Power Sharing and Labour Market: An Autopsy of the Legal Politicisation of the Post-War Congolese Labour Market
This study analyses the legal aspect of the politicisation of labour market by power-sharing political regime in post-war the transition. Exploring the case of the Congo transition from 2003 to 2006 after the 1998-2002 war, it covers gaps in the literature on the reconstruction of labour markets in post-conflict countries which has paid little attention to the impacts of power-sharing political regimes on post-war labour market reconstructions. It reveals that existing studies overlooked to explain how these power-sharing political regimes can legally and legitimately politicise labour markets. Drawing on Levitt's notion of the legality of power-sharing and theories on African states, this paper argues that although the politicisation of labour market is often decried, the current trend of implementing power-sharing regimes in post-war African countries results in the politicisation of their labour markets. This paper further argues that Congolese post-war rebuilding policies, namely the Pretoria Agreement and the constitution of the transition (2003-2006), legitimated and legalised the politicisation of the Congolese public sector labour market from 2003 to 2006. These arguments have emerged from the results of qualitative research conducted in Kinshasa from 2016 to 2017 and from 2018 to 2019. The results inform that the Congolese public labour market was legally politicised, peculiarly characterised by plethora of decision makers, and purely disorganised during the 2003-2006 transition. These realities had led to the failure of the Congolese public market reforms at that time.