‘Double Capture’ and De-Democratisation: Interest Group Politics and Uganda’s ‘Transport Mafia’

Abstract

This article analyses problems of interest representation and democratic consolidation, using a case study of the Uganda Taxi Operators and Drivers Association (UTODA). It shows how apparently representative organisational forms can exploit the majority of their members, bolstering the power of political-economic elites who straddle the statesociety divide, as well as how such organisations can undermine the foundations for democratic consolidation more broadly. Challenging conventional understandings of 'state capture', the paper argues that UTODA's organisational power instead evolved through processes conceptualised as 'double capture': first, the government infiltrated the informal transport sector, but subsequently the transport organisation came to wield disproportionate influence over the state itself, with detrimental effects on both urban services and popular representation. The long-term domination by this authoritarian organisation meant that even after its downfall in 2011 there was little organisational capacity to build on in the sector, facilitating the reassertion of top-down governmental control.

Minibus taxis in Kampala's paratransit system: Operations, economics and efficiency

“…It also led to excessive competition between drivers seeking to maximize their profits, and left commuters with no choice but to travel in often overloaded and unroadworthy vehicles that seldom adhered to traffic rules. Goodfellow (2017) argues that the laxity in regulation enforcement and the subsequent chaos in the paratransit industry are not coincidental: the situation serves the economic and political purposes of the political elites who use the minibus taxi industry for political mobilization.…”

“…Management controversy, exploitation, inefficiency and political interference are rife in Kampala's minibus taxi industry (Goodfellow, 2010(Goodfellow, , 2012(Goodfellow, , 2017Phillips and Mesharch, 2018). In the early 1990s the first attempt to manage the informal taxi industry through the monopolistic Uganda Taxi Operators and Drivers Association (UTODA) resulted in a deadlock that Goodfellow (2017) refers to as the "double capture".…”

“…The result of this laissez-faire manner of running the transport industry was exploitation of drivers and an inefficient transport service. Today the bad practices of UTODA still haunt the minibus taxi industry: the regulations are not fully implemented; the drivers and other sector employees do not fully benefit from the industry; and commuters have to suffer an inefficient service riddled with delays and high and inconsistent fares, and lacking standardized routes and schedules information (Ndibatya et al, 2016;Goodfellow, 2017).…”

“…Uganda's informal minibus taxi industry is a vital and lucrative component of the urban economy. It directly employs more than 100,000 people in Kampala (Uganda's capital city), and it provides many indirect jobs through the motor vehicle repair and servicing industry (Pablo, 2015;Goodfellow, 2017). In 2015, Kampala had 1.5 million residents and 16,000 minibus taxis that transported 82.6% of the commuters across its five divisions (i.e., Central, Kawempe, Makindye, Nakawa and Lubaga) (Vermeiren et al, 2015;KCCA, 2016;Aggrey, 2017).…”

Mapping minibuses in Maputo and Nairobi: engaging paratransit in transportation planning in African cities

“…Research including from "master planning" surveys points to paratransit having high modal and market share and being critical to mobility and access in African cities (Behrens et al, 2016;Campbell et al, 2019;Lomme, 2008;Nell, 2018). However, many institutional, structural and political complexities, including concerns with illegality and even violence in the sector exist around regulating these minibuses; how to engage the sector to generate improvements is challenging and not always clear (Goodfellow, 2016;Gwillam, 2008;Klopp & Mitullah, 2016;Saddier et al, 2016;Wilkinson, 2010). Finally, minibuses are often seen as competition for the more formal systems like BRT (Lomme, 2008;Woolf & Joubert, 2013).…”