In the Democratic Republic of Congo, public sector remunerations are presently making headlines: strained public finances, driven by expenses tied to the war in the East, and a rising wage bill, have led to repeated delays in the disbursement of remunerations. The wage bill also features prominently in discussions with the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, whose preoccupations revolve around the sustainability of a wage bill currently exceeding half of government revenue – over $500 million per month. Faced with reports suggesting staggeringly high irregularities in the wage bill, the government announced an audit of the payroll in March 2026 – the results of which aren’t known yet.
Problematising and historicising the familiar tale of ‘waning political will’
Though currently appearing highly urgent, these issues are hardly novel. The rationalisation of staffing levels and control over the wage bill has been the target of a spate of donor-driven administrative reforms since the 1970s, which have proven generally ineffective. According to the World Bank, civil service reforms (CSR) are one of the categories of development interventions with the lowest degrees of success, even more so in difficult state fragility environments. The usual tales explaining this paltry record typically revolve around domestic political capture, driven by inimical governance contexts, with some acknowledgement of poorly-attuned donor procedures.
Our recent article, entitled ‘Bureaucracy as Assemblage: Civil Service Reform, Administrative Legacies and the Politics of Informalization in the Democratic Republic of Congo’, published in the journal Development & Change, sheds a different light on this phenomenon, by analysing a recent $122 million World Bank CSR project in the DR Congo, known through its French acronym, PRRAP (standing for Public Service Reform and Rejuvenation Project). Implemented between 2014 and 2021, the PRRAP came in the wake of a previous abortive round of administrative reform during the DRC’s ‘post-conflict’ reconstruction phase (2001 onwards).
As we describe below, much as its predecessor, its trajectory could be narrated as an archetypal case of political capture and recuperation – ‘waning political will’ in the policed language of the World Bank. However, this well-known trope may often be overly simplistic. Drawing on development anthropology and over a decade of empirical field research in Congo, we complicate this picture by viewing this particular reform project not so much as a tug-of-war across a (keen) donor and (reluctant) recipient, but by foregrounding the perspective of the administration as it historically evolved in the heart of our analysis.
Past administrative legacies of state informalisation – reconfigured rather than resolved by reform
To understand dynamics in the public sector, the importance of past administrative legacies is hard to overstate: the Congolese administration, after all, has survived a string of calamities: the 1970s economic crisis; the hardships of donor-imposed ‘austerity-as-cure’ in the 1980s; the collapse of the budget, withdrawal of donors, and wars of the 1990s.
However, its survival came at the cost of entrenching a set of features which endure to this day, which we label ‘state informalisation’: first, given budgets available to fund public services dried up, public entities (such as schools and hospitals) started charging user fees to cover operating costs, compensate for emaciated salaries, and finance the administrative pyramid from the bottom-up; second, the overwhelming majority of civil servants were hired irregularly, via recommendations, nepotism and clientelist arrangements, in violation of legal provisions; and, the remuneration system became increasingly ‘wageless’, that is, reliant on discretionary allocation of salary supplements (bonuses).
Current dynamics in the public sector, including the sudden salience of Congo’s wage bill, cannot be understood without looking at how this informalization was reconfigured and reshaped – rather than rolled back – by the period of donor-supported state reconstruction after 2001.
Administrative reforms have invariably endeavored to counter this trend of state informalization. However, the CSR project we analyse – with its focus on retirement of eligible civil servants and rejuvenation through meritocratic recruitment of a younger generation – ultimately not only had a limited impact, but also left the drivers of informalisation largely untouched. We highlight two major flaws in the course of implementation. First, the fact that the project ended up operating as a parallel, standalone project, hitting indicators via consultants while bypassing the administrative services of the ministry of Public Service. Second, the merger of the roles of reform coordinator (on the government side) and of project manager (controlling financing) ended up posing obvious accountability issues, in turn facilitating political capture by the minister, and leading to serious implementation issues down the line.
Political-administrative entanglements, international financial institutions, and the need for scrutiny
Why does this matter? In the DRC – much as in other contexts of state fragility – the public administration is at the heart of important stakes: being at the same time the largest employer, a source of rents and patronage, and serving as a springboard to political careers for senior echelons, it remains intimately intertwined with the electoral cycle. In the run-up to the 2018 elections, for example, in a bid to build electoral constituencies, a previous minister of Public Service issued a long series of decrees which awarded civil service registration numbers to over 750.000 contenders for public employment – thereby drowning the modest achievements of the reform in a sea of informal recruitment.
The difficult and thoroughly politicised environment certainly made the project risky; but ultimately, the country’s legacy of state informalisation (underestimated in reform design) and the different actors at play repurposed and refracted reform activities according to their own entrenched logics, producing uneven and contradictory effects. The issue of political interest cannot be understood independently from past administrative legacies informing the practices of different groups of actors, nor confined to self-serving political elites alone: while the latter’s priorities are more straightforward, it is harder to read the World Bank’s tacit acquiescence to implementation dynamics, which did little to counter informalisation trends, and may have even inadvertently deepened them.
This raises difficult questions about donor engagement: since the close of this CSR project in 2021, important initiatives have been launched in the Congolese public sector, attempting to roll back informalisation trends: the continuation of retirement policies, the constitution of a single civil servant unified database by the ministry of Public Service, and the launch of a new salary policy. The World Bank has financially supported such initiatives through important new projects (such as ENCORE and FIRST) containing CSR components; the discussions with International Financial Institutions around the wage bill suggest these are high on the agenda of government and outside agencies alike.
In development policy – where international organizations are not renowned for their institutional memory, and selective amnesia abounds – in-depth inroads into past administrative legacies are of paramount importance. After all, recent experience shows there is no shortage of attempts at political instrumentalisation, given the civil service is closely bound up with the electoral cycle; as such, improving policy interventions requires both close scrutiny and oversight, and upholding democratic accountability no less.
Stylianos Moshonas is an associate researcher at the Institute of Development Policy, University of Antwerp, and freelance consultant.
Tom De Herdt is a professor at the Institute of Development Policy, University of Antwerp.
Kristof Titeca is a professor Institute of Development Policy, University of Antwerp.
