Author:
Albert Malukisa Nkuku
(MENAFN- The Conversation)
Commuting in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, presents challenges for its 17 million residents . Massive traffic jams and unsafe driving cause chaos on the roads , leading to long delays.
The chaos has become a pressing concern for residents. Reaching Gombe, Kinshasa's central business district, for instance, can take up to five hours from surrounding neighbourhoods.
When he came to power in January 2019, President Felix Tshisekedi promised to combat Kinshasa's traffic chaos by targeting road infrastructure. This included constructing an interchange and flyover . One-way traffic was introduced on certain streets. These have had little effect. Kinshasa's traffic issues persist.
While congestion in the capital is usually blamed on poor infrastructure, there are some harder-to-see causes. As social science researchers, we set out to understand what institutional factors might be behind the city's gridlock.
In a recent paper , we analysed an illegal revenue-generating scheme inside Kinshasa's traffic police agency involving a coalition of traffic police agents, their managers and judicial officers. We studied the role this scheme plays in the city's traffic conditions.
Under the scheme, known as the quota system, station managers (police commanders) assign street agents a daily quota of drivers to escort to the station, often based on fabricated allegations.
Our findings and analysis provide insights into how the quota system causes traffic jams and accidents, undermining the police agency's mandate of traffic regulation. We also detail how corruption operates as a coordinated system rather than as isolated acts of individual misconduct.
The problem
Like many traffic police agencies worldwide, Kinshasa's traffic police are tasked with managing key intersections and enforcing traffic rules.
Similar to many other civil servants in the Democratic Republic of Congo , police officers earn meagre salaries – around US$70 monthly. Anecdotal observation suggests that the police service lacks funds for basic necessities such as fuel or communication costs. Low resources have contributed to police officers extracting funds from drivers, partly for personal profit, partly to cover the costs for their police work .
A major way in which this is done is through a specific scheme involving traffic police agents. We found that station managers assign different street agents a daily quota of drivers to bring to the station.
To meet this quota, agents often use brute force and have the discretion to invent infractions that they report at the police station. The dilapidated state of most cars in Kinshasa helps police officers with this task.
At the station, agents pass the allegations to judicial officers, who have the power to issue charges – or demand bribes so drivers avoid formal penalties. Many drivers try to avoid this extortion by developing relationships with influential protectors. These are people who can intervene on a driver's behalf and are often high-placed security officers or politicians.
Our research
After three years of qualitative fieldwork, we built trust with a large number of individuals inside and around the traffic police agency. This enabled us to design data collection systems in 2015 to study the traffic police agency's practices.
We relied on the cooperation of 160 individuals and generated the following data:
direct observations of over 13,000 interactions between officers and drivers at intersections
station records of 1,255 escorted vehicles, including bribe negotiations and outcomes
traffic flow and accident data from 6,399 hourly observations.
To quantify the cost of this scheme on public service, we added an experiment: we collaborated with police commanders to reduce the daily quotas for some teams and days.
We encouraged commanders to temporarily cut their teams' quotas in half. Reducing quotas could be expected to lower corruption demands on agents, reducing corruption overall. It would also enable agents to focus more of their time on managing traffic – an outcome later confirmed by our findings .
To ensure this approach worked, we compensated commanders for the private income losses they would experience due to the quota reduction, which we carefully estimated before implementing the study. This compensation is not unlike traditional anti-corruption incentives routinely used across the world, except that rather than it being targeted at street-level agents, it targeted the node of this particular scheme: the police commanders.
What we found
The scheme generates large illicit revenue. The traffic police agency's real revenue is five times larger than its official income from fines. We found that 68% of the illicit revenue generated through the quota scheme came from bribes paid by drivers after they'd been escorted to the station. The rest of the illicit revenue comes from street-level bribes outside of this quota scheme.
The revenue raised relies on extortion at police stations. Judicial police officers had the power to threaten to issue arbitrary charges. We found that, first, 82% of the allegations were unverifiable by third parties. Second, the amount raised in station bribes was strongly linked to whether a driver was able to call a powerful“protector”.
Extortion in police stations relies on the street agents' power to arbitrarily escort drivers. These agents use their discretion to fabricate allegations and/or physical force to bring drivers to the station. When a driver was not seen making an infraction, force was more likely to be used.
Overall, this means that the scheme hinged on a coalition of managers, agents and judicial officers.
Through the reduction in the quota scheme levels, our scheme also revealed some social costs of this scheme. We found two important results.
Worse traffic : the quota scheme was accountable for a significant share of traffic jams and accidents observed at street intersections from where the agents operate. Partly through their induced absence and partly through their behaviour, the police officers also create numerous traffic jams and accidents. While this is suggestive rather than conclusive, our estimates suggest that 40% of traffic jams at the main intersections of the city are due to the scheme.
Diluted incentives to respect the law: the scheme made it less likely that drivers would respect the law. They could be escorted to a police station regardless of whether they complied with the traffic code.
Why the findings matter
Our study , which provides rare, detailed evidence of how corruption operates, has three policy implications.
Target officials' managers, rather than the officials themselves. Visible corruption is only the tip of the iceberg, and hinges on relationships of power and coalitions inside the state.
Limit the discretion of judicial officers to charge the public, or that of agents to escort drivers to police stations arbitrarily.
Incentivise“good” corruption. Encouraging station officials to take a significant share of fines for genuine infractions could give agents an incentive to escort drivers who actually break traffic rules. However, the trade-offs between traffic flow, safety and compliance must be carefully weighed, as quotas tied to fines could worsen congestion.
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