Chapter 5—
Is There a Rural Constituency for Economic Reform?
Ghana adopted poor economic policies because leaders were desperately searching to establish and enhance political constituencies that would allow them to retain power. In particular, policies (including the exchange rate, price controls, and subsidies on key commodities) were biased to keep the politically important urban class quiescent and to enrich the state. As J. Dirck Stryker and his colleagues noted, "It was the failure of politics to provide an effective mechanism for influencing policy in the allocation of resources that led ultimately to the collapse of the regime."[1] The problem facing Ghana and other African countries that hope to adopt comprehensive economic reform programs is to develop political systems in which politicians do not have incentives to introduce ruinous policies with an urban bias for political gain. In particular, Ghana will have to develop a system whereby the rural population has a political voice significant enough to be a viable constituency for the economic reform policies now being adopted. Indeed, the World Bank now stresses the lack of "countervailing power" as one of the key elements of Africa's "crisis of governance."[2]
In addition, the question of a peasant constituency is important to the long-term sustainability of economic reform. As will be noted in chapter 6, the World Bank does not have a model of how political systems evolve
while African states reform—although there is a clear though untested assumption that as economies grow and the welfare of individuals improves, political support for the regime and for continued reform will develop. In this model, economic improvement generates almost immediate political support. Of course, this assumption becomes even more important given the problems that Ghana, and probably many other African countries, will have when trying to develop constituencies in the urban areas.
Unfortunately, the implied political model ignores several factors. First, other barriers, especially long-standing ethnic hostilities, may obstruct the deterministic progression from economic improvement to political support. Second, large transaction costs prevent quick changes in the nature of constituency support. Third, the implied model of political support in economic reform models ignores the institutional requirements for the development of political constituencies. Indeed, this chapter will argue that for political support to be meaningfully transmitted to national leaders, the PNDC or other reforming regimes will have to develop far more dense political institutions in the rural areas than Ghana or most other African countries have ever had.
Some scholars have already asserted that the PNDC probably cannot generate a rural constituency strong enough to replace the urban one it is losing.[3] If Ghana cannot develop a constituency for the policies it has adopted since 1983, one of three things will eventually occur: The leadership could respond to perceived pressures from the urban population by adopting the counterproductive practices of the past, which bought city-dweller support at the price of faulty national economic policies. Or the country might have to remain under the permanent tutelage of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the only two organizations in Ghana presently capable of providing a political counterweight to the urban population. Finally, the alignment of political constituencies could remain largely unchanged even though agricultural policies favoring the peasantry would continue, primarily because of the preferences of the leadership.
The question of whether a constituency for structural adjustment can be established also immediately intersects with a whole series of questions about political structures and the prospects for democracy in Africa. As Larry Diamond has noted, "Virtually everywhere in Africa,
the formal political arena has remained narrow, even when it has not been narrowed as a deliberate authoritarian strategy."[4] A constituency for structural adjustment based in the rural areas would therefore be a strikingly different development for countries such as Ghana. In addition, while a system giving the rural population more political voice would not necessarily have to be one in which votes counted, empowering the rural population is clearly a crucial step in the slow process of democratization.
This chapter will also examine the equally important question of the ability of an African government to develop a system of local administration so that information concerning developments in the rural areas can be transmitted to the central government. The type of urban, centralized systems of rule that Ghana and other African governments have are information poor because they do not encourage the transmittal of prices, demands, and other sources of information from the rural areas. There is no need for this type of information if a government's constituency is in the urban areas and its economic policies ignore the rural areas. However, a government with an orientation toward the rural areas needs information from areas beyond the cities. Also, a government that adopts sound economic policies needs information about the entire economy, not just that of the urban areas, if it is to rehabilitate roads, distribute seeds and fertilizer, build schools and clinics, and the like. The flow of information is thus a particularly important political question for those governments trying to move from stabilization to structural adjustment.
The Disempowered Rural Population
The disempowerment of the rural population is both a political given that confronts African leaders and a consequence of the authoritarian and centralizing actions of governments in the colonial and postcolonial periods. First, poor roads and telecommunications systems in all African countries cause the rural population to seem even more distant from the capital than they really are and also make it difficult for the peasantry to organize among themselves. Second, the atomistic nature of the peasantry, especially their large numbers and low individual output, poses exceptional barriers to organization. As Robert Bates notes, it is much
easier for an industry—in which only a few players are involved—to organize than a peasantry that, as in the case of Ghana, numbers more than seven million, because the benefits from organization will be divided over such a large number of people that it will not be worthwhile for anyone to attempt to organize.[5]
In addition, rulers in African states have taken many steps to further marginalize the population over the last few decades. During colonial rule, no effort was devoted to developing political systems whereby the rural population could have significant voice. Postcolonial African governments also hindered empowerment of the rural population. Nkrumah, for instance, tried to co-opt the burgeoning cocoa farmers' movement by absorbing it into his Conventions People's Party.[6]
Governments have also used force to crush political organizations in the rural areas because these movements could become the basis of opposition politics. This was notably the case in Ghana when the National Liberation Movement (NLM) advocated the secession of Ashanti region during the 1950s in response to the government's inadequate cocoa prices. As Bates notes,
The fate of the NLM in Ghana and the KPU [Kenya People's Union] in Kenya is paralleled by the fate of opposition parties in a host of other African nations. Because the majority of the African people live in rural areas, it is inevitable that their fate becomes central in the appeals of any political opposition. With the use of the state's instruments of coercion to emasculate the political opposition, governments in power thus eliminate one of the basic elements of political life which, by the sheer weight of self-interested political calculation, would champion the interests of the rural majority.[7]
Precisely because governments have so little information about what is happening in the rural areas, they react harshly to any indication of a threatening political development. They have neither the knowledge nor the political systems to develop a more nuanced approach to rural unrest.
In addition, very few African countries have long-standing political systems in which votes count. In Ghana, for instance, the three attempts at civilian rule have all ended in military coups. The failure to develop political systems in which numbers translate into political power is obviously detrimental to the rural peasantry who account for, in Ghana
and most other African countries, more than 70 percent of the population. Where sheer numbers do not translate into political strength, it is almost inevitable that groups such as the urban population, numerically quite small but able to threaten the leadership through physical violence, come to dominate political systems.
But even democratic rule, where the rural population might have possessed greater political power because of their sheer numbers, did not bring substantial empowerment of smallholders in Ghana. As the National Commission for Democracy noted,
Each of our constitutional experiments failed because the type of representational system we adopted on each occasion made governments remote and distant from the primary communities that were alleged to have elected them. Consequently governments remained in the hands of a few, and above all represented the interest of the economically powerful who had access to these resources.[8]
Therefore, independent Ghana has never come close to having the institutions necessary to allow the formation of a rural constituency for economic reform.
Finally, the years of economic decline and, somewhat paradoxically, the manner in which the reform program has been implemented, have further marginalized the rural population. As Ghana's administrative system fell apart in the 1970s and early 1980s, the rural population was further distanced from the state. Those elements of the state present in the rural areas—extension agents, marketing organizations, district offices—simply stopped working as the Ghanaian state imploded and civil servants could do little more than try to fend for themselves. The peasant population was increasingly left to conduct farming for self-sufficiency and little more.
The extremely narrow base with which the PNDC came to power then had the effect of continuing to exclude the rural population. Especially immediately after the coup, the leadership's attention was devoted to mobilizing the urban population. Hansen is right to note that "there was no attempt to mobilise them [the peasantry] although there were important local issues and grievances around which they could be mobilised in support of the regime and their own independent class interests."[9] This exclusion continued for several years as the narrowly formed
PNDC focused on implementing the initial stabilization program. Even when the PNDC began to move to reform fundamental economic institutions, however, it had such a narrow political base and so few links to the rural population that it could not easily develop any kind of contact with the peasantry. Once again, how the early reforms were implemented would have severe implications for the politics of medium- and long-term economic reform.
Efforts to Promote Agriculture in Ghana
Ghana is a particularly interesting case to examine the construction of political constituencies in rural areas because the Economic Recovery Programme has had, as one of its central pillars since 1983, the promotion of agriculture. In the first few years of the program, cocoa received most of the attention, to the relative neglect of food crops. Cocoa was the backbone of the economy and had to be revived if the economy was going to prosper. As Dr. Abbey noted, "In the early years survival itself was at stake. The country was perilously close to collapse. We faced the prospect of social-political collapse."[10] Also, the IMF's focus on the current account imbalance may have made policymakers especially eager to reinvigorate their major export. At the same time, given the very limited administrative abilities of the Ghanaian government, it may not have been possible for the government to focus on more than one area in agriculture.
The first policy measure to affect cocoa was the devaluation, which had the immediate effect of increasing the cedi price of cocoa. Nominal prices also were increased and, as the Cocoa Marketing Board was reformed, cocoa farmers began to receive a higher percentage of the world price. Just between 1984 and 1988, the nominal price of cocoa increased fivefold. The Structural Adjustment Credit with the World Bank called upon the government to provide cocoa farmers with 55 percent of the international price by 1988/1989.[11] Cocoa production, which bottomed out at 158,000 tons in 1983, is projected to average approximately 300,000 tons in the early 1990s (figure 7).
It was not until the PNDC began to review the country's progress, in the run-up to the second phase of the ERP in 1986, that a focus on food agriculture emerged. The country was fortunate that in 1984 there had
Fig. 7.
Cocoa Production during the Recovery
Sources: K. Ewusi, Statistical Tables on the Economy of Ghana (Legon: Institute of
Statistical, Social, and Economic Research, 1986); and Commodity Research Bureau, CRB
Commodity Yearbook, 1991 (New York: CRB, 1991).
been good rains to increase agricultural production, but it was obvious that the ad hoc measures taken up to that point could not guarantee an adequate food supply. A number of initiatives were therefore taken under the Agriculture Sector Review to strengthen the institutional framework of the agricultural policy sector, improve the delivery of public-sector services to agriculture, and enhance the distribution of agricultural inputs. For the period 1990–1995, the government has begun implementing the Medium-Term Agricultural Development Programme, which seeks to increase food crop output and to create a more balanced agricultural sector. Table 1 displays the government's ambitious goals for 1995. Overall, agriculture is projected to grow at a rate of 4.7 percent a year.[12] If these ambitious targets are met, grain production will be doubled. As a result, food, which now accounts for 80 percent of current incomes, will decrease to 60 percent of total incomes by 1995.[13]
Ghana is therefore in the process of massively changing the incentives for agricultural producers. Indeed, at least for cocoa, the urban-rural terms of trade seem to have reverted to the level they were in the early
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1970s.[14] On a symbolic level also it has been clear that the ERP has been biased toward the rural areas. Indeed, Rawlings's central indictment against the old regime is that it exploited the farmers. In 1983 he said,
Cocoa and forest products make up about 75 percent of all our export receipts and yet the benefits you get from the system [are] small in comparison with what you put in. It is with your agricultural products that we buy the cars, lorries, petrol, kerosene, matches, soap, sugar, etc. and yet how many of you have access to these things? We intend to reverse this trend and bring back the wealth of the country to where it belongs, in the rural areas.[15]
However, it should be noted that people in the rural areas are still absolutely poorer than they were in the mid-1970s (much less than at independence) and will be for some time to come. Although cocoa production increased from 158,000 tons in 1983 to 270,000 tons in 1990, and although there is significant evidence that farmers are finally planting new cocoa trees,[16] significant income gains for cocoa farmers will only appear slowly because it takes seven years for the trees to yield a
crop. The recent dramatic increase in cocoa sales does not indicate a gain in farmers' income of a similar magnitude because much of the "new" production is actually from cocoa that had previously been diverted to Côte d'Ivoire. In the food-growing areas, it will also be some time before farmers experience significant income gains. Inevitably, gains for these smallholders will be halting and will vary widely depending on the region as the state starts to reconstruct its agricultural system. Therefore, it is important not to overestimate the immediate effects of the ERP on rural people in Ghana. Indeed, one of the tests of the ERP will be whether or not it can construct a constituency while only slowly increasing the real incomes of rural people.
Similarly, government efforts to establish more administrative structures in the rural areas have met with very little success. Especially in light of the mixed economic prospects of the rural areas, there is no evidence at present that the regime has the institutional structures to cultivate a rural constituency or to gather significant amounts of information about what is happening in the rural areas. Research by students of the University of Ghana, Legon, on the Committees for the Defence of the Revolution (CDR) and their predecessors, the WDCs and the PDCs, suggests that most of the organizations the Rawlings government has attempted to establish in the rural areas are disorganized and ineffective. Augustus Opong Ansah's conclusion that the CDR had all but collapsed in Akwapim district is supported by many other studies and by anecdotal evidence.[17] More generally, despite the government's rhetoric of trying to reach out to the peasantry, to many government officials, the majority of Ghanaians still live in a different world. As one Ministry of Finance official noted in an interview,
Society has been unfortunately organized. Peasants are organized around an old societal structure while government is organized around a modern administrative machinery. We observe two different decision-making processes going on as if they were opposed to each other. Peasants see government differently from the organizational point of view. We have not succeeded in integrating the two organizations.[18]
There are still many indications in Ghana that the rural areas are viewed as bastions of backwardness and that true economic growth is associated with industrialization in the urban areas.
Thus, while the government indicates that it wants the peasants to have a greater voice, it has yet to take substantive actions to allow them a greater input into the policy process. For instance, the government has not aided the establishment of a nationwide peasant organization, which would provide smallholders with a visible political presence in the capital through which they could influence policy.
In contrast, the Zimbabwe government has given aid to peasant farmer groups so that they will at least be a visible part of the policy process.[19] The Zimbabwe government was able to include the peasant association in the policy-making process because the setting of prices for crops is an open process in which farmers have an institutionalized voice. In contrast, the PNDC's deliberations are not open to this kind of participation from societal groups. More generally, it is simply not the style of Rawlings and his colleagues in the PNDC, especially after a decade of authoritarian rule, to self-consciously try to open up the political process. Therefore, the government has not felt the urge to encourage peasants to create national structures that would attempt to influence the policy-making process. As one Ministry of Agriculture official said to me,
Farmers have no comparative advantage in formulating policies. They have a comparative advantage in production. There is not a one to one relationship between farmer participation and their improved productivity. Improved extension and ensuring adequate supply of inputs at the doorstep is more important for productivity.[20]
On a material and symbolic level, the government has announced that it intends that the benefits of structural adjustment be focused on the rural areas. However, the economic benefits will be slow to come to the rural areas. It will certainly not appear to many rural people that there has been a dramatic improvement in the standards of living directly tied to government action. In addition, the PNDC has run into a host of administrative and attitudinal problems commonly found throughout Africa. Therefore, it is particularly appropriate to ask if the benefits that the PNDC have promised to deliver to the rural areas can create a rural constituency for structural adjustment and how the rural areas might
express support for the government. Inevitably, given the changes in terms of trade, it is also important to ask if the increase in support in the rural areas will be enough to overcome the political damage resulting from the urban populations' relative material deprivation.
The Ethnic Overlay
Constructing rural constituencies is not simply a question of distributing greater resources to the rural areas. In Ghana, as in most other African countries, leaders are linked to a variety of constituencies through geography, ethnicity, and class. In Ghana, a particularly important factor that must be reviewed is the ethnic split between the PNDC and the majority of the rural population. This ethnic split is especially relevant because it divides the PNDC from the group that has apparently benefited the most from the structural reform efforts: the largely Ashanti cocoa farmers in the middle forest belt of the country. This ethnic division adds an extra, important dimension to questions posed above because it must now be asked if the PNDC can form a constituency for structural adjustment despite an ethnic cleavage that has been an integral part of Ghanaian politics since independence. Consideration of the ethnic factor also makes the examination of the potential for constructing rural constituencies much more realistic than political models that simplistically assume that greater incomes translate into more political support.
Since 1957, ethnicity in Ghana has been an extraordinarily rich pattern of shifting coalitions. Nominally, approximately 44 percent of the country (largely in the middle) belong to the major Akan configuration (Asante, Fante, Brong, Akim, Nzima); the Mole-Dagbani group (northern) constitute 16 percent; the Ewe (southeast) 13 percent; the Ga-Adangbe (Accra region) 8.3 percent; and other groups roughly 17 percent.[21] For the purposes of this discussion, the dynamics of the Ashanti grouping are particularly important because this group tends to dominate the cocoa-producing regions in the country and, with memories of the National Liberation Movement still vivid in many people's minds, poses particular problems for any government trying to develop a rural constituency.[22]
The Ashanti question becomes especially important because the PNDC is in reality, and, more important, is largely perceived as being,
Ewe-based. Unfortunately, given the highly depoliticized nature of Ghanaian society, it is almost impossible to gauge how salient the Ewe-Ashanti conflict is to the population at large. Certainly, there has been elite protest at what is seen as Ewe domination of the PNDC. As Professor A. Adu Boahen noted in his Danquah lecture,
Whether Rawlings is aware of this or not, this situation [all top government positions being held by Ewes] is giving the unfortunate impression that the country is being dominated and ruled by that single ethnic group, and this impression is causing . . . anger and irritation.[23]
Unfortunately, Professor Boahen's analysis was about the only cogent political critique of the PNDC in the 1980s. However, Kumasi elites interviewed often expressed similar sentiments in private. For instance, it was the feeling of one group that the PNDC was "the most tribalized government" Ghana had ever had.[24]
Indeed, comments like this are common, even though Kumasi and Ashanti region have benefited from the economic upturn since 1983. As one senior community official said,
The Region [Ashanti] feels discriminated against. People see the Kumasi-Accra road but that is also the Kumasi-Tamale road. People feel that projects which have been established in Ashanti have been done with wealth from the region—especially the cocoa which pays the East German firms for the roads—but that other regions get aid. People in Ashanti Region do not feel they are getting their fair share.[25]
Beyond the impression of elite unhappiness, however, it is extremely difficult to gauge popular feeling in Ashanti region, or anywhere else in Ghana, toward the PNDC. As one journalist noted,
There is nothing you can do [about politics] but enjoy it. You cannot agitate. People present their petitions at durbars but that is it. Everyone is suffering from the squeeze. There is nothing else you can do but to tighten belts and go into farming or petty trading. In the absence of political parties there is no way that you can agitate politically. There is no organized means of raising political issues.[26]
As these interviews make clear, the ethnic tension between people in Ashanti region and the PNDC is a clear barrier to creating rural constitu-
encies for economic reform. Even though the increase in economic activity has been palpable in the region, many in Kumasi attribute (to some degree, correctly) most of the development to the resources the region itself generates. In some cases, the overall animosity toward the Ewe-based regime causes some citizens to simply ignore the welfare gains they may have experienced. Of course, even after many years of economic reform, the gains in Ashanti region are not overwhelming, and many people recognize that they were better off in the 1970s. That Ghana may have been unable to grow any faster is of little consequence to people who are absolutely poor. Even in Ashanti region, the area that has unquestionably benefited the most from the PNDC's economic policies, there is no clear link between improvement in overall economic aggregates and clear political support. Indeed, there is some indication that even if economic conditions become substantially better in Ashanti region, people will not automatically give their support to the Rawlings government.
The inability to accurately gauge popular opinion in Ashanti region is particularly important to note because the government faces the same problem. Because previous governments and the PNDC have effectively removed all channels of political communication between the urban state and the rural masses for such a long time, it is exceptionally difficult for the leadership to measure support of or opposition to their own policies, especially in an area that is seen as ethnically hostile. Indeed, PNDC officials picture themselves as being only loosely connected to the popular pulse in regions such as Ashanti and are only truly aware that something is going wrong when there is mass political dissension or after grumbling from local CDR officials reaches such a pitch that it makes itself heard in the PNDC. The PNDC can hear the drums beat, but they do not know what those drums mean.
Building New Constituencies: The District Assemblies
The more perceptive PNDC officials recognized that the organizational structure under which they took power could not continue indefinitely if they were actually to undertake a program of economic reform. A government of a dozen policymakers could withstand the popular onslaught caused by cuts in subsidies and devaluation, but it cannot create a system that would cultivate a rural constituency supportive of a long, comprehensive economic reform program. As PNDC member P. V.
Obeng noted, "We realised that we had not been able to tap the ingenuity and resources at grassroots effectively to back the national thrust for recovery, we had to decide how to do so."[27]
Therefore, in 1988, the PNDC began to decentralize the government. First, it created a series of 110 district assemblies. It was widely recognized in Ghana that these district assemblies would not be the end of governmental reform; the assemblies had no real powers, and it was particularly unclear what demands they could legitimately press on the central government. However, the PNDC rejected attempting elections similar to those that inaugurated the Busia and Liman regimes. Indeed, senior Ghanaian officials are critical of efforts at democratization, such as Nigeria's, that focus on creating national organizations (e.g., two major political parties) rather than a local base for democracy. In particular, they feel that such efforts are incompatible with economic reform. Top governmental officials believe that a system beginning at the grass roots is more likely to succeed than is one imposed from above.
The Rawlings regime therefore sponsored elections to the district assemblies in three phases during 1988 and 1989. Only individuals were allowed to run for election; no parties or other forms of organized political support were allowed formally to express themselves. In addition, the PNDC reserved the right to appoint up to one-third of the members of the district assemblies. Nevertheless, the district assemblies exercise succeeded in attracting a significant turnout, especially compared to recent elections (table 2). Even in the independence election of 1956, only 50 percent of the eligible voters cast ballots.[28]
However, it is impossible to read the overall turnout figures as a victory for the PNDC. Some who voted obviously supported the PNDC, but there may have been many others who voted in order to hasten the day when the PNDC left office to be replaced by a democratically elected government. Given that approximately 2,200 separate elections were held for the 110 district assemblies, a large number of local factors undoubtedly influenced the turnout figures. For instance, there were certainly politicians from the parties that had ruled Ghana previously who suggested that if their supporters came out in large numbers, it would be the first step to reinstalling those parties in power, precisely what the PNDC did not want.
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The high turnout figures can be read simply as reflecting strong sentiment among the largely rural population in Ghana in favor of political structures that might decentralize political power. Kojo T-Vieta is correct to note that "the high turnout in rural areas and newly created districts can be attributed to effective PNDC propaganda for District Assemblies as powerful vehicles for local development. New districts took the elections as a serious opportunity to catch up with old districts."[29] The district assemblies elections were, most of all, a referendum on the district assemblies.
The district assemblies, however, cannot actually shift the balance of power in Ghanaian politics because they are not systematically tied to the central government in any manner. For instance, there is no procedure whereby they can make resource demands on specific ministries. Nor do they have the ability to allocate resources or raise taxes. Correspondingly, the central government has not yet even begun to modify national ministries so that they can be responsive to demands emanating from rural areas. Given the disarray of many of the national ministries,
which do not have the administrative strength to meet the problems they face now, restructuring them to be responsive to the rural areas will be a significant challenge. Most of the national leadership recognizes that the district assemblies are a long way from providing the PNDC with the kind of institutional conduits needed to have a true rural constituency.
In addition, the PNDC faces the problem that apolitical organizations such as the district assemblies cannot be expected to provide political support. The PNDC has gone out of its way to say that the district assemblies will not operate as previous civilian regimes did and that they will not be divided along party lines. Rather, government officials argue that for the peasantry, politics and government "are about how to improve their mud-houses, their drinking water, their capacity to bring their farm produce to the market-place, have their health needs attended to and have schools for their children."[30]
However, the PNDC cannot have it both ways: it cannot prevent district assembly members from organizing around political positions but somehow expect that a rural constituency will automatically emerge from these assemblies. Only if the PNDC takes the lid off politics in the rural areas will there be any chance for a real rural constituency to develop. For instance, Joel Barkan argues that because of frequent, consequential elections in Kenya, the state was held accountable to the peasantry through a series of patron-client ties.[31] In Ghana, however, the PNDC has so far been unwilling to liberalize politics because it fears that liberalization will generate opposition and because its operating style has been to deny political expression as much as possible. The best indication of the unwillingness of the PNDC to contemplate real politics in the rural areas has been its insistence on appointing a significant number of people to each district assembly; such appointees, it is assumed, will be beholden to the central government rather than responsive to constituents.
Another "defect" in the system is that there is no way in which the district assemblies can transmit information from the rural areas to the national leadership. The assemblies are not designed to transmit information, and they currently lack the expertise or the resources to competently survey their constituencies even if they desired to inform the
central government about the state of agriculture, the roads, or social services. Also, the central government itself does not have the capability at this time to begin to absorb significant information from the countryside, even if there were a dense enough institutional structure to transmit greater amounts of data.
Requirements for an Economic Reform Constituency
A government in Ghana, or in most other African countries, that had a strong rural constituency would have to operate on something of a paradoxical basis: it would have to be strong enough to physically resist the urban population should city-dwellers try to exercise their political opposition through physical violence, but flexible enough to decentralize a significant amount of government administration to the local level. It would also have to be responsive to a large amount of sometimes confusing information coming in from the countryside. It is the need for this difficult amalgam of authoritarian practice and democratic receptiveness that has fueled the endless, and largely unproductive, debates on whether it is best to have a democratic or authoritarian government implement dramatic economic reforms. No matter what a regime calls itself, it must have aspects of both if it is to implement significant economic reform.
As argued in chapter 4, for a variety of reasons the PNDC does have the ability to keep the urban population from threatening its rule. Indeed, given that the Rawlings regime survived the traumatic early years of the Economic Recovery Programme, the government is unlikely to be toppled by a dramatic popular uprising sparked by economic grievances. This situation is fine for stabilization but, as noted above, becomes increasingly inadequate as the country tries to reform basic institutions.
A future Ghana government could, of course, eventually design a system of local government that would provide a significant amount of information concerning developments in the rural areas. This system would have to be considerably more than the district assemblies, which are not presently connected to the central government in any systematic way. If regional organizations were established as intermediaries between the central Accra government and the district assemblies, however, it is conceivable that the assemblies could generate significant amounts of usable information. Of course, reformed district assemblies would also have to be assigned real duties and some funds from the
central government if they are to become more than local debating societies.
Unfortunately, it is much more likely that denser rural institutional structures will be haphazardly created as economic reform increasingly affects the rural areas. Much time and energy will therefore be lost as the government tries to design institutions to catch up to its expanding information needs. Given the administrative disarray the PNDC inherited and its style of rule, perhaps nothing more could be expected from it. However, it is a clear lesson for future governments that lack of institutions in the rural areas to transmit information will have a strong impact on the design and implementation of policy as structural adjustment continues.
Conclusion
It is clear that even after eight years of structural adjustment, the PNDC cannot look to the rural areas for strong political support to reform the economy. Whether the PNDC or a government similar to it—unelected, with an obvious ethnic bias, and run by a relatively small group of officials—could actually attract outright support from the rural areas is less clear, and at this point unknowable. Too many questions are unanswerable given the level of information available to outside observers or government officials in Accra: Have the economic improvement and the prospects for moderate growth in the future caused rural dwellers to change attitudes developed toward the state during the long period of decline? How important is the lack of democratic practices to the rural population if its economic plight is improving? Does capturing political support require just a general improvement in the economic environment, or does it also depend on the allocation of specific goods (e.g., roads, factories) to tie groups specifically to the leadership (a method tried by past Ghanaian governments)? As this book indicates, the very approach to stabilization that the Rawlings government took makes winning political support during structural adjustment extremely difficult.
It should not be assumed that a democratic successor government to the PNDC would automatically be able to cultivate a rural constituency that would be instrumental in providing support for structural adjustment. As noted earlier, previous democratic experiments in Ghana and Nigeria, among other countries, did not result in rural empowerment. Whether the new wave of democratization sweeping Africa will em-
power the countryside is unclear; the democracy movement in Ghana and in the other African countries seems largely to be an urban affair. Finally, this chapter has stressed that, irrespective of initial attitudes that reforming politicians might have, the severely limited institutional presence of most African states in the countryside poses real barriers to cultivating peasant support for reform. Elections that matter may be only a first step in reorienting African governments to the countryside during the reform process. Chapter 9 will argue that a host of other political reforms—notably, the freedom to form political associations—must also be accomplished before elections can be expected to fundamentally change the political terms of trade between the cities and the countryside. Certainly, it should be recognized that the assumption that even relatively dramatic economic growth will lead automatically to the creation of a rural constituency for reform is simplistic.