Abstract
AbstractIn 1961, Frantz Fanon scathingly characterised the emerging African elite as a bourgeoisie of the civil service. Many have since described Africa's public sector employees as a rentier class that grew disproportionately large in relation to the continent's underdeveloped private sector. Is this characterisation still accurate? Using educational data and household budget surveys from Kenya and Tanzania, this article situates public sector employees within their respective educational hierarchies and national income distributions over time. It finds that since independence, the share of public sector employees at the top of these distributions has declined. The corollary to this is an increase in the share of private sector employees and business owners at the top, providing some cautious support for the notion of a rising private sector upper and middle class. © 2020 The Authors. Journal of International Development published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd
Highlights
Many of Africa’s early independence scholars noted that public servants comprised an unusually large share of the richest ranks of postcolonial African society and predicted that this would stifle the continent’s economic development (Fanon, 1963; Dumont, 1966; Shivji, 1976; Diamond, 1987)
The Tanzanian results tell a similar story of change to that of Kenya
Recent literature on middle classes around the world has made a distinction between an old, statist middle class and a new middle class of the postadjustment era oriented towards the private sector and entrepreneurship
Summary
Many of Africa’s early independence scholars noted that public servants comprised an unusually large share of the richest ranks of postcolonial African society and predicted that this would stifle the continent’s economic development (Fanon, 1963; Dumont, 1966; Shivji, 1976; Diamond, 1987). With the caveat that household budget surveys tend to underestimate income shares at the top of the distribution, the same sources suggest that the average annual household consumption in the top 1 per cent was $40 000 in Kenya and $23 000 in Tanzania Taking these estimates at face value suggests that only the top 1 or 2 per cent of East African households would scrape into a British middle class definition.. The Kenyan 1975 distribution, is amalgamated from several sources and is at best a rough indication of the occupational structure of society at that time It draws on the integrated rural survey (which covered roughly 75 per cent of the population), the large farm survey, the enumeration of employees, the informal sector survey, income tax statistics reports and estimates of the pastoral population by Collier and Lal (1980), as described in Appendix 1b in the Supporting Information. While far from precise, these estimates provide an indicative sense of how public sector salaries compared with earnings of households engaged in other sectors and should only cautiously be compared with the latter estimates
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