Promises of future performance and informal-sector transfers of personal property: The example of Anglophone Cameroon

• Jurisdiction: South Africa
• Date: 15 August 2019
• Published date: 15 August 2019
• Author: Claire Moore Dickerson
• Citation: 2011 Acta Juridica 285
• Pages: 285-307

Promises of future performance and

informal-sector transfers of personal

property: The example of Anglophone

Cameroon

CLAIRE MOORE DICKERSON*

The informal sector in Cameroon’s anglophone regions reveals that business

does function there, and that property is sold in commercial transactions, but

that most transactions are simultaneous exchanges. Sophisticated formal busi-

ness laws designed to facilitate the exchange of promises of future perfor-

mance, even between strangers, do technically apply to these transactions.

These formal laws, however, are not implemented deep in the informal sector

and, consequently, fail to support informal-sector actors who seek the market-

enhancing and capital-forming benef‌its of such promises. While further

simplif‌ication of substantive contract law can make it easier to apply in the

informal sector, enforcement remains a major obstacle to that law’s effective-

ness. Only when contract law is enforced in an inexpensive and reliable

manner will informal-sector entrepreneurs be prepared to accept offers of

future performance, thus signif‌icantly increasing the range of possible com-

mercial transactions. In Cameroon’s anglophone regions, one possible method

of streamlining enforcement is through enhanced customary courts.

I INTRODUCTION

In the global North a seller offers credit in order to increase its pool of

customers and thus its market, and a purchaser obtains credit from its

suppliers in order to leverage its capital. Formal law enhances the

predictability of these transactions, inviting us to inquire how formal law

can help the retail seller in an emerging market’s informal sector to obtain

the same result, namely the ability to extend and obtain credit through her

sales and purchase transactions, thereby increasing both her market and

her capital.

The ref‌lections below on formal law in the informal sector are a

product of a larger project, still in its pilot stages, undertaken with Dr

Emmanuel Yenshu Vubo of the University of Buea in Cameroon’s South

West Region. Twenty retail sellers were interviewed, eight of whom

were in one of two very large formal markets within Douala, the

* Professor of Law and Sen John B Breaux Chair in Business Law, TulaneUniversity Law

School; Permanent Visiting Professor,University of Buea, Cameroon. LLM in Taxation, New

YorkUniversity; JD, Columbia University; AB, Wellesley College.

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2011 Acta Juridica 285

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commercial capital of Cameroon, the remaining 12 being located in one

of three formal markets in the nearby South West Region.

1

Interviews

were based on a guide from which questions were read in English or in

French, as appropriate, and every effort has been taken to preserve the

interviewees’ anonymity. The results of this pilot effort indicate the need

for further study to better understand how to formulate a formal commer-

cial law that more closely tracks economic actors’ actual behaviour and

that provides a simple and reliable enforcement procedure appropriate to

informal-sector retail sellers’ realities.

The issue is not a dearth of formal laws technically applicable to these

economic actors. As we shall see, their purchase and sale transactions are

undeniably subject to formal laws adopted by the national and suprana-

tional legislatures. Equally undeniably, the economic actors interviewed

for the pilot study describe very little formal law impact on their

commercial transactions. Because even the informal-sector economic

actors live in a structure that nevertheless technically contains formal laws,

legal pluralism exists around the edges of their commercial experience.

Their experience with the formal laws is nevertheless insuff‌icient to allow

them to derive from formal law the same benef‌its as economic actors in

the global North.

The discussion in Part I brief‌ly describes both the type of legal pluralism

that the informal-sector economic actors described in their interviews,

and the informal sector in which they operate. Part II discusses the

technically applicable formal law in Cameroon relating to transactions

between a retail seller and her supplier on the one hand, and her customer

on the other. In the process, it describes how that formal law will, in the

formal sector, enhance such a retail seller’s ability to extend her market by

extending credit to her customer, and to increase her capital through

loans from her supplier. Part III summarises the information related by the

informal-sector retail sellers with respect to their relationships, f‌irst with

their customers, and then with their suppliers. In the main, these retail

sellers reported little interaction with formal commercial law, and transac-

tions that did not otherwise permit them to obtain credit from their

suppliers or encourage them to extend credit to customers. Part IV

proposes a modif‌ication of formal commercial laws so that these would

1

Although I use the feminine pronoun to refer to retail sellers, the pilot study included

men, especially sellers of second-hand goods. Most of the interviews were in Cameroon’s

anglophone South WestRegion, and the rest were in Cameroon’s commercial capital, Douala,

located in the Littoral Region. The six interviewees in the largest Douala market were selected

by a friend of an acquaintance, as that market is hard for an outsider to penetrate. Five

interviewees located in two different South West Region markets were similarly selected

through the intermediation of acquaintances, and two additional interviewees offered to

participate upon seeing neighbours do so. Twointerviewees in another Douala market and f‌ive

in a South WestRegion market were selected by entering into whatever open stall or store was

available.

286 PLURALISM AND DEVELOPMENT:STUDIES IN ACCESS TO PROPERTY IN AFRICA

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