Ghana: One Decade of the Liberal State
Edited by Kwame Boafo Arthur. Dakar: CODESRIA & London: Zed Books, 2007; pp. 307. £19.99. ISBN 1842778293. Reviewed by Jasper Ayelazuno, York University, Canada. ©Jasper Ayelazuno, 2008.
Reminiscent of the euphoria that accompanied Ghana's independence in 1957, we are again witnessing an era of optimism about Ghana's future. A landmark transition to liberal democratic political stability and a modest economic growth have made Ghana the poster child of liberal democracy in Africa. It is in this context that the anthology of Kwame Boafo Arthur is situated. The central thrust of the book, as Boafo Arthur states, ‘is to put the liberal democratic cum neo‐liberal processes over the past decade in clear perspective’ (p. 1). To this end, Boafo Arthur assembled a team of seasoned Ghanaian scholars to examine the ‘liberal state’ on a variety of important topical areas: human rights, security, economic development, conflict management, political leadership, gender and politics, labour activism, and foreign policy. This is a lot of ground to cover thoroughly in a single volume, making this an ambitious project.
As is common with edited volumes, the essays vary in quality. There are chapters that are just thick empirical descriptions, without any theoretical framework. Other chapters, namely, Kwame Ninsin's on the tension between free market and the democratic ideal of equality; Joseph Ayee's on the comparison of the leadership qualities between Rawlings and Kufuor, Alexander Frempong's on the liberal democratic peace, and Kwaku Tsikata's on the gap between constitutional guarantees of human rights and the real life enjoyment of these rights, stand out for their clarity, analytical rigour, and theoretical grounding.
However, the book has some limitations. It is poorly organised: for coherence, flow and easy reading, the essays should have been organised into thematic parts. Similarly, the book is in need of a conclusion on what it has accomplished and what needs further investigations. As the ‘liberal state’ is both the theoretical and empirical referent of the book, one was hoping to see the essays explicitly situated in relation to the fundamental theoretical and political canons of the ‘liberal state’. Except in some few instances, they were not. This might be due to the failure of the editor to lay out the theoretical and political coordinates of the ‘liberal state’ in the introductory chapter. For the individual contributions to form a coherent whole, Boafo‐Arthur needed to rigorously unpack the ‘liberal state’, both theoretically and historically. Instead, he allotted a paltry one and half pages to such a vital discussion (pp. 5–6).
The foundational theoretical and political doctrine of the liberal state, namely, the separation between the ‘economic’ and the ‘political’ is not problematised. Neither is the socio‐historical specificity of the ‘liberal state’ addressed. The liberal state emerged in a specific socio‐historical context in England, begging the question whether we can talk blithely of the emergence of a ‘liberal state’ in a different socio‐historical context in Africa. Therefore, this book not only needed a clear theoretical framework but methodological guidance.
Given this serious oversight, Boafo Arthur and some of his contributors make some assertions which suggest a superficial knowledge of the ‘liberal state’. Boafo Arthur finds ‘the wholesale mar‐ginalisation of the state in the management of the market’ (p. 17) baffling and wrong. In reality, there has never been ‘wholesale marginalisation’ of the liberal state, but rather a selective intervention in the interest of the market. Second, the ‘liberal state’ seems to be conflated with a constitutional government. With respect to Ghana, the liberal state is merely distinguished from the praetorian dictatorships which ruled the country at one point; so the First Republic under Kwame Nkrumah is a liberal state while Rawlings’ PNDC is not.
However, the issues are more complex than this. Boafo Arthur correctly points out that the Rawlings PNDC government used ‘draconian’ methods to implement liberal economic policies, and in the process, suppressed ‘the fundamental liberties of the people’ (p. 7). Yet the ‘international community and donor agencies ignored them because the PNDC was implementing to the letter the Bretton Woods‐inspired economic management package’ (p.236). To explain away this monumental contradiction and two‐facedness of the international community is to skirt the responsibility of asking a central question of this book: why did the Ghanaian liberal state wait until 1993 to emerge?
Answering this question would have thrown into relief a gamut of dynamics – class, new imperialism and the power of liberal discourse – which would have given Boafo Arthur and some of his contributors a pause before jumping on the liberal bandwagon. Similarly, the unrealistic expectations of the liberal state and criticisms of what is misunderstood as transgressions of its doctrines could have been avoided. For example, Boafo Arthur expects the liberal state to ensure ‘the creation of material wealth that will be for the good of the whole society’ (p. 5), and sees inequities as a dilution of the ‘sacrosanct values inherent in liberalism’ (p.12).
Ninsin argues that socioeconomic inequality ‘leaves liberal democracy a distant pedigree of its classical form’ (p.103), and advocates the intervention of the liberal state in the market to redistribute wealth. Surely, they are mistaken. While I am sympathetic to Ninsin's concerns, he cannot remain in the liberal state straitjacket and simultaneously make these demands. Despite these limitations, the book is a handy and valuable source of information on the Ghanaian state in this era of global neo‐liberalism.