Paper short abstract:

Across the river from N’Djamena, Chad’s capital, the Cameroonian town of Kousseri offers a singular case to explore the tensions between central and local governments around revenue collection and expenditure during a nationwide process of fiscal decentralization

Paper long abstract:

The town of Kousseri is separated from N’Djamena by the confluence of the Chari and the Logone rivers, which serve as the international boundary between Cameroon and Chad. In the shadow of the Chad’s capital, Kousseri’s economy is highly reliant on international trade and transport. Building on intermittent fieldwork conducted between 2017 and 2023, the paper reconstructs the contours of revenue collection in the last decade and juxtaposes the central and local governments’ fiscal practices throughout a period when nationwide Cameroon was supposed to be embarking into a process of decentralization. This has also been a time marked by high volatility in levels of economic activity in Kousseri associated with sustained insecurity in neighbouring Nigeria and the Lake Chad region, the extreme degradation of the road network and the shorter-lived border closures imposed during the Covid-19 pandemic. In a place where municipal authorities began to be elected only three decades ago but where many residents see themselves as citizens of a (local) republic within the (national) republic, the tensions between central and local government revenue collection and expenditure lead to the distinct dynamics I set out to explore.