 Welcome everybody, is this on? Welcome to this other special seminar of the development studies department here at Sars. As you know, the seminar is serving as the vehicle of a book launch for the new book by my former colleague and pal, Mateo Ritza, and this is the book taken for a ride. I'm just going to say a few words about the book. Then I'm going to invite Mateo to talk about aspects of the book after 40 minutes, and then the discussion will start with another comrades here, and then we'll get some good questions and discussion going. Some years ago, I can't remember how many, Mateo will. I got to know Mateo when he came to the development studies department at Sars as a post-op fellow. He'd done his PhD in African History here, and I don't know, could we say you were a kind of refugee from the history department coming into the development studies. Two things I remember clearly in that time were, one, that under the terms of his fellowship with Mateo's responsibility of commitment was to write up and publish articles based on his PhD, but the other one I remember very clearly was his great interest in and enthusiasm for the transport workers of Dar es Salaam, because he had already been in Dar es Salaam, and got to know a lot about those workers on the buses there. Now, some years later, the book has appeared, and I'm very happy that it has, and I have just finished rereading it, because earlier I read drafts of it, parts of it, and rereading it as a whole has demonstrated to me, reminded me, of what an excellent piece of work it is. Now, I won't go into that very much, because Mateo will be talking about it, but it very unusually combines a number of distinctive strengths, it seems to me. One is, it's, the whole thing is built on a fantastic ethnography, and this has owes a lot to Mateo's command of Pisawhili, and his enjoyment, I think, of hanging out in Dar es Salaam, bus stops, various popular points in the city, popular in the classic sense of where the people meet and go about their lives. Another reason I like the book so much is that I think it has a splendid critique of a particular and perverse kind of populism, which is where the championing of the informal sector by people like Ananda De Soto, and this very strong and unfortunate post-colonial post-structuralist writing on African cities and the lives of the urban poor, converge. It's a very peculiar and, in some ways, disturbing train of ideology, which I think Mateo nails down so well and so precisely in this book, and you're going to talk about, that's none of the things you're going to talk about. Good. I also very much like the title he's taken, all its metaphorical possibilities taken for a ride, which he uses very well throughout the book, and in the conclusion there's a very nice summary of, as Mateo calls it, using this metaphor, six stops along the route that the bus or the journey takes. And, as he says, and I think it's again, for me is part of the great strength of the book, two of those stops were unexpected when he first encountered these bus workers in Dar es Salaam. One of those stops was when they organised themselves collectively, and this leads Mateo in the book to propose and to illustrate, I think, very, very well, a very finely drawn dialectic between issues of agency and structure, a more general issue in the social sciences, and I would say particularly collective agency, because the kind of de-soto-informed economy of advocacy, of course, champions individual agency, in a peculiar form, but Mateo traces, connects and analyses collective agency, so that was one stop. The other stop, I suppose, is the last stop, which I'll talk about a bit, which is that, with the more recent field work that Mateo did to complete the study, historical moment that now moved into what's called second phase neoliberalism, and this was a grandiose project, or took the form of a grandiose project, by the wild ground to introduce a BLT, bus rapid transit system in Dar es Salaam, and there's a really interesting and subtle account of how that proceeded or failed to proceed according to the vicinal fantasy of its designers, and that's something for those of you here who are developing the study students, I think together with the critique I mentioned, these are things in the book of much wider significance that you can learn from in thinking about other areas of development, theory and practical practice and policy to point at term. Last thing, I'm going to talk about marketing. This beautiful edition Oxford University Press is a beautiful edition, in terms of printing, design, it's beautifully written. This is available for you to buy, maybe. Well, we hope it will be. Afterwards at half the publisher's price, and that should be outside, so make sure that you take advantage of that offer at the end, and in addition, Matteo will sign it with Khanf's name. If he's feeling good at the end of the session, he'll sign it with his form, so welcome again to Harununis, and thank you for this same piece right here. Okay, so thank you very much, Henry, for your very warm introduction, and it's a pleasure to have you and Alana here today. And so what you have in this book is a fine grained case study on public transport, precarious labour and neoliberalism in Darsalan, which I hope upon reading you might agree can act as a micro window to understand much broader processes that are taking place beyond Darsalan. After all, the rolling back of the state, the enforcement through policy and lending conditionality of neoliberalism is the big story of the past 30 or 40 years in development studies. And this fine grained interdisciplinary political economy that draw on quite slowly carried out fieldwork. So, as Henry mentioned, this was my BA dissertation back in 1998. Then I used the same findings after an MSc in development studies as so as to write my MSc dissertation about this. Then my PhD was not about transport, but I was still in Darsalan where the archives, the national archives that I was using for my PhD in history were. And so I was finishing or even cutting shots these days in the archive to go and continue researching this topic and, in particular, the reality of working in this sector. And then there was a career break from academia. When I rejoined in 2008, I resumed the fieldwork on this subject. And by then I had kids, so very much short visits. But you have a fieldwork that takes place in 2008, 2010, 11, 12, 14, until I said, okay, let's close it. So, it's a case study about public transport, but I'm keen to make the point that it is a case study that aims to engage with theory bottom up. And we are talking about an African city, so the theory on African cities, that the huge, vastly growing field of writing about African cities and urbanisation in the South and informal economy, because these are workers operating in informal settings. So these are the two bodies of work that you directly will find an engagement with. And the first part of my presentation will be about deconstructing and, in my opinion, distracting two sets of theories approaches that become really hegemonic when it comes to writing on the city and on informal economy. These are the post-colonial narrative on African cities. And then the second one is a market fundamentalist mainstream economics. You might call it, in different ways, theorisation of economic informality. So following this, I will trace a more constructive and fertile way to study cities and labour is by illustrating the six stops that the book makes, which correspond to the chapters of the book. So to start, the post-colonial narrative is all about rejecting the idea that when we study African on Asian cities, we get stuck with this understanding that are all about chaos, dystopia, about things that don't work. They contrast this with the reading of the urban experience that is all about hope and understanding that there is an order and functionality in these cities, but we need to open our eyes to the fact that it is unconventional and not Eurocentrally defined. And I think this constant clash between chaos and the order, dystopia and hope is at the present stuck in the moment of rising hope. I think it's safe to say that post-colonial narratives, if you look at publications coming out, position of power as editors in key academic journals, key speeches given at conferences are really quite hegemonic. And what I hope to do in the next 5 or 10 minutes is interrogate this narrative about hope and alternative functionalities about understanding the theoretical implications, the empirics, which are very thin, but also the political agenda that derives from this. So post-colonial narratives tell us that we need to reject this normative, teleological and Eurocentric reading of cities in the South as dystopics. We need to move away from materialistic explanation of urban realities centered on economic failure. And we need to move beyond political economy and developmentalities, which they explain as attention and obsession with different levels of development if we are going to build a more pluralistic and more fertile post-colonial shalead urban theory. I'm going to put a few quotes so that we can share the details of the writing by these key authors. This is Simone, a very big guy in the field that says urban life should not be seen as a series of policies going wrong. Agency and determination by urban Africans to find their own way is key to understanding urban society in Africa. Peterson, director of the South African Center for Cities, complains that relocates slums with their teaming complexity in a black box devoid of complex agency and determinacy. There are very bold statements that we should reflect upon about doing without attention to materiality. And this is the book who writes about Kinshawsh and says what one needs in order to open, to turn an open space into a garage is not a building named garage but rather the idea of a garage. So all that you need these ideas to be creative and exercise your agency. You might ask where are the resources to access the building or the tools that you use in a garage to come from but this is not seeing a concern. And Robinson, who is perhaps the most famous of all these guys says that we should not understand cities in the south as dysfunction. Every city is different. We are best understanding cities as ordinary. This is our key message. So to repeat African cities and functionality if you follow this narrative do not follow the north experience but we need to understand their order and functionality nonetheless. This is not just an academic agenda. It comes with some claims to alternative politics that these different understanding sets up. These are the same guys that says the phenomenology and practices of the everyday must be the touchstones of radical imaginings and interventions. Our role as researchers committed social sciences is to recuperate the constitutive humanity and by extension generative powers of the ordinary. As we are told that African cities are built on people as infrastructure the policy formulation of a better urban future must draw on such infrastructure. Robinson again refers to the transformative potential of shared lives in diverse contested ordinary cities. My questions as I read these texts that as you might have guessed are quite convoluted as well and dense is to ask a set of layman questions about these readings and so I ask myself what is the ordinary? What do people at the grassroots of ordinary cities do every day when they get up in Africa? What do concepts such as people as infrastructure and generative powers really mean? If it's true that these powers are generative for what sources do generative powers derive and what do they actually generate? To what extent are such generative powers or transformative potential able to make a dent on the poverty that we do know exist in the cities and do such contribution have anything to say about how poverty is created in first place in the cities? Can we think of radical interventions to improve the lives of people living in poverty without addressing the root of structural causes that created in first place? Is it true and this is given as a given in these narratives that political economies analysis are by definition reductionist and prone to teleology? Or is that the cost of characterising political economy like this? When we say that every city is ordinary isn't this a form of extreme and misleading relativism? What does understanding the African urban experience in comparative terms tell? Are there other ways to think comparatively about African cities? As I apply these questions to these texts I realise that we are dealing really with an incapacity to move beyond the vague concepts. So this is a shield member, another very famous and important intellectual. The writing about Johannesburg and the responding to the criticism by Michael Watz who is a political economy about the fact that people as infrastructure doesn't really mean much. His response is that the difficulty we having to act through the provisionality that people as infrastructure is that the meaning of the tactics employed can hardly be pinned down. That might be true but the point is if you look at these texts and look where is the evidence or empirics behind these claims I wouldn't say that there is a significant field law effort before we give up by saying it's quite difficult to pin it down. Simone again along the same line say innumerable possibilities of combination and interchange that preclude any definitive judgement of efficacy or impossibilities. To be sure open ended situations, fluidity, uncertainty you don't know what will happen tomorrow but as scholars our job is to take a congregation of 3-4 million people and try to understand which of these open ended situations takes place more often than others. And then we are moving towards an analysis of informality debates. What do people as grassroots so ordinary citizens do when they wake up in the morning every day in Africa? One thing we will agree with these post-colonial scholars is that they do work in the informal economy. These are economies with very small formal sector sizes and as a result you survive by working in the informal economy. So it becomes important to understand how this kind of scholars conceptualise informal economies. And the romance goes on. This is Simone saying informal economies might act as a platform for the creation of a very different kind of sustainable urban configuration from those currently generally seen. Peterson again says, as long as the contemporary capitalist system persists uneven and highly exclusionary it is likely that it will serve the interests of the majority of the poor to retain their autonomy. Robinson again saying keywords talks about cities and shaping an autonomous and inventive future. So the keywords is here informality as exclusion from capitalist capitalism, informality as a space of autonomy from capitalist. Which leads me to the second theoretical entry point, which is the Soto or mainstream economics market fundamentalism. The Soto is famous, this quote is perhaps one of the most widely quoted quotes in development studies says, the poor do not so much break the law as the law breaks them. It reads the explosion and mushroom of informal economic activities as the reaction from below people who want to tell governments who are over regulating the economy that is better to do without regulation. So informality is a choice, a collective choice by the poor against the state over regulating the economy. And when we ask what type of workers do we find in informal economy, the Soto is again going very openly against political economy analysis when it says that Marx would have been shocked to find out how in informal economy you don't find oppressed legal weight workers, proletarians, but instead oppressed small entrepreneurs. So this narrative has been very powerful at projecting the idea that in informal economy you are dealing with a self employment, people working for themselves in very small scale business. Again, this is a conceptualization that has a very important policy relevance because from this idea of self employment as the norm in informal economy you get so much of investment of aid money into microcredit, the formalization of property rights, a set of interventions that take as a starting point the idea that the poor are self employed. And as I will go on to show the problem is that this, if this is the policy relevance of this analysis, the problem is that much of the policy that we see is irrelevant to the need and realities of poor people. So they are two different strands, they have the differences but what they do share is a misleading notion of agency, a notion of agency that fails to be rooted in a grounded understanding of what the structure of both political and economic worker against which a wise reading of people's agency needs to be placed. And there is also a very misleading conceptualization of informality as a space of autonomy and exclusion when we know from existing literature that the reality of working in informal economy is to be incorporated in the most brutal form of capitalism. You can find why I am saying the most brutal because there is no degree of regulation that might protect workers from employers. And so you have two sets of markets that poor people tend to be operating in. One is the small scale trading. So many people in Africa operate in very small scale trading and the problem of course because the scale is small, these are oversupplied markets where the competition is really cut through. And the second one is oversupplied labour market, the dramatic situation of countries with no jobs and people really struggling to even get access to these jobs if they do exist in informal economy. And that leads me to ask where does this dysfunctional, you might call me normative, I still call this dysfunctional situation where there are no jobs comes from and that's where we need to find a better way to understand urbanization in Africa in comparative terms. And the obvious starting point is to see how growth of cities in Africa and in much of Asia is not followed industrialization and this lies behind the fact that there are no jobs. In some, attention to economic and political structure and to the historical paths that underpin this economic and political structure becomes essential to begin to appreciate what agency poor people might exercise in a less romantic fight. So I take this agreement with these bodies of work and then I take it to Dar es Salaam where we are now moving and my empirical efforts through field work over the years were all rooted in applying to different aspects of this transport system the quintessential radical political economy questions that I strict to the bone and ask within public transport who owns what in public transport? If you look at the buses, if you look at the roads, if you look at the station, who does what with what they own? If you ask who owns what, then the next question is what does it change in terms of the provision of public transport ownership of what? And finally I ask once I know who owns what and who does what with it who has the power to exercise in the transport system so that the shape of the public transport system is influenced and what are the political struggles that underpin different efforts to exercise power? As the Harry say is a journey in six stops the first one is really a big picture context and this is about setting the scene and understanding the transition from public provision of public transport to private provision of public transport so here you have a deregulation, economic liberalisation and the two ism concepts that are central to make sense of this transition are neoliberalism and post-socialism. Neoliberalism is central because you do see how details of the transition in Dar es Salaam conform to a bigger picture that takes place in all other African cities and more broadly in the direction of policymakers that is about rolling back the state, opening up services to private sector provision and in the case of Tanzania since the early 90s progressively removing the state even from a regulatory framework so if you look at the mid 90s public provision was operated, was provided by private operators without any control on fair levels or any control on the number of entrants in the sector and this has very negative implications on the quality of the service because basically the provision of public transport is reduced to a kind of a Formula One raising where an oversupplied market with many mini-buses are competing in ways that really violate the most basic rules of safety in public transport. The second concept as I was telling to understand the shape of public transport is post-socialism because this pervasive regulation leads to transport chaos and this creates legitimacy problems for the government who is constantly called to comment and to intervene to improve public transport, the problems of which are before the very eyes of the public constantly debated in newspapers which I use a lot in the book to make sense of what's going on and post-socialism is about saying that we need it was developed as an idea by Ampitcha when it comes to African studies and she is complaining about the fact that when we study Africa we don't pay enough attention about the legacies of socialism and the way in which people who try to resist liberalisation but also people who try to justify their political existence following liberalisation draw on notions, ideas, concepts of the socialist era even in the context of pervasive liberalisation and post-socialism is important because time and the game you see the public sector, the state intervening in public transport matters in Dar es Salaam trying to justify these interventions as a way to reclaim some public ownership of the provision of public transport but however these are interventions that are undermined by the lack of capacity of the state that doesn't have the resources or the means to address the huge problems that the provision of public transport is experiencing. Stop 2 unpacks the private sector, so far we have talked about the transition from public provision of public transport to private provision of public transport in stop 2 we ask again who owns what, who does what in these private buses and here a worker is writing on the back, life is war what war is he talking about? A questioner was administered to over 600 workers and what I found out was the importance of a class because you have a clear cut stratification where 90% of the workforce is operating buses that they don't own so there is a class of people who own the buses and a class of 30,000 people that work on this selling the labour to the owners the problem and that the war that the worker is talking about comes again from the nature of the labour market in Tanzania this is the best way to synthesise in 4 wars actually 3 what it means to be a transport worker in Darsalam this guy is saying which means bad job comma if you have one so the idea that if you think that the dollar-dollar work is awful the problem you face is that there are thousands of people behind you who are desperate to get the job that seems awful to you and as you can imagine this oversupplied labour market has very important implication on the balance of power between bus owners and bus workers bus owners don't even wage workers and exploit them through wages they ask for a fixed sum of money at the end of each working day from the worker on top of that workers need to pay for petrol they need to pay for bribing police if necessary whatever is left at the end of the working day will be their return from work as you can imagine this sets the brutality of the working conditions in the sector you know dollar-dollar workers need to work 16 hours per day 6.7 days per week and at the end of this long working day the income that you will get to the daily return is uncertain and not very substantive here is another one talking about money torture and most importantly when it comes to understanding why the provision of public transport by the private sector is so inefficient clearly the roots of all the inefficiency of the private sector operations comes from unsolved employment problems why am I saying this because if you're going to work 16 hours per day and the last one or two trips is the money that you take home it means the speeding is a necessary strategy to survive in the labour market because the more you speed the more trips you can complete every day if you overload the bus with passengers you make more money for each trip if you refuse to ferry students because they pay a bit less you make more money for each trip so the many inefficiencies of the public transport provision by the private sector are rooted in responses and reaction by workers to very exploitative terms of the conditions of employment the second thing we do in this chapter is to look at statistics on labour because one problem that was occurring is that I was picking a story where labour and understanding of labour markets was central to understand the provision of public transport but official statistics as you can see this is the 2006 Labour force service tell that in informal economy paid employee wage workers are 0.7% while self-employment is combined 96% so the question is was I hallucinating or is there something very wrong with the way statistics on labour are created in Tanzania but broadly in developing countries and what I did was to take the questions that inform Labour force service to look at how status of employment are you a wage worker paid employee or are you self-employed are posed in English and then when I look at the Swaeli translation I was contrasting and comparing the way workers talk about their employment the terms, the words they use with the phrasing of these questions in Swaeli and what emerged from the story is a way of posing questions that makes for a worker to answer that is a wage employee impossible and forces a catch-all category respondents to suggest they are self-employed so workers are very you know one aspect that was coming out from all the interviews is this feeling of deeper disappointment about being criminalised by the public by employers as the main source of public transport problems workers are greedy workers are hooligans they don't have good manners they don't respect our students and the government is laying on this narrative of we need to clean public transport we need to get rid of these hooligans and the workers are putting forward this disappointment the best one again a guy wrote taking on this narrative of cleaning public transport he said in public transport he wrote if to wash means to clean why does the tower get dirty so he's saying this narrative of cleaning is nonsense and so the question that came from this is why do 30,000 workers occupying the same structural position operating in a city that without their services would be brought to its knee would be impossible to move around in the city why did workers fail to organise to express an institution that would represent their interest vis-a-vis the state vis-a-vis employers and what I found is that in the same way in which you need to open up the private sector you also need to unpack this notion of what does it mean to be a dollar-dollar workers there are at least three categories of different dollar-dollar workers with different roles and stakes in the labour process there are those who are given the bus from the employer they work from 4am to 10am this is physically impossible so when it comes like morning they take a break they have a two-hour rest and there is a worker on the bench who lost his previous job in a bus he's going to take over for a couple of hours get enough money to eat for a day and just survive day by day like this and then there is a third category that is the job of those who fill the buses once the bus is full by shouting the destination they get one fee, one fare and move to the other bus why does this matter because workers at least could capture from interviews on their mind was how to try to keep a foot in the labour market rather than thinking of taking on employers, the state at the same time at this stop we look at what workers actually do notwithstanding their failure to organise to have an institution that represents them against employer of the state and I studied one informal institution that put together the transport workers of one route and I tried to understand first of all how do they go about using the space to create a source of income that then creates an informal welfare system and the second thing is how do they use this money is important for this worker to keep the head above water because they use this to smooth consumption if you don't have money for food if you have a family health expenditure which is serious the party will support you, the association will support you but they also use the money to bribe policemen if one of the colleagues is impounded by the traffic police so to romanticise the everyday and the political implications of this I think it would be impossible on the basis of what I did find stop number four was dictated by events I go back in 2008 to Dar es Salaam and I find that workers have started an association called Uwamada you can see it on the left and they have been told that if they want to represent workers in Tanzania they need to become a branch of the transport trade union so there is a partnership between these workers association and the transport trade union that develops and I studied how did workers, what was the spark that led workers to organise what was the relationship between the trade union and the informal workers association once the association was formally registered what was the strategy to claim labour rights from employers and the state and the substantive gains that over nearly 10 years these efforts to formalise the employment relations in transport achieved stop number five is empirically the most difficult one because this fellow worker is saying get rich or die trying and I often ask myself when researching this topic that you clearly see hardship it looks really gruelling but what you don't know is whether this hardship is gruelling dynamics of slow micro accumulation and upward mobility or whether this is just hardship that serves to reproduce itself and as you can imagine when you are dealing with a sample there is 30,000 workers unregistered you don't have a starting point to do this but what I did was to use the informal association that I was talking about records they had a list of people who get access to the income of the association so it's a roster that is closely monitored by every single member of the association you can be comfortable that the people that 120 or so people that in 2001 were reported as transport workers genuinely were transport workers so what I did is at two points in time I asked to two different groups of workers what were the occupational whereabouts of these groups and the findings are not pretty because you find that 13 years from the first moment 48% which is nearly half of this workforce is stuck in this profession 52% has moved to other jobs where you have two groups within this subgroup the tragic stories of barn out characters characters that descend into drug consumption alcoholism and one of my informants was stoned to death because it was found stealing from a house in one of the rich areas so there is a significant amount of these workers who after being squeezed like lemons just burn out and end up in a bad way and then about half of this group moves to other job and they use the skills honed through Dala Dala Wark to move to other driving or mechanics related job the taxi driver, the private chauffeur driver, the lorry driver, a couple of them they praise the fact that these are much less hectic jobs and as well more rain marriage I was stepping back from this number what is important when we try to step out to Dara Selam and understand what the significance of this story is when I interviewed this workers in 98 and I was trying to ask what were you doing before this job what do you see your job, how long do you think you will do this job it was described invariably as a Dala Dala Wark as a passing time job you know I just lost my job just doing this for now it pays the bills but this is not where I see myself long term but for half of these people the passing time job has turned into a lifetime occupation this speaks volume to the lack of alternatives, the failure of the Tanzanian economy to create jobs the second point is there is indeed some degree of occupational mobility but we shouldn't romanticize as mainstream economics tend to do the picture of informality as a quick gene to learn entrepreneurial skills that you take them somewhere else this is a very slow pace of occupational mobility if you take 130 people no more than 3 or 4 every year can move to other things stop number 6 is about phase 2, the new phase of neoliberalism which was announced as imminent as early as in 2002 I took forever to implement and it became operational only in 2015 frustratingly when the book was going to press it was starting and so bus rapid transit, why do I call them the new phase of neoliberalism because it is about intervening in a public transportation that has become so congested as you can see in these photos and it has become like this because the state has no resources or money to intervene in the regulation of public transport and after 30 years of this the World Bank comes in and say 150 million dollars are available to completely transform the phase of public transport in Dar es Salaam we are going to double the size of each main arteries in Dar es Salaam on two lanes these bendy buses like we have them along will operate on exclusive lanes and the other two lanes is going to be private owners of cars why is this the new phase of neoliberalism again you ask who owns what in BRT, how has BRT arrived to Dar es Salaam and you can start seeing quite quickly the way in which the number of BRT by the way is growing exponentially in the cities of the south 150, 10 years ago they are scheduled to be over 300 in the next 10 years and why is this happening because there are a group of very active NGO brokers who knock on the doors of the mayors of almost every main city in Asia and Africa and they offer packages to go to Bogota to study and learn the flagship project of BRT in Colombia and these are NGOs that even if you look at their boards have a strong representatives of a big finance interest you know Goldman Sachs, a World Bank former transport advisors are overly represented in the boards of these NGOs and what's in it for finance is that through BRT you open up public transport to loans which of course needs repaying with taxpayer money so the first thing I do in this chapter is to deconstruct again the case of BRT which is suggested as this win-win intervention in public transport that is good for the poor, for the economy, for the environment and instead try to pin down what are the vested interests that push this agenda in such an aggressive and successful way but the second question is to ask why has it taken so long to implement a project that really took nearly 14 years to see the light and the story that I tried to follow is that the story of a Tanzanian interest that had a lot to lose from the introduction of BRT the Dala Dala owners, the workers, the state caught in between because there are a legitimacy issue in opening up this sector to owners that by default given the size of the investment would be foreign so the BRT project gets caught up in some very interesting nationalist politics where the government is very unsure on the one hand is committing to the work on the project is getting the loans running on the other hand is very cautious not to make worse off a number of pre-existing actors that are well-rooted in Tanzania society and we conclude by looking at the way in which political economy helps us to understand the shape of the project once it was finally launched a project that was looking very different from the way in which it was planned by the advocates of BRT Why was it different? Because when they announced the fairs of BRT remember this is a very poor country and a very poor city with lots of poor people in it BRT first would have involved more than 50% increase in public transport and you can imagine the outcry about realising that this cheap and poor project would have been actually a 50% increase in public transport so what the government did was to allow Dala Dala owners to operate in competition and in parallel to BRT so that on my last visit I was in Dar es Salaam two weeks ago you could see I have never seen social inequality so obviously in buses so you have two buses, one if you can afford 650 shillings you board a bus that operates on an exclusive line and in 25 minutes it takes you 15 km at the other hand if you can't afford that you pay 400 shillings so less than 50% and you get stuck for one and a half hours in very old and polluting and unsafe buses so the tragedy is that scarce resource public funding is being earmarked to serve the loan for a project that is unfit for being poor final stop this guy is saying we are also human and I agree there is a desperate need of bringing real living people at the centre of the studies of cities and informal economies people that are very often displaced in my opinion by both the post-colonial narrative and the mainstream economics narrative on informality ordinary cities are actually extraordinary cities I think they are cities of ghosts because you have this amorphous urban poor people at the grassroots the everyday a number of market concepts in which all you know is that these people are unhinged from the material, the economic which are as we know central aspects of everyday life so there is a post-colonial incapacity or lack of interest in pinning down materiality which of course has a serious implication on the capacity to imagine radical intervention because when it gets real you can't use very effectively concepts such as people as infrastructure or the generative powers of the everyday in any meaningful way so in some post-colonial emphasis on the agency and creative virtues of the poor is seriously misleading in that it lacks attention to the economic and political structure in which the poor are located and so for me rescuing the humanity of the poor was about giving voice space to the tragedy of the lives and careers of these people this is Dottu, a life spent filling buses in Darsalans any man with a sound brain knows that shouting a destination and pulling people into a bus is not a job we do it because we are in trouble and then I think it says a very important thing cleverness without results is pointless and this is where so much writing on urban Africa and informal economy gets it wrong mistaking the heroic efforts to make ends meet an impossible situation with a capacity to shape the reality out there that poor people simply do not easily command even more grim story from another guy, I can't put the photo because this guy is an orcolist it was 10 am when I interviewed him and he was already drunk we sit here, we talk, a life of trouble, deep trouble, you sit with hunger and you see me today I haven't got a bus or anything else this guy is in Dars, his family and kids are in Tanga a few hundred miles away he's stuck, I can't go and visit when things are going well how can I go when I haven't got even the money for breakfast I will have to go and see them with enough money, not with 10,000 shillings so you need a job, 100,000 shillings at least to go there the money for the bus ticket to and from Tanga, clothes from my parents and family and enough money to use while I'm there how can you get this money without work? we live like birds, actually a bird is better off as he knows that he will live there is no way out so there was a serious disconnect between the bitter disappointment and despondency of these guys and what I was reading as a theoretical entry point of my work so Peter says, worry that we shouldn't see material deprivation as the only lens to which we understand cities in the south my concern is the opposite, it is about this flow of romantic unsubstantiated celebration of the everyday and why am I concerned because I think these narratives that become so hegemonic are systematically crowding out an understanding of the concrete realities ordinary urban residents actually face and therefore crowding out a study of the possibility for overcoming the challenges of their lives the second and final point I want to make is that instead of these romans about our agency historically and empirically grounded political economy remains the best approach at our disposal he does a great job for opening the door to accounting for empirical deference, complexity but without falling into extreme relatives as much of the scholarship I was talking about does so we go back to this original question, what defines the urban experience in Africa in contrast to other parts of the world and I would say to cut a long story short that we do need to do prior conceptual work and also a lot more of empirics than much of the literature does but the key points are that different levels of capitalist development do matter because they result in marked differences about level of economic growth and of course the urban outcomes and urban possibilities, how do you abstract from different levels of capitalist development so in some what we do need to do to take structure and agency more seriously is to have a contextualized understanding of urban capitalism and that today means the study of neoliberalist extension and contestations of which Taken for a Ride wants to be a contribution I stop at that, thank you I think Alana has some brief comments and questions and then we'll open it up Thank you very much and it's hard to follow Matteo's act so I'm going to be very brief As was mentioned before I'm from the International Transport Workers Federation which is a global union federation in the transport industry at the moment we have over 700 trade unions affiliated to us representing about 19 million transport workers and it's been absolutely brilliant working and getting to know Matteo and his research because all his knowledge and analysis has a very direct and concrete relevance to the campaigning, bargaining and organizing strategies of trade unions so we've been able to make available some of the ideas that he's developed in his book to the members and leaders of the trade unions that are affiliated to us and one of my dreams is that we'll find a way of developing some popular worker education material based on the research that is written up in the book I'm going to make a few comments linked to the two questions that I want to ask Matteo The one is related to the vision that we try to develop in the trade union movement for public transport so I want to situate the book in the wider context of the crisis in public transport in most developing cities around the world We know that there's increasing urbanization and that public transport is not expanding fast enough to meet the mobility needs of the populations of most developing cities We know there's terrible congestion, we saw the photograph that Matteo showed us and we also know that there hasn't been a significant modal shift from private cars to public transport in line with what the science tells us is required in order to address climate change so transport is the one sector where emissions are still rising so I think the question that I have Matteo is given this crisis and the need to address mobility needs Does your book run the risk of resisting interventions like BRT which is attempting to address this crisis without proposing a compelling alternative? I asked that question because these are some of the questions that we ourselves as trade unions are having to address The second question I've got is that I think the book has so many strengths but the one strength that really stood out for me is the very detailed focus on labour issues and I think what I really loved about the book is that Matteo does not speak on behalf of workers through the many interviews that you've done and the hours of listening to workers in their own language they really speak for themselves in the book and much of what we've heard from the transport workers in Darius Alarm is also true for transport workers in many other cities common problems and issues and challenges and we also know that BRT is faced by many of those workers so my question is what would you say are the most significant lessons for workers' struggles in other countries for public transport drawing on the findings of your book Thank you Havana for the great questions So let's start with the second one So what can we learn from Tanzania for workers' struggles elsewhere? Is he on? So the events that I analysed and described in the book are context specific and they are also open-ended there is a lot of struggles that you don't know until you see the end how they are going to pan out so the start of what has to be, the findings are not replicable but you can draw some important general considerations about workers' possibility elsewhere so I would say there are three aspects that one can generalise about the first one is about trade union and informals what's the relationship between trade union and informals how can you best lay a relationship that is likely to generate a strong workers action and I think for me they are about process these are very slowly developing partnerships so the informals and the transport workers basically spent the first two and a half years just getting to know each other I have all these correspondence which is fascinating where the Dalla Dalla worker chairman is writing a long letter about the economics of working Dalla Dalla what does it mean to be a Dalla Dalla worker and at the same time the transport worker is educating the worker association leaders about how do you maneuver the Tanzanian state bureaucracy so there is a process of knowing each other that doesn't easily fit with the time frames of a development aid project that impose unrealistic three four years timeline so that's the first thing, it took the best part of three four years to get the ball rolling and then nearly a decade of mobilisation in different ways that I tried to describe in the book the second one is that workers, the informal workers leadership is central in the process of organisation is central to the chances of success these were workers that kickstarted the association of the workers they were then told you need to approach the transport trade union for a set of bureaucratic reasons but throughout the process they did maintain some considerable level of leadership in the process so that the lesson for unions would be you don't easily go and organise areas where there's not a strong enough movement before trade unions to build upon and I think also to be fair to unions co2t, the formal transport trade union is investing resources, facilitating the organisation of these workers and that is important because there is a lot of literature that suggests that unions are not interested or very cynical in organising informals that might be the case in many instances but there is also genuine case studies of trying to break new ground to respond to important changes and challenges in the labour market so that's the first one, let's not over generalise the second one is again as I was saying in the conclusion methodological, class based, political economy is central to make sense of the relationship with trade unions and informals too often you read so much of the writing about informality where you don't get shown who owns what, who does what and yet we are pontificating on why the informal traders behave politically the way they do I think I'm all for pinning down the basics of who owns what and the materiality and how this opens up the door to understanding the political interests of people in the process and related to that political economy does allow to locate workers in these economic and political structures and by no means is functionalised by definition these posing these questions if you are serious about field work really leaves you with a lot of work to do to understand what is actually going on and finally the generalisation that you can get from this case study on organising the informal economy is that its findings sits at odds and challenge very influential writing in development studies about the fact that writes a work and organising at the workplace belong to the past so here I have in mind the work of a very important and in many ways progressive guys like Guy Standing or James Ferguson they push a basic income or universal basic income grant on the basis that the complexity of labour market and the invisibility of employers makes workplace struggles very unlikely to succeed I would say instead let's look at different sectors, different degree of powers by different type of workers and even that doesn't tell you the whole story because then you need to understand how political power is claimed through organisation but I would say let's not celebrate the funeral of organised labour when there is so much new forms of labour organising taking place so that's the first one, going to BRT given the urgency of addressing mobility needs do we run the risk of resisting intervention like BRT two things I would say here, one is what ITF is also trying to do to get in early with BRT is fundamental because by the time the buses are running you can do very little as an organisation to defend the workers from job losses so getting early in the negotiation process like you guys are trying to do in Nairobi can open the door for meaningful gains in resisting the impacts of BRT but deep inside for me you can quote me on this but BRT is a scam because it is advocated as this financially self sufficient proper public transport intervention that is good for the environment as well once you see it every time after it starts operating it becomes clear that it needs subsidies to be sustainable it does frame out of this improved public transport the poor or of course cannot even consider a 50% increase in unfairs and it distorts the use of taxpayer money so I often ask myself why is Tanzania which is one of the poorest countries in the world needs to have buses they are so high tech which of course mean that infrastructure will cost a lot more because it needs to tolerate the tonnage of this high tech infrastructure so I would say the challenge for unions and for people who want to resist BRT and not buy this wind wind narrative that comes with BRT is how do you develop alternatives because the problem is what is the capacity for unions or scholars on their own to develop credible and fully costed alternative to BRT it requires a lot of effort and money but I think what I have in mind is why can't you put forward programs to help existing owners to capitalise and have a less hold, less polluting and perhaps link this to better labour standards which will result of course the issue of poor provision of public transport but these are issues that are completely ignored and I think the response is to be when people start saying what's your alternative I say let's build this alternative, let's create space and funds to study this alternative and as the first step is let's look in a more honest way at the many problems that BRT implementations comes with Just a small footnote, the framing of BRT plus rapid transport, which Matteo discusses very well in the book, is that its primary vehicle in terms of finance is public-private partnerships that in itself raises a whole number of problematic issues which should perhaps be kept separate from the environmental gains that evidently come from effective public transport systems that reduce private car ownership and so on When I read the book I was just thinking about this country all the time because I have a generation that remembers this person called Margaret Thatcher Margaret Thatcher had an absolute hatred of the railways which seemed irrational at the time, it seemed even more irrational in retrospect and one of the objectives of her period in office was to move freight off the railways onto Britain's roads and a lot of problems of Britain's roads are because of that displacement of freight traffic from the railways to why did she hate railways so much My own guess is that railways are intrinsically public goods, they privatise railways with pretty disastrous results as well as moving freight from rail to road in this very small country we inhabit with massive social costs Anyway, that's my little, so now we're open for questions, comments, both the issues which can be to Matteo or something along the way specifically on trade union issues of transport, behind you the first one Thank you so much, I really, I read your book, I really enjoyed how you tried to not create an amorphous urban poor and really allow people to speak on their own behalf I'm just wondering, I know you, when you finish writing this book it sort of leaves off at a certain time of the BRT project and there's a certain compromise that's worked out between the government and Dalla Dalla workers I'm wondering on your most recent trip what you learned from the context that you've been talking to about this compromise and how it's being negotiated with the Dalla Dalla workers with BRT in November 2017 Thank you very much for your talk, that's very interesting, when Henry said that you were very well known amongst the transport workers I thought you'd actually been caught many times travelling without paying your fare My question actually is serious, I better declare my lack of credentials, I don't know anything about Dara Salam, Tanzania or East Africa, so my question may be very, very naive In one of the photographs you showed I inferred that about 40% of the traffic was not in fact a bus but privately owned and I was wondering is there a means by which, I mean I don't know people who own their own vehicles how much richer they are than the general poor people are travelling on the buses referring to Is there a means by which it would be possible to introduce congestion charging, you have people who are collecting the tolls that would create employment and if you can facilitate public transport covering fare distances in a short time Is there a means by which that would generate more employment because you've got the infrastructure, there might be more entrepreneurs setting up their businesses and then creating more employment but I don't know whether that would fit in the context of Tanzania, I'm completely ignorant I admit that First of all when the project was first launched the World Bank was very aggressively saying whoever operates this system will be decided by market and market credentials, we can't interfere with this we're going to make investors run away and whoever gets to operate this system needs to have a previous track record Which of course cut out Tanzanians from ownership of the project but that creates political pressures on the leadership that was meant to intervene to unlock this situation and at this particular time also Tanzanian politics are very rapidly changing So the Magufuli as you know is the new president that came in in 2015 one of his key political capitals and slogans is to protect Tanzanian's interest from this dumping by foreign company and from patterns of the regulation that leads to very little poverty reduction So what happened is that the project reached a standstill where the infrastructure was ready but there were no buses because the World Bank and the Tanzania government could not agree on who was to operate As a compromise Uda which was the former public sector company was privatized and then the rumor is the sound of the president behind it but Uda starts ordering this is a Tanzanian company hundreds of buses without the permission of BRT and then they say we are going to operate BRT The World Bank had a major panic about this because a they weren't ordering the right buses but b because they wanted more efficient and larger operators to operate this Now it seems that the Tanzanian ownership of the project is there to stay because whoever will win the not entering tender but the long term when you get 20 years of revenue will have to put in place a credible plan to incorporate the pre-existing Uda in this But this is not enough for Uda we say we don't need anyone from outside we're going to run it just Tanzanians ourselves so basically what's happening now is the project is caught up in this nationalist politics But also there is the biggest issue this issue of fares because 650 sheings was not acceptable to the public and that led to the allowing or Dala Dala to operate in parallel which was not in the plans but that kills a lot of the revenue of BRT So the BRT is saying in this way after one year we're going to go bust but the minute you ask for subsidies Dala Dala start saying hey we have operated 30 years without subsidies you put the fees up and you want now subsidies as well so it's a very explosive situation in which it depends who will prevail but these are the kind of drivers of the politics Access of the poor is not their requirement of subsidies and the foreign versus domestic commercial Your point is very interesting the photo you spoke to the key issue that the key source of congestions in Dar es Salaam is that the use of full by full with one or two people in it you know you're talking about more than 100,000 cars on the streets every day as opposed to 7,000 mini buses so it's interesting how BRT targets the displacement of 7,000 and does nothing about congestions I think when you are talking about intervention at the end of the life of BRT will cost more than one billion dollars everything is possible in terms of technological change but the problem is congestions in charge is quite a soft intervention You know you put all the technology and digitalization is important but you don't need to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to redo the streets and therefore finance is not so angry about congestive charges because it doesn't create one billion dollars of revenue and the loans that find the market So I think it's a very interesting question yours but the answer is solutions to public transport problems don't get decided on the basis of a common good it's more that we move from a situation of lack of interventions because there was no funding available to a situation where a certain cartel has been very successful in pinning down the Tanzanian state to a loan that has now 150 million dollars. Now phase 2 has been constructed, that's the game. I have a franchise which will end in 10 years or something like that. Yeah but they are now investing in an infrastructure that has designed the roads to carry these buses you know when you get to the stop it opens aligned with the station is designed as a full package that costs a lot of money because of all these complexities. Yeah the BLT project that Matteo described in the book does involve a lot of road building in the city because there are going to be these dedicated lanes for the buses as well as smart cards and all kinds of other accrupturements of civilization. No queuing, no job collecting money on the buses, it's all going to be smart card. Okay, other questions. Right, one, two, three. At the back first here. Bari Zagioni, from across the border in Nairobi. I just wanted to ask because I've done some interesting work with Matatu's in Nairobi and I wanted to ask if you've looked at the incentive structures around the Dala Dala industry in Tanzania because one thing we found was for example asking why do Matatu drivers drive so badly and we thought it was a cultural behavioural issue and it was, it wasn't, it turns out that they are pushed to do this by the owners of the vans themselves. And then when you ask the van owners why you're pushing the drivers to do this, they say I've taken out a loan at 18%, I have to have this thing, make as much money as it can. So there's this incentive structure that flows down which then drives behaviour and not the other way around and that probably and I was wondering if you looked at that in relation to the Dala Dala industry and secondly just on the question of solutions have you looked at you know complementary solutions. So one of the things we looked at was for example a trunk railway line in Nairobi to take traffic off the major roads which is where you get the major traffic. But to keep Matatu's to do the point to point transport because that's what they're really good at while they're terrible on the highways. And so those sorts of integrated solutions where you do have to build some infrastructure but at the same time you keep what the existing industry is very very good at. Thank you Matiu. So this is, I mean you've already said maybe a few of the things I wanted to ask but having spent, I mean I've spent about the last six to seven years trying to oppose BRT projects in Lahore, Pakistan through discourse and other kinds of sort of interventions. And one of the sort of bizarre things which you just sort of pointed out is that they're willing to spend billions to get rid of these 7000 vehicles instead of the others. So in Lahore sort of the policy framework is ridiculous. So one you have the building of BRTs and on the other side you have the building of signal free corridors. Signal free corridors. I mean I don't know if you understand what they are but these are sort of pro-car. So existing roads are being converted into signal free roads to encourage cars. So on one side we have these bus rapid transit projects being developed. On the other side we have the signal free corridors which are actually designed for making car transport more efficient being designed. So it's this sort of bizarre situation where actually BRTs aren't solving creating sort of public transport for all. They're actually sort of creating sort of this intervention within labour transport regimes. And even within that a peculiarly sort of ridiculous one given subsidies and the involvement of foreign capital. But the other question I sort of had was, so you did sort of say and I appreciate the theoretical interventions but I also think that maybe they also come up with their own sort of problems at least in terms of opening it up. So this idea of chaos for example and you said short there is a level of dysfunction within Dar es Salaam. There's a level of dysfunction within Lahore for example. But in a sense this is part of the discourse that justifies the BRT intervention. So when we say public transport is chaotic and the middle class or upper classes sort of say oh public transport is chaotic we can't use it. Therefore you need something like the BRT to come in. When even after the BRT comes in this class only uses it as a tourist sort of site. So I mean my family will go there as this you know oh we got on the BRT once in five years and it's some tourist experience. But what in Lahore happened is when the BRT was introduced over a 27 kilometre route five or six other forms of public transport that served the same route were actually banned. So they actually the competition angle was completely eliminated. And the question for me is when we sort of use this chaos discourse does it not sort of allow or open up our cities to sort of external intervention designed for the entry of foreign capital. And how do we sort of resist those projects without fetishizing these form of labour practices. So also not fantasizing or fetishizing the existing modes of public transport. Thank you. You said that like 300 more BRT projects are planned throughout the world and well we just heard his criticism. I wondered like how mainstream is BRT criticism becoming and how likely do you see change happening. And also if you can point to some cities where which you think are doing something different and doing it very well. Thanks sir. I think I'll invite the chair to respond now. So the incentives questions I did look as I explained in my presentation at the employer employee relationship and this triggers these incentives to a provision of public transport that is safe and comfortable for passengers. Because these guys need to run and overload the vehicle as a matter of fact if they want to have a chance to get some daily return from work at the end of the day. Your point about owners saying I've taken out a loan. I need to repay. It's fascinating how even two countries across the border that how different it is. So for instance studying owners of Dala Dala is very difficult to access them. You don't have companies you need to basically word of mouth get them. The existing studies that we do have point to the fact that personal savings as opposed to loans are a key source of money to buy the past. So repayments of loans is not such a driver of the incentives by owners by in any case what is problematic about this story is that workers already have a stretch the working day to the very end. It's not that the owners for me the incentives works that the owners knows that workers have no bargaining power on a one to one basis to negotiate on how much money they want to be taken back. To them every day. And so they push this fee up very up and is consistently the same fee across the sector depending on the age of the car or the size of the car. Other than that they know that in this way they will get. It's a quite interesting arrangement because basically it's a type of work where the amount that you bring to the owner at the end of the day is known. Whether workers will get anything back is unknown. So owners after they put this arrangement in place can sit back and wait for the FTSAM at the end of each day to be delivered. If not they will forgive them maybe for one day or two after which they will proceed to finding another fresher maybe driver and conductor on the integrated solutions. Again you know one thing I learned by studying public transport in details is how political the decisions about solutions to public transport are. So I really shy away from saying what could I do if I was the mayor of Dar es Salaam or what are the technological choices that allow us to have a better public transport system. Because it is blatantly the case that big changes are coming because of very big players in international development who are pushing an agenda without much consideration to what the alternatives might be. And that's why challenging BRT narratives becomes important because you wouldn't know that there are such significant problems with BRT if you read 95, 99% of the existing literature. This is not a small literature by the way. Laura, I didn't know that you were responding to BRT. I was talking about chaos as the postcolonial disagreement about cities as chaos. To me it is correct and important to report how dysfunctional the situation has become in public transport. There's no denying that some degree of intervention needs to take place. And I don't think this opens the door to BRT interventions because there could be other solutions to this crisis which is a crisis that could be elaborated and invested upon. But the problem is again about monopoly over ideas. At the moment there is this lobby that has captured the funding of the key players, the eyes of most mayors. The trips of mayors from cities in Asia and Africa to Bogota, you are talking about over 100 mayors who are taking executive flights, nice accommodation to see how beautiful Bogota Transpillanean is. From that they take you to Washington to talk to the World Bank and that's how they open up these things. For me we need to continue calling it a chaos because this is what it is but that doesn't necessarily open the door to that fix as an intervention. Are there BRT that works better? The flagship of BRT is in Bogota in Colombia. And again some of the issues that I was describing about the Islam are also visible there. I think that the politics and implementation of BRT might differ a lot from context by context. But the tension that it generates are, as far as I can tell from review of literature, quite endemic so to speak. What are they? They come as a package which is a PPP as Henry was a public-private partnership. And then you have already from the outset very powerful asymmetries between what is the capacity of a public sector part of the partnership to negotiate and bargain over the contracts, the revenue guarantee clause that gets negotiated very early in the life of the project, vis-à-vis mega transport companies that have been rolling this project. So I'll give you this example about the Islam. Once the government doesn't have the guts to frame out the Daladalas from the root, it means they are taking away shares of the market from BRT. But BRT will complain and say hey you gave me an idea that I was going to get 100% of the market now I'm getting 50%. And there will be a contract with the revenue clause that means this is at the loss of the taxpayer because the government will have to subsidise the revenue. So I think that is a structure of tension. BRT are advertised as something that is self-sufficient once you do the infrastructure, they very rarely are. BRT requires some increases in fair levels and as a result they exclude the poor from public transport. The concentration of ownership of public transport is reduced to a handful of big companies or families like in the case of Bogota. So the politics of these issues will vary from context to context but it's not surprising the way it's set up that BRT results in these problems. They are structural characteristics of the project that we are dealing and talking about. Hi Mathew. It's really interesting that most of the questions are focusing on BRT and if you want to talk with me in the expert there it is. But I think this story, this narrative that you're weaving is about the people in the story. And you've said a couple of times about how saturated their working lives are, 16 hours a day, 6.7 days a week. But knowing some of those lives as I do as well, I know that these people have got second income streams and third income streams and fourth income streams going on at the same time. There's layers of the informal economy going throughout this narrative as well. Do you look at that in the book and what's your thoughts about that? I mean, I know drivers who get up at 4 to do two hours' work shift at the abattoir before getting in the bus and driving a 16 hour day. Thanks for your talk. I was wondering if you could maybe elaborate a little bit more on the resonance of Tanzania's experience of socialism for the labour movement today. I was fortunate enough to spend some time in Tanzania over the summer and when I came home my parents asked me if there's any sort of words that I'd learnt in case we're healy. And they sort of laughed when Mapinduzy was the first one that I said which means revolution. Because it's some of the lots of the conversations that I had with people in Dar es Salaam particularly one outside a bookshop for quite a few hours. We spoke quite a long time about Narare and there was quite a complex and sincere attachment to him as well as like an excitement about talking about lots of other African freedom fighters that we came up in the conversation. So I guess my question is like whether there's a sort of strand in the union organising or movement that sort of self consciously conceives of itself within this radical tradition and what sort of impact that continues to have. Your question, other income streams, my sense you know first of all remember stop number five is about tracing where people go from here right. And so in terms of long term outcome from this kind of activities there is a disturbing picture about 50% being stuck, the other 40% moving to other transport related jobs together with the burnout. In my instance I asked quite a lot whether there was more on the side in addition to this and they seem to be talking about a work that is the only activity that they rely on. And the problem is if you get a good win and you get three or four days where the car is functioning, the police doesn't disturb you, you can also accumulate some small money that might trigger other activities but systematically you say because it's so easy to lose the job. You are on the bench relying for these two, three hours of work and eating away your small capital. So I don't have a sense of these people are, they are stuck in this bus with the exception of two, three hours and they're not chasing other ventures. They are just recovering ready for the next six, seven hours. Those who are chronically on the bench are more maybe moving but they are just spraying themselves very thin with those old sorts of micro survival activities but I don't get this sense of otherwise I would say they would move on to other things after a while and they don't. Is there any resonance of Tanzania socialism in the way unions behave? In the effort by workers to claim for employment contracts, labour rights, socialism and the values of public ownership and the treating workers fairly is used endlessly in the letters to authority in the letter between the association of workers and the trade union itself. That's why as I was explaining my talk I found this literature on post socialism quite revealing because at the end of the day Tanzania fully turned its back to socialism but the moral power and influence of Nyerere has never vanished and that's why today with these new presidents it's quite interesting how it's really pushing back the role of the state but these might have disturbing implications for workers and the unions because it seems more like the developmental authoritarianism that Maguful is trying to bring in place and that as we know from other contexts might well result in the crashing of organised labour activities and all the effort will be on accumulating and industrialization of building sustainable factories. A bit of a provocation to have a bit of fun. So an important part of your story is also methodological. You give us your take on how self employment and wage employment is defined and indeed the representation of people at the workplace is crucial to understand also collective action. So if I put my mask of the sort and I say well that owner of the car is actually a rentier who's charging a rent for these vehicle assets and these guys are just self employed heroes who pay so hiring this car and then trying to make a living out of it. How would you respond to that? I'm just saying this because this is not just a pedantic methodological discussion when we get lost in semantics. Just think about the contradictions in how delivery workers and Uber drivers have been defined in recent court cases. Exactly a very similar type of employment relationship but two completely different outcomes. Hi Mateo, thanks very much for the presentation. We've heard a lot about this incentive structure in terms of valedala drivers having to pay a daily amount to owners and it seems like a very simplistic. I'm sure this is discussing your book which I haven't read yet. Sorry that kind of incentive structure, a simple solution would be to invert that incentive structure whereby owners would actually pay drivers a set amount for day. It's called a wage of a language. Old fashion. Old fashion I know. Obviously that would change the risk that the uncertainty in the risk would be placed on the owners rather than the workers. But I'd like to hear from you a bit of, is there a debate around changing the kind of employment regulations in the sector as a kind of short term fix. Hi there. Thank you so much for a very interesting talk. It was very interesting. It's kind of, my question is a unification of a couple of come before already actually, mainly linked into your point that you said you wanted to study why in particular, this particular moment, at this particular moment, this informal sector chose to unionise or to come to an association in the way that it did. Again, it might be covered in your book so apologies if I'm asking for spoilers in that regard. But I would wonder if you could comment on that. And also how you might see this association developing in the future, particularly with regard to other countries in sub-Saharan Africa, such as South Africa recently where an informal sector in the form of taxis seems to have quite a lot of political power in recent years as emblemised by recent strikes. So if you could comment on that, that'd be great. Thank you. Okay. Thank you very much. So starting with the SOTU. They are technically, if you say, they are renting the car, but they are renting the car because employers take advantage of their power in the labour market to deprive these workers even of the status of being a worker so that they don't know what to do. They don't know who is working for them. And so I agree. These are not pedantic issues and we need to stick to the bottom. Okay. Self-employment must have some degree of entrepreneurship attached to it. In this particular case, it's not the case. And I think what it becomes then crucial is to look at how these guys, even including Uber and delivery, see themselves. What is interesting is when these guys do manage to organise, the first step is what do we want? When do we explain to the union and say we want employment contracts? So they are, if you want to call them rentier, you can, but they are people that operate buses so which they don't own even a sticker. And when they do organise, they ask, we want to end this fiction that we don't work for this, we want employment contracts. So that is linked to Kevin's question about is there a regulation, a debate about employment regulation? This is all, by the way, discussed in the book. And when they do organise, they start putting pressure on the regulator. The starting point is the Tanzania state doesn't know and doesn't want to know who operates these buses. If I own a bus, I go to the vehicle inspection, I show that I paid income tax and I get my license. But following years of wildcat strikes, protests that could not be too confrontational but nonetheless significant enough to turn the heat on the state to regulate, act as a diplomat between the two parties, a regulation have changed so that if you want to get given a license to operate as a public transport private operators, you need to bring as part of your documentation the contracts of the workers. So these are all victories of these guys, slowly but surely. Of course you can bring your cousins with a contract. These are of course doctoring the contracts, but as the union says, for us it means that the roomful manoeuvres for people who want to bypass labour regulation is getting smaller and smaller. Because the day this guy, my worker is caught on the bus and the contract, we look at the contract and this guy is going to end up in labour court. And the union is picking up on this and much of their work is to defend workers in court because they had a contract but it was put aside. So there is been a key target of the organising to change the incentive structure. They got some legal victories as you know, legal victories, one thing, victory in the real world is another, but the step is not small because the room for cheating and bypassing labour regulation is really formally shrunk. Why did they organise at that particular point and where is this going? The organisation is fascinating, you know, we all experienced that, we get stuck with the same problem, sometimes a spark leads us to do something different. The story was that one worker was involved in a serious accident, the owner disowned it, said, you deal with it. The workers were forced of course to emergency collection of money to get this guy out of jail. And then four or five of them say, okay, we don't continue this on a hard dock basis, we want to start an association. And from that, you know, this is all explained and analysed in chapter five, there is a long journey that takes three years to the formal registration of the association and that gets involved in the struggles that I was explaining to them. So where is this going? Although the formal trade union and the association have a good partnership that leads to achievable results is full of tensions as well because the informals feel that they have become a branch, they are paying some fees, they don't get any weight within the union that is dominated by aviation workers, you know, railway workers. So this is the classic story of the informals that might be organised, but how do you change the power within the union that involves many formal sector stories is not an easy story. So after two, three years, the informals exited the union and started their own trade union. So the association has now given life to Tarwotu, which is road workers, Tanzania road workers union. So on the one hand this is disturbing because the labour movement is fragmented and that allows room for employers or BRT to manipulate things, but on the other hand as an offshoot of this partnership you have now an informal workers union formally registered and fully controlled by the workers themselves. And so when BRT really hits the farm and it starts really phasing out all the dollar-dallas, what you will see I think is that Co2T, which is the formal sector transport union, will be quite happy about BRT because this is a big company, it's easier to organise, much easier than dollar-dallas owners, while Tarwotu, which is the informal workers union, will be concerned about the loss of 20,000 jobs which are their constituency. So union politics will play themselves up like this I think. That's Mateo, except as you and the dollar-dallas workers point out, again whether one pulls this at job is exactly part of the much more widespread series of issues about work and employment and income and survival and capitalism today. I'd like to thank everybody here for very good questions and observations to thank Mateo, to thank Alana and perhaps to urge Mateo to rush out to sign any copies of the book for those who want to read further. Some of the very good questions are in fact questions of the material in the book does cover. So thank you all and thank you.