The State and “Its Responsibilities” School, Welfare State, and Community Building in Lubumbashi (Haut-Katanga, Democratic Republic of Congo)

In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the state administration has retreated from much of the public domain. The education sector has virtually disappeared from the Congolese state budget since the mid-1980s. Nonetheless, schools and more generally the education sector survive at the heart and through the intervention of the civil society. The case of the education sector shows how, in DRC, public services continue to be provided, and how the Congolese State, often described by scholars as having “failed”, nevertheless continues to exist and transforms itself. In fact, the whole educational system is largely based on what is locally called “FIPs”, “frais d’intervention ponctuelle” (“occasional intervention fees”), that is parents’ payment of teachers’ salary. FIP amount is defined locally, at the school level, during a meeting between school staff and parents held once a year. School fees are not fixed once and for all and, sometimes, can be reviewed, usually upward, along the scholastic year. This system, that works likewise regardless school grade and status (public, private or religious), was initially meant in the 1990s as a temporary solution in order to supplement State’s budget shortages. However, it quickly became the pillar of the Congolese educational system and it evolved into a routinized and institutionalized way of functioning still in place today. Focusing on two cases studies, a Lubumbashi suburb’s high school and a Catholic school complex in the city centre, this chapter shows that schools have become a “negotiated order”. Due to the “FIPs” system and the daily negotiations taking place around it, schools play the role of a “social interface” between the institutional discourses and practices on education held by State actors and the socio- economic strategies of families concerned with their children’s education. More specifically, the article focuses on two aspects of school as an intersectional space: firstly, the shaping of an ambivalent view of the State ranging from the idea of welfare State as a provider of all public services (“l’État doit prendre ses responsabilités” as my interlocutors were used to say) to that of a greedy institution (“L’État sorcier”) that steals money for its own benefits. Secondly, the article focuses on the reproduction of schools’ administrative framework whose structure is constantly redefined by the encounters of school (and State) actors and ordinary people. The first part of the article presents the education sector’s evolution since the 1990s, at a time when many economic and social sectors of the country were being ‘liberalized’, notably the education sector which in the Congo had always been a State’s and Christian missions’ domain. The second part analyses the case study of St. Matthias school complex in Kasungami (Lubumbashi). The third and final part compares Kasungami school with an important high-school located in Lubumbashi’s city center in order to make a comparison between State representations, shaped within the education sector, both in the suburbs and in the city center of Lubumbashi. Data and analyses presented in this article are the result of an ethnographic research I have conducted in Lubumbashi in October-November 2017, and September-October 2018.