Download Lectio Praecursoria

Amin Alhassan
[email protected]
June 28 2004, 12 noon
Lectio Praecursoria
Development Communication Policy and Economic Fundamentalism in Ghana –
Justifying my Choices
Honorable Custos, distinguished opponent, ladies and gentlemen.
Development Communication Policy and Economic Fundamentalism, the title of my
dissertation, establishes the position that policy practices in Ghana operate under a new
paradigm of economic fundamentalism. By economic fundamentalism, I mean the
tendency for policy choices to be justified and assessed by the yardstick of market
performance only. That is without regard to the humanist requirement of need and
community. This position of the study is a temporary one become I have come to realize
that the research process is never entirely complete. It is always a process and once in a
while, you bracket out a temporary closure only to continue shortly afterwards. Today's
occasion is the examination of one of such temporary closures.
I want to tell you a short story, a real story that probably helped to define my interest in
my current research, and my object of research. Precisely in 1992, when I was then a
journalist stationed in the remote area of Upper West Region of Ghana, I had the
displeasure of visiting a rural community, Chakala, on the entourage of the Mayor of Wa,
the regional capital town of the area. The mayor's task was to educate the people on the
need to pay taxes to the state of Ghana so that it can carry out development projects. The
actual reason why the mayor made the working visit was because, as part of World Bank
recommendation to Ghana, the government was to reduce social spending including cuts
to local government budgets.
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Local government administrations were asked to fill-up the budgetary shortfall by
maximizing the tax net. So these villages were asked to honor their civic responsibilities
by paying taxes. After some 30 minutes of pontification to the people on how to pay their
taxes, a local spokesman got up and informed us that 5 years earlier the entire village was
washed away by floods, and that those who survived rebuilt their lives from the scratch.
More than half of the village died in the floods. No one came to their aid. It was not even
news outside the village. They faced their problems alone without any governmental
assistance.
So the spokesman asked the mayor: Where was government then?
As a journalist it was a traumatizing experience for the simple fact that we were
embarrassed to hear the shocking story of a community that faced a disaster without
assistance. I was embarrassed that this community never felt it belonged to the national
imagined community called the nation-state.
Probably if there is any moment in my life that I should point to as forming the seed for
the development of my intellectual interest in the idea of postcolonial nationalism as an
imagined community founded on the fabric of a shared communication infrastructure,
this was it. The rest of the country simply did not know that a disaster had struck that
community. No telephone, no radio, no journalist to report, and indeed no access road to
the village to serve as conduit for the news about the disaster. So the entire village did not
understand why they should pay taxes. And in my opinion they were justified.
My embarrassment turned into an intellectual curiosity when I later abandoned the
newsroom for the classroom. Hence the subject-matter of my dissertation.
For the purposes of theoretical rigor, I have tried to position the late postcolonial nation
as yet coming into being. It is in the process of coming into being because it is called
developing country. And again, this promise of coming into being will to a large extend
be delivered through the agency of communication infrastructure.
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Now, let me qualify this statement. I am not anthropomorphizing technology. I would not
do that after spending so much time in my research sorting out the relations between
technology and human agency. I am only here celebrating the enabling effects of
technology.
Can we write the history of the formation of developed nations without a chapter on
strong communication policy? North American postcolonies, and we have to
acknowledge the power of telecom and railway networks. European nations like Finland
that did not evolve from empire and we have to acknowledge the power of public service
broadcasting.
The conjuncture around which this project was undertaken is dominated by one enduring
policy initiative. That is Ghana’s adoption of IMF and World Bank sponsored Structural
Adjustment Program (SAP) in 1983. Since Ghana’s independence in 1957, SAP has the
historical record of being the longest running policy ever to be implemented. It has gone
through a decade of military rule, and three democratically elected governments. And
from all indications, it will be there for a long while.
What makes SAP key to any analysis of communication and development policy in
Ghana is the fact that it has a comprehensive reach, including a Communication sector
reform. I have tried to discuss this in my book, as thoroughly as possible.
Structural Adjustment Program, as the wording implies, was designed to re-engineer the
less commodified economy of developing countries into the financial discipline of global
capitalism. The process of colonialism was already on such a mission, but the process
was cut short by the global articulation of “a people’s right to self-rule.” SAP was
therefore designed to continue from where formal colonialism ended.
A way of reading the scene that I am trying to paint out is to argue that the political
project of nationalism terminated the economic project of globalism. That is from colony
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to postcolony. But for a short period. Only for the economic project to return, but this
time through the agency of the postcolonial state under the tutelary of International
Finance Capital, institutional embodied as IMF and World Bank.
The political state, involved in the project of building an imagined community, is now
turned into an economic state, involved in building a new market of consumers. This shift
as I have tried to point out in my research was inaugurated by the implementation of
SAP.
The task for development communication theory then, as I see it, is to focus attention on
the postcolonial state. I have traced the trajectory of development communication theory
and one of the key arguments that I have forcefully established is how state agency in
communication policy is woefully under-theorized. Part of the reason being that
communication scholars took the state for granted. Nation building in progress: focus on
the international relations. This omission was justifiable because the full implications of
SAP were not yet evident at the close of the 1980s.
If the promise of political community was so alluring and tempting to preclude the
postcolonial state from critical analysis in development communication, well, the news is
that with SAP in place, the postcolonial state is now a political turncoat, and we need to
re-tool our analytical categories to capture the contemporary conjecture of a commodified
postcolony. And this is precisely one of the tasks I have ventured into in this dissertation.
It may take a generation of scholars to accomplish the task. Mine is just a step in that
direction.
Doing this required an interdisciplinary approach. I have a feeling, and the feeling is that
development communication theory has for far too long been a provincialized
undertaking. I am saying so because interdisciplinarity is not in abundance in this area of
study. Thus, I have tried to initiate a cross-disciplinary discourse of Postcolonial Theory,
Political Theory, Cultural Studies and Political Economy. This has been fruitful because,
while the postcolonial state was analytically neglected in our field of development
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communication, it was subjected to unsparing analysis in these other fields of study. So I
consider Interdisciplinarity as one of the central features of my book.
Why the Method?
I want to briefly comment on my choice of methodology for this study. One of the
troubling aspect of this project was the question of How? That is how do I approach my
object of study, which also happens to be my object of desire? I chose Articulation
Theory because while I wanted to do policy analysis, I was sure I did not to just want to
do a traditional policy analysis as done in the field of Policy Studies. My policy analysis
was to combine discourses (both formal and informal) about policy, the process of
policymaking, the target of policy, and the various constituents who have stakes in
policymaking or its outcome. Too many angles all in the name of a policy research, isn't
it?
Traditional discourse analysis, or content analysis of policy, to my understanding, would
not allow me to capture these various angles of the study, more especially when I am
interested in capturing the moments in the processes. As I have tried to justify in my
introductory chapter, articulation’s methodological purchase lies in its resilience, and its
flexibility in picking up the moments and elements that make-up policy discourses and
processes for interrogation. In a word, its forensic quality as a tool for investigation.
Structure of Book
Why did I choose to examine telecom, broadcasting and Internet/phone consumption all
under the title of communication policy? If one goes by international media
representations of Africa and Ghana for that matter, one may ask why there is no any
discussion about print media or the newspaper industry in this project. The good news is
that there isn’t much to problematize about it apart from its urban centeredness. Press
freedoms, by liberal democratic standards, are well in force in the country, respected by
both the government and the opposition, as well as the military. No license is needed and
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all media related conflicts are subjected to the due process of law. For me then, this is not
a juicy area of research.
Within the circumstances of the postcolony, the relations between broadcasting and
nation formation is more obvious than it is with the print media. Broadcasting’s ability to
transcend literacy barriers, its simultaneity and its facility in mediating multilingual
communities, makes it topical. So for this project, I chose a more historical approach to
see how broadcasting has been used and continue to be used in the nation formation
project. My discovery surprised me. The moment of transition from colony to postcolony
is not the moment of a shift in policy. Rather it is the structurally adjusted state (I mean
the postcolonial state under SAP) that inaugurates a discontinuity of broadcasting for
community building to broadcasting for consumers. Until I started working on this
chapter, my assumption was that, the shift in policy would occur during the
colony/postcolony transformation. A logical development of this chapter would have
been a comprehensive focus on broadcasting, but the fact of technological convergence
suggests that the future of broadcasting, like anywhere in the world, probably lies in the
future and power of tele-networks.
Thus my reason for shifting quite soon to telecom policy, and the shift has been a fruitful
one. I discovered that within policy circles there is a conceptual shift from thinking of
communication for development to information for a fortressed state. The stress here is
on the conceptual difference between communication and information. It is a
paradigmatic and a strategic move by the postcolonial state because now that certain
constituents are disconnected from the promise of community, the state has to be fortified
to properly keep them in check. Ghana has been a peaceful country and I hope it will
continue to be so. But just across the eastern border is the Ivory Coast, a country which
use to be cited as a paradigm case and paragon of a successfully adjusted economy. As
recent developments shows the state in the Ivory Coast got properly adjusted and the
discontented constituents are now also trying to adjust. Hence, a civil war. The Ivorian
experience, if anything at all, underscores the relevance of this research project on Ghana.
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Looking at World Bank and Ghanaian State recent re-articulation of communication as
information has been a rewarding venture. For conceptually, I have argued that that is the
only way communication can be sent to the market arena. I have tried to examine the
implications of such an articulation on civil society. The muddy and messy area of policy
implementation has been examined in my book. Here too, the sorry condition of the
postcolonial state’s ability or inability in telecom regulation has been laid bare. It is a
disheartening story that had to be told. And I did just that.
If market thinking has colonized the policy process, the evidence is not one of complete
sorrow. My chapter on digital consumption allowed me to demonstrate not only the losers
but the winners of deregulation as well. The process of consumption is not always a story
of senseless conspicuous display of affluence, but one of civic participation as well. The
chapter allows us to appreciate the market from both sides. At the same that it give us a
window of opportunity to see how digital capitalism disconnects and connects various
constituents in the postcolony vis a vis the global.
So my project then can be seen as offering moments and windows in broadcasting,
telecom, Internet consumption and phone consumption as evidence of communication
policy. A concentration on any one of these would surely have denied us the opportunity
of seeing the others within the acceptable framework of a dissertation.
One of the conclusions of this study has been that policy actors have a simplistic view of
communication and development. They evoke liberal economic articulations that have
recently been brought to bear on communication without understanding the full
implications of their arguments. Market regulation is understood as a magic wand for
delivering development needs including improving access to communication facilities.
Even where recent experience shows otherwise, the story of telecom policy outcome in
my book shows that they would not want to question the suitability or otherwise of the
market, as an instrument of regulation.
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Conclusion
Now to my conclusion. One of the developed interests that I gathered from this project is
a passion for issues that bring together economics, communication and community. If I
have to use one phrase that captures the spirit of this work, I will say that it interrogates
the violence of economics on community through communication policy. So I will like to
continue from here, a research project that interrogates the rhetoric of economics in the
constitution of communication policy. Communication, Commodification and
Community are therefore the three key concepts that will shape my scholarly thinking
These concepts of communication, commodification and community appear to have
differing implications within two different discursive regimes, or what can also be
described as two epistemic communities. Namely, the intellectual discursive community
where there is a visible attempt to resist the celebration of progress and the power of the
market. The other epistemic community, which controls the bureaucratic practice, and for
that matter has direct influence over communication policy, celebrates progress, idolizes
technology and religiously believes in the market.
Thus between an ivory tower sophistication in theory on the one hand, and a
programmatic and simplistic orientation in policy practice, I find my research interest
developing around the rhetoric of economic articulations in communication policy. And
that is precisely what I intend to pursue when I draw the curtain on this project. Or more
precisely, if I survive the intellectual swordfight for which we are gathered here to
witness.
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