense that is of concern in this article.

In Cameroon, the long era of the one-party rule (1966 to 1990) was not a fertile ground for the sort of citizen involvement that la concertation presupposes. There, as in most Francophone Africa, talk of la concertation gained real currency only in the era of multiparty politics. It was also intimately tied to the dominance of the idea of participation in international development.Footnote ⁵ In Cameroon today, the need for la concertation is proclaimed in all domains of governmental action at many an occasion of perceived conflict on the horizon. Legal texts have certainly incorporated la concertation into the repertoire of administrative instruments, but the crucial point is that la concertation today exceeds the narrow parameters of formal law.Footnote ⁶ Furthermore, a cursory look at the recent profusion of examples shows that la concertation is not a process restricted to dyadic interactions between citizens and state officials but may refer to a variety of complex entanglements involving leaders of trade unions, members of civic associations, representatives of the central government and local authorities, officials from different ministries, government advisers and consultants, and representatives of international financial organizations.

The example I consider in this article escapes any direct international inducement and falls within the type of local renegotiation of measures decided by the central government. Although its nominal addressee was the railway company, the DGI's letter soon became known to Adamaoua's cattle traders, many of whom felt it was really addressed to them by proxy. A few decided to redouble their zeal in avoiding occasions of potential contact with the tax authorities (to the point of suspending their cattle shipments by train for several weeks in a couple of cases). They chose to wait and see, while keeping as low a profile as possible. The large majority, however, saw the letter as a wake-up call. They could not afford to let the DGI's characterization of traders as antisocial tax evaders go unchallenged. They subscribed to the idea of using the letter as an opportunity to make claims to which they felt entitled, despite the general awareness that this choice may expose them to more rigorous controls.

Let us take a step back and examine the range of possibilities they had ahead of them. Hurrying to the district tax center to regularize their situation did not seem advisable. For them to provide a location map for verification of their business premises (their homes in most cases) was not particularly burdensome, but the payment of annual licenses and income tax arrears for several years would have been harder to swallow—particularly because it was unlikely to free them from the unofficial payments that tax officials, who operate on the assumption of the traders' underreporting and are often ready to take personal advantage of their positions, would have required. Neither would this course of action have made the authorities take the cattle traders' grievances concerning taxation seriously.

How could they then go about their challenge against the tax authorities? Outright refusal to comply with the requirements imposed on cattle shipments, including the payment of tax advances, was not an option. The railway company would simply not agree to transport their cattle on such terms. Boycotting the railway as a means of transport for their cattle (as well as the tax payments attached to it) in protest against the new measures represented a financial sacrifice few of them were in a position to take. Administrative and judicial remedies that might have been available to counter the authorities' actions and regulations were equally implausible. It is not only that the traders' failure to show themselves as being law-compliant would disarm them in such adjudicatory venues—one of the dimensions of the principle of suspended enforcement. More important, with few exceptions, judicial review in the sphere of administrative law in general and tax law in particular remains irrelevant in Cameroon. The statute that created the provincial administrative courts across the country in 2006, for example, postponed their effective establishment to the time when it befits “the needs and means of the State” (Law 96/22 of December 29, 2006, art. 119). Until that day, the only administrative court in the country is the Administrative Chamber of the Supreme Court in Yaoundé. An inside critic, owing to his status of civil servant, has recently accounted for the insignificance of judicial review as regards tax law by evenly distributing the blame between who he characterizes as timid and experience-lacking judges and pusillanimous taxpayers (Reference Evina ObamEvina Obam 2005: 14). Within this narrow realm of possibilities, la concertation emerged as an attractive option.

A week after the letter became public knowledge, the Vina District chapter of the Association Nationale de Commerçants à Bétail de Cameroun (ANCBC), the dominant professional association, held an unusually well-attended meeting in anticipation of foreseeable events. Different courses of action were discussed. After this preparatory meeting, the ANCBC president informed the Vina prefect about the DGI's letter. The prefect, who was unaware of its existence until that point, could not turn a deaf ear to a potential confrontation between the tax authorities and the traders from his district who supplied beef to the country's main urban centers. Yet, because the correspondence had deliberately excluded him, he had to operate behind the scenes. Having been trained in the overzealous formalism of the Cameroonian administrative system, the prefect asked the president to furnish him with a written justification to intervene—and hence save face. The president obliged and sent him an official letter, warning him about the disruptive effects that the tax administration's initiative was likely to have on the flow of cattle to the south.

Who were these traders actively seizing the opportunity to set la concertation in motion? Since the colonial era, a nationwide network of delegates representing the main trading groups in the country had served as a transmission belt between the state and cattle traders (Reference FroelichFroelich 1954; Reference Lacrouts and SarniguetLacrouts & Sarniguet 1965). This structure of representation was not formalized until 1990, when the leaders of what later, in 1993, became the ANCBC agreed to put in place a self-regulating mechanism that would stop excess supplies from reaching southern markets and therefore prevent sharp fluctuation in prices.Footnote ⁷ Due largely to existing patterns of market infrastructure and organization, access to the knowledge and experience, the social relationships, and the financial capital required to succeed in cattle trade is severely restricted. In Adamaoua, only Muslim men who enjoy both strong bonds to rural areas where cattle are raised and good commercial contacts in southern markets are in a position to succeed (Reference BoutraisBoutrais 1994, Reference Boutrais2001). Some of them are employers, and some are self-employed. Others work in partnerships, pooling capital and labor. Although the article refers to them consistently as cattle traders and this is the occupational identity that they themselves privilege, for the majority, this is only one among several lines of activity. Many are also farmers with variable livestock holdings, and some have butcheries in southern urban centers. Road transport, be it of goods or of passengers, is another common side investment.

The immediate backstage developments that preceded la concertation had considerable weight on its dynamics. Part of the interaction that took place was the public product of other private conversations (cf. Reference Moore and CaplanMoore 1995: 29). These conversations certainly dictated how the prefect framed the meeting in his opening remarks. He made a point of obviating any direct reference to the DGI's letter in his initial speech. Instead, he produced another letter, the one that the ANCBC president had written at his request, and proceeded to read it aloud for the benefit of the audience. Then he invited the traders to make their case. Acting as the traders' spokesman, the ANCBC president rose to the occasion and asserted their commitment to pay taxes. The explanation for the decline in cattle-related state revenue, he said, should be sought in a reduction of cattle flows from Adamaoua to the country's main urban centers in the south: “There is no spirit of tax avoidance. It is simply that many traders have incurred in losses and as a result have scaled down their operations in Yaoundé and Douala” (Chamber of Commerce Provincial Archives 2004b). Following this brief first statement from the traders' side, the prefect ceremoniously took the DGI's letter out of a folder and went ahead to read it. Only then did he finally give the chef de centre d'impôts (CCI, head of the district tax center) a chance to speak.

The distribution of turns to speak reflected to what extent the prefect sanctioned the traders' initiative in response to the unilateral measures that the tax administration had adopted. In this regard, although the agenda for the rest of the meeting was primarily set by the traders' spokesman and the CCI, as well as by brief but decisive remarks from the Ministry of Livestock, Fisheries, and Animal Industrties (MINEPIA) provincial delegate, the prefect retained his protagonist role throughout. He set himself up as the guarantor of the spirit of la concertation: “I've told you right from the start that this is a working session, a concertation. There's a problem, we discuss, we find solutions together.” Such reminders surfaced in his words every now and then. He strove to maintain a sense of balance and evenhandedness befitting his role. He combined encouragement and understanding toward traders with intimations of the harsh treatment that could await them if they did not comply with regulations. As far as the tax authorities were concerned, the prefect's sympathy for their attempt at more rigorous enforcement was matched by his lack of patience with their reticence to quantify the decrease in tax revenue at issue. As he put it at one point, “If the tax authorities had provided us with figures, this would have helped us understand. Tax revenues have fallen. Yes, OK. But to what extent?” Remarks such as this one resulted in a markedly defensive attitude on the part of the CCI, who at times could not hide his frustration at the way the tables had been turned. After a particularly heated exchange, he admitted disbelief at how the latest effort to clamp down on tax evasion in the cattle trade had led to a meeting focused on the traders' grievances against the dysfunctions of the tax system.

La Concertation as a Multifaceted Accomplishment

The previous section has underscored how la concertation took place as a remedy to unilateral administrative measures. If the DGI's letter announced the tax administration's new, tougher stance toward cattle traders, la concertation came as a second moment in which both parties, through the mediating offices of other state representatives, could work out a mutually acceptable agreement. In what follows, I propose four analytical dimensions that advance a deeper understanding of what is at stake in such processes. I argue that la concertation is a moment of suspended enforcement, a moment of accommodation among competing government bureaucrats, a moment for a critique of the law, and a moment for the discursive reconstruction of particular social fields.

The first dimension is suggested by the prefect's remarks when he approached me after the meeting. He prefaced a question about my impressions with the following observation: “You see, this is what democracy means for us now at the local level. Times have changed. In the period of the one party, you would not have seen anything like this.” The prefect was calling my attention to a longer history of state-society relations in light of which la concertation appeared as a remarkable improvement. In the not-too-distant past, had cattle traders in Adamaoua decided to approach the state administration, what faces would they have encountered? Colonial chefs de subdivision, for example, exercised with almost full discretion the administrative and judicial powers that the indigénat afforded them.Footnote ⁸ Prefects and subprefects during the first three decades of independence embodied the paternalistic authoritarianism of a thinly spread administration, of which Reference GeschierePeter Geschiere (1982: 223–227) and Reference BurnhamPhilip Burnham (1996: 103–105) offer particularly vivid ethnographic portrayals. In the first two decades after independence, Adamaoua was a district within the vast North Province and had only a prefect and five subprefects. The local ministerial offices, including those of the Ministry of the Economy and Finance (MINEFI), which was in charge of tax collection, had no presence outside the district center, Ngaoundéré. In 1983, Adamaoua became a province and the grid of both territorial and tax administration became denser. Indeed, throughout the meeting, the prefect had emphasized (and taken a certain pride in) his representing a state that, having left behind an era during which it saw Cameroonians as a peuple-enfant (child-people) to be guided and disciplined (Reference BayartBayart 1985: 216), now listens to its citizens and is open to dialogued solutions to their problems. This view is largely consistent with that of the French proponents of la concertation in the 1960s, who conceived it as a more democratic alternative to an earlier paradigm of state-citizen relationships—that of la tutelle, in which the state administration was seen as a trustee or guardian (Reference Grémion and CrozierGrémion 1974).

However, the prefect's self-serving take on how public authority in Cameroon has changed from the time of the one-party regime to the present era of multiparty politics is not exempt from ambivalence. The same gesture that asserts la concertation as the choice of a democratic state that willingly suspends its right to repressive action acknowledges such a right. The prefect himself made this clear early on, when, after reading the DGI's letter to those in the audience, he outlined the view of la concertation as an alternative to sanctions and penalties: “If there has been [tax] evasion, we will take measures. … But since we are now in a framework of concertation, let us listen to what the different parties have to say.” At the conclusion of the meeting, he highlighted this same point in addressing the traders: “You want to work and earn your share. The state, in turn, would like to collect taxes. It is difficult. And you understand that if force is required, things can turn ugly.” These veiled threats are a common rhetorical option in interactions between officials and citizens in Adamaoua. In fact, only six months earlier the ANCBC had invited the chef provincial des impôts (provincial head of taxes) to be one of several guest speakers at a seminar on the modernization of the cattle trading profession. After a review of the different tax rules and regulations to which traders were subject, he had warned that they had better “start paying taxes before things get serious”Footnote ⁹ (Chamber of Commerce Provincial Archives 2004a). The DGI's letter gave such words a new, more consequential resonance.

In contexts where what Reference LedenevaAlena Ledeneva (1998: 77–79) calls the principle of suspended punishment holds sway, the dangers of enforcement are only too real. In Adamaoua Province, to be normally socialized in the cattle-trading profession does not entail appearing law compliant (cf. Reference SilbeySilbey 2005: 331). These cattle traders operate in an economic environment in which everyone is bound to disregard at least some of the existing formal rules—hence their concerns. Reference LedenevaLedeneva's (2006) most recent work on Russia and Ukraine in the post-Soviet era, a period similarly marked by the intensity of legal reform, shows how in such circumstances punishment for rule violation is bound to occur selectively on the basis of extralegal criteria. These are situations in which changes in the law “… can have only limited effect. This is partly because efforts from the top are difficult to sustain, and partly because any change in the formal rules introduces, and is perceived as, yet another constraint to be dealt with informally” (Reference LedenevaLedeneva 2006: 13–14). Although I find Ledeneva's arguments well founded, her word choice is unfortunate, since it unduly privileges punishment over other legal effects. I would therefore prefer to speak of suspended enforcement.

In the case at hand, the most ostensible goal of la concertation is to gradually push cattle traders toward increased compliance with the law, while temporarily renouncing a repressive stance toward them. An analysis that fails to go beyond this, however, is set to fall prey to the dichotomies that dominate many studies of state-business relations and state-society relations more generally. The scope of what can be accomplished through la concertation is certainly broader. It is also a moment of accommodation among competing government authorities. The traders know this only too well and, in this light, their role in orchestrating la concertation appears less paradoxical. They are aware that in the task of reining in an excessively ambitious tax administration they can recruit the prefect and the local representatives of MINEPIA as temporary allies. The meeting furnished ample evidence of this.

Far from being a moment for public officials to present a united front, la concertation instead morphed into an opportunity for settling scores. Reprimand, when not outright attack, was often the mode of address used by the prefect and the MINEPIA delegate toward the CCI. They took the opportunity to vent a few old, and seemingly recurrent, grudges. The MINEPIA provincial delegate made his reproaches public as soon as he was invited to speak. He reminded everyone present how the tax administration, as a matter of course, unfairly accused MINEPIA of stoking up farmers' and traders' incivisme (uncivil behavior).Footnote ¹⁰ To the embarrassed silence of the CCI, he admitted, “Frankly, I was perplexed to find out that the measures contained in the [DGI's] letter were taken without us being informed. I must say, however, that we are already used to this kind of practice on their part.” Once more, he noted, the tax authorities had shown a complete disregard for the role of MINEPIA, “which, as you all know, is held responsible for anything involving cattle.” Interestingly, the Vina cattle traders spoke with one voice throughout the meeting. Their internal conflicts were thus omitted almost completely. In fact, a sizable minority opposed the ANCBC long-term project of “professionalization” of the trade, which, many thought, would bring about tighter controls by the authorities.

For the prefect, as noted, the refusal of the tax authorities to provide revenue figures was a source of particular frustration. “If the calculations are flawed to begin with, nothing can be done. Nothing can be done!” he told the CCI at one point, seemingly overwhelmed by the intractability of the problems at hand. Yet, he reserved his stronger words for the end.

It was no accident that the prefect concluded the meeting with an unequivocal assertion of his authority: “The prefect has to be briefed. The prefect is your boss [of the CCI]. If it concerns my district, I have to be called upon. The prefect is he around whom everyone and everything [in the district] must revolve.” Not for nothing have governors, prefects, and subprefects been called chefs de terre (chiefs of the soil) in Cameroon since early independence (Reference Nkou MvondoNkou Mvondo 2002: 374). While betraying his irritation at the DGI's disregard for his role, the prefect's words closely refer to the vigorous terms in which a 1978 decree, still very much in force, defines prefects' “permanent mission of information and coordination in economic and social matters.” Specifically, prefects are entrusted with “watching over law and order and the enforcement of statutes, regulations and government decisions” (Decree 78/485 of 9 November 1978, art. 29).Footnote ¹¹ The comment of a trader over the course of a group conversation in a cattle market a couple of weeks later is revealing of how broadly the outweighing influence of prefects (and the legal texts that prescribe it) is taken for granted: “[The tax authorities] send a letter without bothering to consult the chef de terre? It's not normal! Don't they know that before taking controversial decisions they need to secure his support?”

This aspect of la concertation is a salutary reminder of the patchiness of public authority in regions and domains of activity where uncoordinated state action is pervasive. Moments for direct interaction between the prefect, who is the representative of unified governmental action at the district level, and officials in the governmental agencies in charge of cattle and taxes are few and far between. The meeting allowed them to work out the limits of their respective authority. In the following section, I explore the third proposed dimension of la concertation: its productivity as a moment for criticizing the law.

Talking Tax Law

• ANCBC PRESIDENT: It is the government that has tackled this issue outside the law. The tax advance is set at 1 percent of our turnover, but we pay 1 percent of sales not yet made.

  TRADER IN THE AUDIENCE: Indeed!

  ANCBC PRESIDENT: We have accepted a situation in which we are being taxed on our stock, whether we sell it or not. We have been paying for our stock!

  PREFECT: But surely the tax advance is lawful. It is the law. …

  CCI: It is the law that establishes …

  ANCBC PRESIDENT: Yes, it is the law [that establishes the advance], but it is a percentage of actual sales.

  PREFECT: Ah! OK.

  ANCBC PRESIDENT: It is once I have sold cattle that I should pay an advance. It is not an advance based on my unsold stock. [Consider] the owners of a store; the tax authorities do not go and tell them to pay taxes on the stock they had and burnt on a fire. …

  PREFECT: According to the law, when is it that the advance should be paid?

  CCI: After the sale takes place.

  PREFECT: Therein lies the problem.

This dialogue offers an illustration of the ways in which la concertation allows for the law to become an object of commentary and criticism. Two legal texts in particular focused the attention of participants. First, article 21 of Cameroon's general tax code establishes the duty of incorporated businesses to pay advances on income tax and sets these advances at 1 percent of their chiffre d'affaires realisé (sales). Second, Adamaoua's arrêté provincial no. 45 of September 17, 1999, establishes the obligation to pay advances on income tax when shipping cattle by train and sets these advances at 1 percent of the shipment's nominal value (150,000 CFA francs per head). Whereas the tax code consists of a collection of statutes voted on in the parliament, an arrêté provincial is a bylaw or ordinance made by a (government-appointed) provincial governor. Whereas the scope of the tax code is nationwide, the enforcement of the 1999 ordinance is limited to the provincial level. This particular ordinance has no analogue in any other province. The implication is that cattle sent to the south from railway stations in provinces other than Adamaoua, as well as cattle transactions in Adamaoua that avoid the railway, fall outside the reach of the ordinance.

In the excerpted passage, the prefect was trying to grapple with the conclusion that followed from the ANCBC president's argument: that the tax advance established in the 1999 ordinance was unlawful, because its amount was determined on the basis of commercial stock instead of on the basis of sales. It is worth mentioning in passing that this was not simply the traders' idiosyncratic interpretation but was widely shared. A senior tax official working in the national capital, for example, confided to me, “The [tax] advance is not legal. The law does not say anywhere that such an advance should be paid” (interview, Yaoundé, August 14, 2005). The issue of the ordinance's lawfulness was only one among several bones of contention, such as the verification of place of business and the certificates of tax payment mentioned in the DGI's letter, yet it aptly exemplifies different forms of engagement with the law.

On the one hand, the CCI limited himself to remind everyone what the law was. On the other hand, the traders' representative refused the CCI's entreaties to take the law at face value. Let me briefly explore these contrasting approaches. The CCI intended to establish himself as a neutral official simply aspiring to enforce existing rules. He tried to do this by adopting a decidedly pedagogical mode. In a studied, matter-of-fact manner, and taking the trouble to quote legal texts, he reminded cattle traders of the specific obligations that tax law imposed on them. The ANCBC president was adamant to put to rest the assumption that he saw underlying the CCI's didactics. Cattle traders were not semiliterate, unsophisticated villagers, as they are widely held to be. When the CCI quoted a particularly lengthy passage of the provisions regulating the taxation of cattle breeding and trade, the ANCBC president was quick to retort, “You know, we have tax code copies too. We try to make use of them.” At the time of my fieldwork, claiming for traders the status of legally competent professionals was an important item in the ANCBC's agenda. In any case, during this meeting the emphasis of the traders' position was not to remain tied to the letter of these rules but rather to question their rationale.

The 1999 provincial ordinance provided an obvious target for the traders' criticisms. The ANCBC president argued that it defied the most elementary principles of Cameroonian tax law in at least two crucial aspects. First, under the terms of the ordinance, those traders who either used means of transport other than the railway or operated in other provinces were spared the obligation to pay tax advances. “How come such norms can be adopted and not implemented uniformly all over the country?” the president wondered. Second, as can be gathered from the above-quoted dialogue, the ordinance violated the principle that commercial income tax should tax actual, not potential, income. Thus, tax advances should be only a percentage of sales. At present, cattle on their way to their final markets, and therefore not yet sold, were being taxed. As the ANCBC president forcefully put it, “The advances we pay are not on our turnover. You are making us pay on our stock. And that, we refuse!”

This internal critique of legal norms carried considerable weight in the eyes of participants. The prefect's sententious words (“Therein lies the problem”) make this much apparent. Yet, la concertation also opened up space for further questioning of the ordinance. The argument moved from denouncing its incompatibility with basic principles of the tax system to underscoring the extralegal factors that had surrounded its adoption. In this regard, the cattle traders' spokesman reminded everyone that in 1999, a critical year for the national and provincial treasuries, traders had been asked to forego their objections to the ordinance for the sake of public interest. As he put it,

Since both the prefect and the CCI had only recently been appointed to their jobs, the ANCBC president stressed, they were not privy to a longer history of concertation in which purportedly the tax administration had waived its right to collect commercial income tax proper in exchange for the traders' acceptance of the imposition of an unfair, inconsistent system of advance payments. The president's remarks were backed by the MINEPIA delegate, who saw the opportunity to score another point against the tax authorities. As he noted,

The delegate further recounted that there had actually been two ordinances. The first provoked such an outcry among farmers and traders that the governor had to call a meeting to appease them. As a result, the governor issued a second ordinance revising downward the taxable value of a head of cattle. This revision fell short of the farmers' and traders' expectations. The delegate claimed that today's problems should be seen as a consequence of their resistance to abide by regulations that the authorities had imposed in full contempt of their legitimate reservations.

The quicksand on which the letter of the law had been built was not a domain in which the CCI was ready to venture. He made clear that he did not see himself bound by the rights and wrongs of his predecessors in the provincial tax administration. He was certainly not going to abide by any alleged commitments they may have made. The CCI's lack of response notwithstanding, the ANCBC president's remarks call our attention to a powerful strand of the traders' attitudes toward compliance with tax regulations.

Many of the traders I interviewed thought of effective tax obligations as resulting from a fiscal contract open to constant revision and renegotiation. They thought the government was not living up to its responsibilities in curbing cattle theft, road banditry, beef imports, and corruption. The ANCBC, for example, had repeatedly voiced how unsatisfying it found the terms of the present contract with the government. In meetings of the ANCBC's Vina District chapter I had seen its leaders numerous times champion a process of “regularization” of business licenses as a way to detach themselves from petty traders who lacked the means to become “true professionals.” In the preparatory gathering traders held a few days before the concertation meeting, the president asked everyone present, “Can we all pay and get our papers straight?” Doing so, he argued, would allow them to push for a change in the discriminatory system of tax advances as well as to press authorities to fulfill their mission in other domains where their performance was wanting. In the closing moments of the concertation session, the CCI reiterated the tax authorities' readiness to impose penalties if traders remained uncooperative. The ANCBC president reacted by pointing out other dimensions of reciprocity implicit in the tax relationship. He reminded the CCI that too aggressive an approach to enforcement could have high political costs for the government. “With the [October 2004 presidential] elections just around the corner, I wonder if it is wise to shake everyone up in this fashion,” he warned.

The remarks of the ANCBC president and the MINEPIA delegate highlight la concertation's potential to put the fairness and consistency of law in question and to bring to the fore a conception of taxation as a bargained exchange for which legal texts have no room (cf. Reference MaurerMaurer 2007, Reference Maurer2008).Footnote ¹² This brings to the surface the limits of la concertation, in spite of all its critical potential. These limits were readily apparent to all participants. Although la concertation may temper the rigor of the law, it cannot rewrite the law. The prefect made explicit reference to these limits while reasserting the importance of such encounters between state officials and citizens:

In the prefect's rendering, la concertation, if necessary, can tone down excessively onerous aspects of the law through a flexible approach toward enforcement. At most, when the arguments of citizens are well founded, la concertation can make local authorities report to their hierarchical superiors on the undesirable outcomes that the implementation of certain laws is having.

Reassembling the Cattle Trade

In this last section, I explore the ways in which la concertation elucidates the contours of particular social fields. Here I take heed of Reference LarsonErik Larson's (2004: 470) argument that “by constructing social environments in which particular legal orientations are valorized or ignored, the regimes created to implement substantive rules impact the behavior of … participants [in any given organizational field].” As I have shown elsewhere (Reference MuñozMuñoz 2010), established norms and practices that govern cattle trading in Adamaoua Province enable and constrain regulatory action, including taxation. Out of the form that regulatory action takes, in turn, emerges a certain legal consciousness that shapes norms and practices. La concertation is a privileged moment to re-create in stylized form those norms and practices.

In the present example, the task of reconstructing the workings of the cattle-trading social field largely fell on the prefect and the MINEPIA delegate, with minor parts for other participants in the meeting. Traders themselves played almost no part in this exercise. Consider the following remarks, which the prefect proffered halfway through the meeting:

When he chose to put himself in the cattle traders' shoes, the prefect would modulate his voice to great effect: “On these dates, I sent 200 head of cattle. …” Putting his ventriloquist skills to the test, these nuggets of direct speech summed up the lessons he drew from what had been said up to that point. The hypothetical status of Abdourahmane, Youssoufa, and a third anonymous character highlighted the fragile bases of the prefect's reconstructions. To begin with, traders do not all pay their licenses. This was one of several factors behind the DGI's letter. The prefect's speculative tone was even more apparent when he tried to discern the traders' reasons for noncompliance:

In order to add a modicum of realism to these speculations, the MINEPIA provincial delegate volunteered frequent cues, based on his better grasp of what happened outside in the world of farmers, traders, herders, butchers, tax collectors, railway operators, and veterinary agents, to which the prefect was largely uninitiated.

The discussion over how to read the data generated when traders paid tax advances offers a good example of the collective elucidation of trading norms and practices. It was the MINEPIA delegate who first emphasized the incongruity between names being recorded and traders actually shipping cattle, a fact that the CCI had preferred to pass over. As the delegate explained,

The implication was that existing arrangements for the collection of tax advances did not generate a clear picture of who was trading what. The data that the railway company made available to the tax authorities were inadequate for the purposes of control.

The MINEPIA delegate's account of specific trading and documentary practices offered other participants in la concertation an opportunity to interject. For example, Ngaoundéré's subprefect, who had remained silent up to that point, proposed that the procedures for registering the payment of tax advances be changed. As he put it,

The subprefect's suggestion was dismissed offhand, despite its apparent advantages. Other participants, led by the MINEPIA delegate, deemed the proposed changes cumbersome and ill adapted to prevalent business practices.Footnote ¹³

When the meeting was approaching its end, there was a final and unsuccessful attempt to discursively re-create the traders' practices in ways that would enhance efforts to enforce the law. The provincial secretary of the chamber of commerce, a recent arrival in Adamaoua, wondered whether cattle traders kept sales books that could be used to determine their tax liabilities. “Cattle traders do not work like that,” the prefect was quick to correct him. In what had become by then his routine role of representing the traders to themselves and to the rest of the audience, he described how transactions took place without any written record:

This assertion of the authorities' dependence on the traders set the tone for the concluding moments of the meeting. If in the previous section I emphasize the limits of la concertation as a platform to criticize the law, an exam of la concertation's role in re-creating a social field of business and regulatory practice shows that its limits cut both ways. The mediation between legal texts and administrative decisions, on the one hand, and effective norms and practices, on the other, which some participants try to operate through la concertation yields at best precarious results. The traders' awareness of the degree to which effective tax collection depends on their cooperation perhaps explains their reticence to take part in the discursive reconstruction of their way of doing business. The comment of a young heir of large cattle holdings at one of the main cattle markets in the Vina Disctrict soon after this meeting took place vividly conveys widespread attitudes among traders:

The use of untranslated French administrative vocabulary in interactions such as these, which take place in Fulfulde, emphasizes its extraneous character. In this example, the addition of the part I translate as “whatever else it is” highlights the alien origin of these documents, whose names (certificat d'imposition, plan de localisation) work almost as empty signifiers in the everyday speech of traders. At times, they seemingly stand for the irreconcilability of legal texts and pragmatic norms.

In this light, the lines the prefect scripted for the traders in the excerpt quoted earlier (“On these dates, I sent 200 head of cattle. Here's what I got in Yaoundé's market, but in any case here I am filing my tax forms”) are shown for what they are: a figment of the regulatory imagination. Like the prefect, the MINEPIA delegate, in response to the subprefect's suggestions, tried to speak for the traders:

Here, the choice of direct speech underscores the delegate's slippage from a descriptive to a prescriptive register.

What Reference PierceSteven Pierce (2005: 194) writes about the land-tenure system in northern Nigeria during the colonial era resonates with this analysis of la concertation: “The records of land ownership … were in essence an elaborate fantasy, or at least were the product of a complex set of negotiations between farmers and the officials responsible for measuring their farms. In the end such records bore little resemblance to actual farm holdings.” The discursive assemblage of the cattle trade that la concertation brought about can be similarly seen as a product of the legal imagination made, in varying measure, of justificatory stigmatization and pragmatic simplification. Thus, it is perhaps not surprising that the prefect and the delegate's role-playing had a ring of wishful thinking. This exercise, in which officials ostensibly do most of the talking and traders acquiesce in silence, is the publicly dramatized counterpoint to a series of ongoing negotiations, which the ANCBC president, in a later encounter with the CCI, revealingly referred to as “a second stage of the law.”

La concertation brought home to everyone involved that, for the time being and bearing in mind present standards of the state's bureaucratic capacity, the maximalist horizon of law enforcement hinted at in the DGI's letter was unrealizable. The organization of cattle trade and transport, in the terms of the stylized version that officials jointly produced in the framework of la concertation, made regulatory failure appear almost inevitable. In fact, the only firm resolution that came out of meeting was soon conveniently forgotten. Thus, the periodic meetings of all four parties—the prefect, MINEPIA, MINEFI, and the traders—which everyone had agreed would be scheduled quarterly after the October 2004 presidential elections never took place. The goal of having individual traders disclose the full extent of their activities by filing their quarterly income-tax forms proved to be beyond reach. Instead, in the aftermath of la concertation, that year Vina District's tax authorities settled for a slight increase in the number of cattle-trading licenses.Footnote ¹⁴

The Tax on Being Absurd

“Ta wonnu loi ma [Do not spoil your law],” the ANCBC representative in Meiganga asked the head of the Mbéré District tax center. This plea captures well the nature of the processes through which legality is constructed in Adamaoua Province. Citizens, traders in the case at hand, take an active part in determining the practical fate of a law that is seen as alien (cf. Reference SaratSarat 1990: 378). In the rendering of this ANCBC leader, tax law is “yours” (the tax authorities'), not “ours” (the traders'). The law's alien origins are also signaled by the use of a French word within an utterance in Fulfulde. Further elaboration on such words is not hard to come by when one moves in trading circles. Tax law is at times portrayed as a law born out of the colonial encounter that has not changed substantially since. Within a shorter temporal horizon, traders may also treat it as the law drafted by international financial organizations in the postcolonial era. Alternatively, it may be seen as the law decided in a faraway capital by a parliament and a government lacking legitimacy or by nonlocal, transient provincial governors and other state officials similarly detached from the traders' everyday struggles.

As noted, to appear as law compliant is not part of the normal process of socialization in the cattle-trading profession in Adamaoua Province. This state of affairs, which has been the case historically, has, if anything, become starker since the late 1980s, the years that marked the beginning of a serious and long economic crisis and of substantial political transformations. I believe that the wave of reforms, which since the mid-1990s has rewritten substantial parts of the rules governing business activities, including the tax system, has only made more apparent this protracted situation of suspended enforcement. La concertation is one of the few arenas where the dilemmas that ensue from such a situation are discussed in public. Despite its conspicuous absence in debates on administrative and judicial reform in Cameroon, the gray territory mapped under the name of la concertation is a key arena for the construction of legality in the domain of administrative law in general and of tax law in particular.

La concertation offers a venue in which the refashioning of law within the social fields that it regulates can take place. However, if, as the prefect said, one of its goals is to temper the law in light of existing situations on the ground, the reticence of traders to take part in the discursive reconstruction of trading norms and practices is hardly insignificant. Building on Reference PierceSteven Pierce's (2005) insights, it could be argued that the cattle trade, as reassembled over the course of la concertation, is a product of the legal imagination. La concertation yields an imagined set of trade norms and practices that has considerable repercussions. Not least of all, it sanctions the partial implementation of the national tax code and the continued application of a provincial decree of dubious legal standing.Footnote ¹⁵

“Ta wonnu loi ma [Do not spoil your law].” The same words that establish a distance from the law (and indexically point to a broad complex of causes at the root of this distance) express a concern for its integrity, a wish not to see the majesty of the law scathed. The example that I have considered in the preceding pages invites us to take seriously similar concerns expressed by the ANCBC president about the fairness and consistency of law. It would be tempting to dismiss such concerns as excuses for continued noncompliance on the part of traders, as the CCI was happy to do. However, as Reference GoodaleMark Goodale (2009: 37) notes in another context, we should be advised that the encounter with law is also the encounter with social actors “for whom the formal conceptual and institutional dimensions of law are all important.” Cattle traders, like many of their fellow citizens in Adamaoua Province, are concerned not only with making law work to their advantage (by paying fewer taxes in this particular case), but also with ensuring that law is formally valid and conceptually coherent. To paraphrase Henry James, the traders who orchestrated and attended this session of concertation did so persuaded that if a tax on being absurd were to be levied, they would fare better than the tax authorities would.