The Malian in search of a governance model – November, 2018

The success or otherwise of the national and international strategy for territorial governance in the Republic of Mali may be verified after the legislative elections and the parliamentary re-entry scheduled for the first months of 2019.

A new phase in the decentralization of power and the deconcentration of state services

The recent draft law, having been the subject of a “cunning leak”, relating to decentralization and the previous regulatory measures on the administrative reorganization of the territory now go in the direction of the recognition of greater administrative autonomy for the twenty (20) regions listed in the document. This dimension of the reorganisation poses fewer questions as it does indeed sound « normal » given the extreme extension of Malian territory. Understand by this, that there is a desire to allow a deconcentration of administrative services. And a desire to allow decentralized state services as well as decentralized services to take administrative decisions effectively. But is this really the case

What about the effectiveness of deconcentration and the risk of failure

This legislative proposal once again poses a symbolic, if not at best, political « act ». And therefore, it is not precise. It does not refer to a logic of deconcentration of state services. It is not clear how and when the State will proceed to install the services concerned by the measure at the local level. After the previous phase of decentralization that led to the creation of the Ménaka and Taoudenie regions, there was the same problem of readability, and it has still not been resolved. Thus to this lack of clarity in the philosophy of the implementation of this proposed law, is added the question of human resources and technical and financial means. Where are the human resources that will lead to the operational implementation of this measure? What is the strategy for mobilizing this resource? Also, where are the technical and financial resources? It remains certain that in the absence of readable, precise and temporal answers, this measure is doomed to be obsolete. To read the rest of this document, subscribe via abonnement@aliberconseil.com