The notion of agility was first forged in the computational sciences, within IT projects, and then imported into the organisational sciences where it informed change management practices. Analytically, the concept of agility explores the capacity of an organisation, a company or a state to react quickly and effectively to the challenges of a dynamic or uncertain environment by carrying out various transformations aimed at innovation. Here, agility describes a mode of governance that is adaptive to the speed with which contextual changes and emergencies unfold. However, to avoid any misunderstanding, agility as a mode of governance must be situated in relation to two concepts of Critical Theory that engage the temporal dynamics of change and adaptation, namely ‘flexibility’ and ‘social acceleration’.

For Richard Sennett (1998), ‘flexibility‘ is a major characteristic of late capitalism. While it claims to engender in individuals a sense of greater freedom to shape their lives, it greatly impacts the values individuals place on their own desires and their relationships with others. Flexible capitalism, by requiring individuals to be open to permanent change, corrodes their capacity for loyalty, mutual commitment and long-term projects, to the benefit of regularly reshuffled relationships, immediate interactions and short-term projects. As for the notion of ‘social acceleration’, Hartmut Rosa (2013) notes that modernity is primarily marked by technical acceleration, the acceleration of social change and acceleration of the pace of life. He notes that it is at the very moment when technologies allow tasks to be carried out more quickly than before, that we seem to lack time more than ever. There is therefore an injunction to do more things in less time. Rosa concludes that social acceleration generates a new relationship to the world and new forms of alienation.

The concept of agility that I develop in my work borrows from flexibility the idea of change as a capacity and from social acceleration that of a celerity of action. But unlike the meaning that Critical Theory gives to these two concepts, the notion of agility that I defend does not carry with it the idea of alienation, corrosion or ruination. It is a mode of governance adapted to emergency contexts such as pandemics, terrorism and public service overflow. The notion of agility that I am trying to trace in my reflections finds its meaning in the way digital technologies are changing the governance of public services in Africa by allowing governments to adapt continuously and rapidly to current dynamics. I would add that agile governance is an opportunity to transform the new technological instruments of calculation and power into instruments of liberation, in the words of Achille Mbembe in “Earthly Community“. The focus on agility allows for a critical look at what Richard Rottenburg describes as emergency management in infrastructure and resource poor contexts. It also provides an opportunity to discuss the socio-technical practices of co-construction, iteration and innovation within organisations. In interrogating agility, I am also looking at how emerging technologies adapt to African contexts and how they are in turn shaped by them.

Since 2021, I have been conducting a study on agile health governance at the Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research (NMIMR), the largest medical analysis laboratory in Ghana, West Africa. The aim is to analyse, through the notion of agile governance, how this laboratory reinvents itself in the face of health emergencies. The Covid-19 pandemic has forced governments to redefine themselves according to an accelerated rhythm specific to war or humanitarian emergency contexts. Despite World Health Organization (WHO) predictions that the Covid-19 pandemic would cause a disastrous health crisis in Africa, we have instead witnessed the ability to contain the pandemic across the continent. This, I argue, was possible by African states deploying an agile mode of governance.

The example of the Noguchi Memorial Institute is significant. At the beginning of the pandemic, this laboratory was responsible for testing cases of infection and, in an emergency, for producing data that could inform political decision-making processes. Its staff demonstrated flexibility and bureaucratic creativity by agreeing to experiment, for the first time in the world, with the delivery of Covid-19 samples by means of medical drones supplied by the American company Zipline. The experiment with this instant logistics aimed at speeding up the delivery of virus samples collected in the surrounding communities of Accra, the country’s largest city, to the laboratory. The adoption of drone technology has profoundly changed the work routines at the laboratory, which has been working non-stop to contain the pandemic. Faced with the urgency of the pandemic, the laboratory engaged in “co-construction” practices with a multitude of actors and in the “reorganisation” of its workforce and material resources. Above all, it developed ‘improvisation’ practices to face shortages caused by the slowdown of global logistics. For its part, Zipline has carried out validation tests for the transport of dangerous products such as viruses, to ensure that the conditions of delivery by drone to the laboratory do not alter the integrity of the samples collected. It has also redesigned the packaging of its products to ensure that, in the event of an accident, the virus does not spread into the environment.

Public health is not the only sector where agile practices can be observed. Over the past decade, African governments have adopted a digital transformation agenda covering vast sectors of governance to respond to the acceleration of societal transformations. The so-called ‘demographic explosion’ intensifies administrative work and demands the acceleration of public service delivery. In terms of security, I illustrate in a study how several African countries progressively adopt CCTV infrastructures in order to secure public spaces and national borders. More particularly, I show how the Cameroonian police mobilizes CCTV provided by Huawei to make their law enforcement activities agile to respond to the rise of terrorism in the Gulf of Guinea. I show that the adoption of this technology has changed the daily life of law enforcement agencies by redefining the way they are deployed on the ground. I also highlight that, assisted by companies such as Thales and Huawei, countries such as Morocco, Côte d’Ivoire, Zimbabwe and Congo-Brazzaville are equipping themselves for public security purposes. In another study to be published this autumn 2022, we inquire how Cameroon uses biometric identification provided by the company Gemalto to speed up the production of identity documents to respond to the so-called ‘identity crisis’, in which thousands of citizens struggle to obtain a national identity card that would give them access to public services. This biometrization accelerates the identification of citizens and ties it to securitisation. The use of digital technologies is thus becoming commonplace in almost all public services: elections, civil status registers, justice, education, finance, etc.

From medical drones to biometric technologies and CCTV, digitalisation characterises the dynamics of public service delivery today and highlights agility as the new paradigm of governance in Africa. I mobilise this notion to extend reflections on globalisation, public organisations and governance by focusing on the administrative appropriation of digital artifacts. In constituting themselves as a laboratory where all sorts of emerging technologies are being experimented with, African governments build capacity to react quickly to emergencies and to the acceleration of social transformations. In deploying digital infrastructures, they reinvent public service delivery and orient development towards securitisation. But at the same time, this digitalisation seems to follow a logic of increasing privatisation where we see that the technological infrastructures, as well as the digital data, are finally owned by foreign companies in the continent – a situation that signals the dark side of governance becoming agile and once again calls to mind the theories of surveillance capitalism and digital colonialism.

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Georges Macaire Eyenga is a postdoctoral Research fellow at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER), University of Witwatersrand, South Africa. He is a member the REGIONS 2050 programme coordinated by Achille Mbembe. His current research focuses on biometric identification, drone technology and the becoming agile of African societies.Twitter.